Phoronix

One week after the Linux 6.15 merge window was capped off, the Linux 6.15-rc2 release is now available in rolling up all of the early fixes that were collected over the past week...

Last year work on KDE's Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support...

While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a "next" branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined...

One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita...

It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption...

Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support...

An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve's Linux graphics efforts...

The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel...

A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines...

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma space with the start of a big new feature landing for the Plasma 6.4 desktop...

In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration...

One of many Linux kernel patch series that NVIDIA has been working on recently to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel are the adjustments needed for Linux running on their newest Smart Switch networking products for the data center...

GNOME 48 made Decibels the desktop's official audio player and in doing so also became the first GNOME core application written in the TypeScript porting language. There's now a second core app for GNOME written in TypeScript...

After several ROCm 6.3 point releases, AMD today rolled out ROCm 6.4 as the next update to their open-source GPU/accelerator compute stack and ahead of their big Advancing AI event in June where they will talk about future ROCm work...

So far my testing this week of the Linux 6.15 kernel in its early, post-RC1 state has been going well. No major upsets, yet to uncover any significant performance regressions, and overall has been going smoothly with the many new features/changes in Linux 6.15...

Intel graphics driver engineers today sent out their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the next Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

With both Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing this month you may be curious how these two Linux distributions are competing for performance. Well, it's a very tight race for common Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware. In this article are some benchmarks looking at clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 on AMD Strix Point.

For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance...

With being just one week past the Linux 6.15 merge window, a lot of fixes have been flowing into the mainline tree as is usual for the early stages of the kernel cycle. Merged overnight were a number of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes that include some notable alterations for the Intel and AMD Radeon kernel graphics drivers...

The Haiku OS open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has issued their newest monthly development report...

Earlier this week IBM announced the z17 mainframes powered by Tellum I processors. But months prior we've seen IBM patches for an "arch15" target for SystemZ within the open-source compilers that we expected was z17. IBM has now confirmed such and has begun updating the open-source compilers to acknowledge this z17 compiler support...

Merged today was this week's batch of x86 fixes ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc2 release on Sunday. Notable with these x86 fixes are landing several patches to fix and clean-up the Spectre Return Stack Buffer "RSB" mitigation handling as well as introducing a new document to clarify the overall state and current mitigations...

Well here is a pleasant surprise, especially for those that recall the days long ago where Fedora Linux releases tend to be notoriously delayed... Fedora 42 is cleared for releasing next week Tuesday, 15 April, in meeting its "early target" release date...

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver for the current Linux 6.15 kernel cycle is EU Stall Sampling support as a new feature found with Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics. EU Stall Sampling is used for exposing information/reasons why execution units are stalled for helping to debug performance issues. Now that the kernel support is ready to go with Linux 6.15, merged to the Mesa 25.1 development code is the user-space support for this performance debugging feature...

In addition to the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release bringing a COBOL language front-end, much better Rust support, revamped AVX10 support, and other shiny new language features and hardware supports, there are also some more fundamental usability improvements for developers...

For those that are curious about the Linux support and performance of the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 laptop processor, I've recently been testing it out within a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (AMD) laptop. Up today are benchmarks of the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 within the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 up against an assortment of other recent Intel and AMD laptops all while running the near-final state of Ubuntu 25.04.

While the Linux 6.15 merge window only ended last weekend, new feature material is beginning to queue for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.16 kernel cycle kicking off in late May or early June. A few notable patches so far have been submitted by way of DRM-Misc-Next...

Google engineers earlier this year detailed an AMD CPU microcode signature verification vulnerability. For local users with administration/root privileges, it could lead to loading malicious CPU microcode patches on the system. Initially AMD Zen 1 through Zen 4 were affected but the Google security engineers since discovered Zen 5 also could be impacted. BIOS updates are rolling out to address this signature verification issue while the Linux kernel is also being patched for microcode protections on Zen 5...

A change merged yesterday to the Intel Mesa graphics driver code lessens a restriction around the amount of system memory (RAM) that can be used by processes for the Vulkan system heap. This will allow more games/apps to work with the Intel integrated graphics that previously exceeded the driver-enforced limits but at the risk of running into broader out-of-memory behavior if under too much memory pressure...

Gzip 1.14 released earlier today as the first new release to this widely-used file compression format on Linux systems and other platforms...

While there are efforts underway to effectively kill the Linux virtual terminal "VT" console by punting the functionality off to user-space, it's not dead yet and a new patch series out on Wednesday aims to enhance the modern Unicode handling by the Linux VT...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now exposing its emulated ray-tracing support by default for older AMD Radeon GPUs even without any form of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in order to run the new Indiana Jones game. It turns out even the emulated RT mode is fast enough to allow various older AMD Radeon graphics cards to be playable with this title...

Long before the likes of DXVK for Direct3D APIs implemented atop Vulkan, and even before the Vulkan API was conceived, there's been Gallium Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker implementation for Gallium3D. Gallium Nine showed promise in its early days for speeding up D3D9 Windows games running atop Wine on Linux. But with DXVK working out better these days and Gallium Nine no longer being maintained in recent times, it's now deprecated and set for removal later this year...

Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next for queuing in DRM-Next until the Linux 6.16 merge window in June is the Asahi driver user-space API "UAPI" header. This is the user-space API intended for the Asahi kernel graphics driver for supporting the Apple M-Series graphics hardware under Linux. But due to being written in the Rust programming language and various kernel abstractions not yet ready among other obstacles, only the user-space API header is set to be added and not yet introducing the actual Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Last year TUXEDO Computers shared that they were developing an ARM Linux notebook powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. They hoped to have the Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop shipping by Christmas 2024, but that didn't pan out. TUXEDO Computers has now provided a status update regarding this ARM Linux notebook effort...

Framework Computer has been working on bringing the Framework 12 to market as a new, smaller and convertible laptop while retaining the upgradeable aspects that users have come to love from the company. Today the company announced the pre-orders are open and the first Framework Laptop 12 devices will be shipping in June...

Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver that was mainlined just with the Linux 6.14 kernel, AMD Linux engineers are now working on "AMDPK" as a new accelerator driver for their upcoming PKI Accelerator engines...

AMD announced today they will be hosting a virtual "Advancing AI 2025" event in mid-June where they will talk about their next-gen AMD Instinct accelerators while of much interest to many Phoronix readers is an update on the ROCm open-source software...

OpenSSH 10.0 is now available for this widely-used SSH client/server implementation. There are a number of changes to find with OpenSSH 10.0 including better protections against possible attacks by future quantum computers...

As part of the announcements coming out today from Google Cloud Next 2025, the embargo has now lifted on the new Google Cloud C4D VMs. Powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, the new C4D instances deliver incredibly high performance and can scale up to 384 vCPUs with 3TB of RAM. For web servers, databases, CPU-based machine learning, and other workloads, the new Google C4D instances deliver incredible uplift compared to the prior-gen C3D instances. Here are some of the first public, independent benchmarks of Google's new C4D family.

The Ubuntu 25.04 release shipping this month will now feature JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box...

Well known open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak has landed his most recent conquest: implementing support for 16-bit NIR types within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver along with the LLVM and ACO compiler back-ends...

As a sooner than expected follow-up to the recent news article around Apple M1 / M2 / M3 core support for the GCC compiler, that code has now been successfully merged in time for the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release...

Merged back in Linux 6.9 was AMD Preferred Core support for Linux for the concept of "preferred cores" with newer Zen processors that are communicated via ACPI CPPC for select cores able to reach a higher maximum frequency or should otherwise be preferred over other cores on the system in the name of maximizing performance. That was a nice step forward for better handling newer Ryzen processors on Linux and matching functionality that had already been working under Microsoft Windows. Of focus more recently has been working on enabling more dynamic Preferred Core support for where the priority of the preferred cores may change at run-time...

Yesterday brought the newest update to Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux. The Azure Linux 3.0.20250402 brought many package updates mostly in the name of shipping security fixes plus brought new instructions on making use of the AMD graphics driver stack under this Microsoft Linux distribution along with various other updates...

The release of the GNU C Library 2.41 at the end of January ended up inadvertently breaking some Steam games, Discord, Julia, MATLAB, and other select user-space software. A workaround was merged today for Glibc to workaround the problem...

The PostgreSQL open-source database server has been on an exciting spree of recent changes... IO_uring support was recently merged for PostgreSQL 18 along with AVX-512 acceleration of CRC32 computations for up to a 3x improvement. Merged today to PostgreSQL is initial support for NUMA awareness for helping with the PostgreSQL performance for multi-node/socket servers...

UALink as the open standard alternative to NVIDIA NVLink that is backed by Intel, AMD, and other vendors has published the UALink 200G 1.0 specification...

The Linux 6.15 merge window ended on Sunday with the release of Linux 6.15-rc1. There is a lot of exciting features and updates that were merged during the two-week merge window. Here is a look at all of the most prominent changes to be found with Linux 6.15.

With the recent release of Blender 4.4 it brought many improvements to its Vulkan back-end but is still being treated as experimental. But they hope to make their Vulkan renderer production-ready this year and in order to do that they need more help from the community in testing it...