Phoronix

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop...

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language...

During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year...

The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...

The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...

With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...

In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...

One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...

The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January...

This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises...

It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...

Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indicated nice improvement. A third iteration of those patches have already been posted as this AMD INLVPGB usage works its way to the mainline kernel...

While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, including a Valve open-source graphics driver developer now taking the top spot...

Back in early 2023 an Xtensa back-end was added to LLVM for the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa IP. Xtensa is used for DSPs, micro-controllers, and this 32-bit RISC architecture is also used for other hardware like data processing engines. Two years after the LLVM back-end was introduced, the Clang C/C++ compiler has added Xtensa target support...

While predominantly covering Linux-related news and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix, the BSDs hold a special spot. Here's a look back at some of the most exciting BSD milestones and FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD project news of 2024...

In addition to all the GNOME advancements and KDE excitement with shipping Plasma 6 this year, other alternative open-source desktop environments enjoyed much success too this year... System76's Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution reached alpha form, Xfce 4.20 released earlier this month, LXQt 2.0 and 2.1 debuted, and other improvements too...

Tvrtko Ursulin with Igalia sent out a "request for comments" patch series today working on a deadline scheduling policy for the DRM scheduler that is used across different Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics drivers...

As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.

Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...

The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!..

As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution...

AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL...

Meta's Yann Collet of Zstd fame is rounding out 2024 by releasing xxHash 0.8.3 as the newest update to this extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm. The xxHash fast hash algorithm pushes for RAM speed limits and with the v0.8.3 update brings more enhancements...

The holiday between Christmas and New Year's is... Linus Torvalds' birthday on 28 December. Capping off the Linux creator's 55th birthday week is the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel release...

Last weekend a Meta engineer posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. The Linux kernel can in turn invalidate TLB entries on remote CPUs without needing to send IPIs and without having to wait for remote CPUs to handle those interrupts. Synthetic benchmarks shown in that patch series were very promising and thus I carried out some benchmarking over the holidays of this AMD INVLPGB support for the Linux kernel.

Back in April was the release of the Amarok 3.0 music player for KDE after a six year hiatus and their first version ported to using the Qt5 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 5. Now in ending out 2024, the Amarok team has released an updated version of this open-source music player that provides initial support for the Qt6 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 6...

The KDE app Kdenlive that is a very popular and featureful open-source video editor is preparing for an exciting 2025...

Thanks to work from Intel engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle will feature faster USB xHCI DbC performance for debug performance and a few other missing xHCI bits being addressed. Plus there is a fix for a rare 10 year old USB bug report...

From my independent monitoring, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty great year. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipped and has been well received across enterprises, Canonical engineers have been focusing more on performance optimizations for Ubuntu, and there has been other interesting changes like their new commitment to always ship the latest upstream Linux kernel version as of Ubuntu release time. Plus they have continued with various GNOME desktop improvements, Ubuntu on servers continues with steady traction, and all-around was a pretty exciting year for the Ubuntu camp...

Earlier this month the Fish Shell 4.0 went into beta with the C++ code ported to Rust. Now with most of the Fish Shell code transitioned to Rust, the project put out a blog post this weekend outlining the successes and challenges they have encountered in porting their large C++ codebase to Rust...

While Linux 6.13 is introducing basic support for various Apple iPads and iPhones using A-series SoCs, the support is just that: basic. Various feature limitations remain for those dreaming over the prospects of running Linux on older Apple mobile devices. One of various feature limitations remaining are around backlight control for different models and for that there is the Apple DWI backlight driver for Linux that continues to be hacked on...

The x86 fixes pull request was sent out this morning ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel being released later today. Both x86 fixes this week pertain to Intel bits: a self-test issue on upcoming Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) systems and also an issue of Intel TDX confidential computing VM guests potentially leaking decrypted memory within the unrecoverable error handling...

This year NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver enjoyed much more robust Wayland support, their open-source kernel modules have matured greatly and are now being used by default, and their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL drivers remain in good standing for performant Linux gaming and workstation graphics. NVIDIA's Linux driver stack had a rather great year...

An interesting "request for comments" proposal I have been meaning to write about since last month is in-development work developing "Safe C++" as an extension to the LLVM Clang compiler and making use of the new, in-development ClangIR...

It wasn't on my bingo card for end of year 2024 but the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has seen a new round of improvements to the Flash Video (FLV) support...

The Fedora Linux distribution had another great year with the successful releases of Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 that were both rather polished and largely on-time -- something that couldn't be said frequently of Fedora releases long ago. Fedora Linux has continued pushing leading edge innovations into their distribution thanks to the sponsorship and upstream contributions of Red Hat engineers. 2024 was a rather successful year for this high grade Linux distribution...

Looking for a 2025 New Year's resolution? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is encouraging a pressure campaign on Microsoft to continue...

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 image editing program that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop will not see its stable release in 2024... But just before the New Year, the GIMP 3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing...

The GNOME Image Viewer has merged initial support for basic image editing capabilities into the application...

Bottles as the open-source manager for Wine to more easily run Windows games and applications on Linux has been pursuing the "Bottles Next" initiative as a rewrite to this software. The Bottles developers have decided they will be leveraging the Rust programming language as well as the libcosmic UI toolkit as part of this rewrite...

A new set of patches implement EC, UCSI, and PSY drivers for the ARM-based HUAWEI MateBook E Go laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. In turn these new Linux kernel patches get a lot more functionality working for these Huawei ARM64 laptops...

Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta performance as well as the AlmaLinux 10 beta, on the same AMD EPYC server here are benchmarks when adding in CentOS Stream 10 to the mix. CentOS Stream 10 as the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is largely similar to what's found in the RHEL 10.0 beta but one of the key differences is being powered by Linux 6.12 LTS rather than Linux 6.11 as currently used by the AlmaLinux/RHEL 10 beta. Here is how the performance of CentOS Stream 10 is looking in comparison on the same hardware.

AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware...

A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14...

OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving...

The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year...

Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms...