Phoronix

At the end of April I reported on a significant performance regression affecting newer AMD CPUs and was bisected to a change in the AMD SRSO mitigation handling for Zen 4/5 processors with the Linux 6.15 kernel. The fix for that significant performance regression was merged today ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15-rc6 release...

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc6 release is support for several more gaming controllers...

A number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring in recent weeks around seeing updated Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards. So for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the Arc Graphics B580 and B570 graphics cards on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how the graphics performance have improved with the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack since launch.

This week Google announced all of the accepted projects for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). There are 1,272 accepted students/projects this year for student developers working on various interesting open-source efforts over the summer...

Queued up for removal in the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle is dropping "echo", a software-based echo cancellation code within the kernel intended for telecommunications use. But it's old, unmaintained, and likely not actively used...

Intel software engineers released oneDNN 3.8 to end out the week with various new performance optimizations and more...

With the copy-on-write Bcachefs file-system considering its on-disk format now "soft frozen" and nearing the point of potentially removing the "EXPERIMENTAL" flag on it, a number of Phoronix readers have been requesting some fresh benchmarks of this open-source file-system. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks of Bcachefs and other file-systems atop the Linux 6.15 kernel being released as stable later this month. On the benchmarking block today are Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS in-tree file-systems.

KDE Plasma 6.4 embarked on its soft feature freeze this week. Thus KDE Plasma developers are now predominantly working on bug fixing and UI polishing for this next open-source desktop release...

Merged yesterday to Linux 6.15 Git and marked for back-porting to stable kernel series in the coming days is an x86 memory management fix to eliminate a window whereby TLB flushes could be inadvertently skipped...

The Servo browser engine project has published a status update outlining some of the enhancements made over the past two months for this Rust-based web layout engine. This includes hitting a notable milestone that some websites like Gmail and Google Chat can now render correctly...

The second beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing as an incremental update to this BSD operating system and ahead of the feature-rich FreeBSD 15.0 due out later in 2025...

Back in January you may recall the news of GNOME's Showtime app looking to replace Totem as the default video player. That didn't happen in time for GNOME 48 back in March but this week all the formalities were met that Showtime has been cleared to replace the outdated Totem with GNOME 49...

With modern Linux distributions beginning to see good support for HDR displays, if you have been looking to upgrade to a high dynamic range OLED monitor, one of the newest options that recently launched by Samsung is the Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF. I've been testing out the Samsung G81SF the past few weeks and it's been working out well paired with the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 to deliver a beautiful desktop experience and a great experience for Linux gamers with supporting a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.

Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16...

The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD...

Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver...

Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France...

In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week...

Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan...

Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project...

After being speculated that such a feature would surface the past few months, today's updated Steam Deck Client Beta from Valve introduces a battery charge limit control to help preserve the longevity of your Steam Deck's battery...

While there have been many Linux kernel patches being worked on for months now for Intel's upcoming Panther Lake SoCs, only seeing the first Linux kernel patches today is their Wildcat Lake platform...

A new Intel graphics/display driver feature being enabled for Linux 6.16 is LOBF: Link-Off Between Frames...

June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially -- and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet -- being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here's a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.

Sven Peter has mailed out the Device Tree "DT" updates for benefiting Apple Silicon hardware with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...

OpenRazer 3.10.3 was released on Wednesday as the newest update to this set of open-source, community-maintained and out-of-tree drivers for Razer hardware on Linux...

With the Linux 6.15-rc6 kernel release due out on Sunday, we're hitting the transition point where the focus on DRM kernel graphics drivers for Linux 6.16 is shifting from feature work to bug-fixing ahead of this next merge window. As such sent out today were drm-misc-next and drm-intel-gt-next pull requests focused on preparing various kernel graphics/display driver fixes for the new code coming to Linux 6.16. The Intel pull request today even contains a fix for aging Intel Haswell graphics...

For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system...

Going along with new AMDGPU kernel driver patches on their way to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.16, the Mesa 25.2 user-space driver code has landed the infrastructure for being able to set queue priorities as well as secure queues...

Python 3.14 Beta 1 is now available in working toward this next major Python release due out in early October...

Intel is teasing new Arc Pro graphics cards coming to market...

Last July it was announced Holly Million was stepping down as the GNOME Foundation's Exeuctive Director after less than a year at the helm. Richard Littauer took over as interim Executive Director while this week a new GNOME Foundation Executive Director was hired...

Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems...

Following his recent PremDay talk on LVFS/Fwupd, Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems...

Raspberry Pi today announced the latest update to their Raspberry Pi OS, which continues to be based on Debian Linux and likely their last major release before migrating from a Debian 12 base to Debian 13 later in the year...

Last month was a fresh look at the Intel Lunar Lake graphics performance between Windows and Linux while this article is Microsoft Windows 11 Pro vs. Ubuntu 25.04 again but looking at the CPU performance between these competing operating systems. For additional reference, some of the recently completed AMD Strix Point Windows vs. Linux benchmarks were also included for additional insight.

Currently when building the Linux kernel for LoongArch processors there is a maximum limit of 256 CPU cores supported but with a pending patch that limit would be upped to 2,048 CPU cores...

Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has queued up a set of patches being worked on the past number of months around block write streams for making use of NVMe SSDs supporting the NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP) specification...

Intel has readied a new "qat_6xxx" driver for the Linux kernel for supporting QAT GEN6 devices with QuickAssist Technology. QAT GEN6 will presumably be found with upcoming Xeon 6 Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids processors while the Linux kernel driver should be introduced for Linux 6.16...

Going back to last year there have been patches for adapting the Intel P-State Linux driver with support for Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as what began as an Arm big.LITTLE feature but since being explored for use by the Intel P-State driver for hybrid CPUs without SMT which for the moment means Lunar Lake SoCs. A new version of the patches were posted on Tuesday and likely to be the last refinement to this patch series...

Last week Valve introduced Proton 10.0 beta as the newest version of their Wine-derived software for Steam Play that enables countless Windows games to run well for Linux gamers on the desktop and with the extremely popular Steam Deck. Out today is another Proton 10.0 beta update with some additional bug and regression fixes over what was shipped last week...

The SpacemiT-X60 RISC-V SoC can enjoy some very healthy performance improvements with scheduler definitions now merged for the LLVM/Clang 21 compiler...

Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines...

With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.

Ampere Computing last year talked up AmpereOne M for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 192 cores up from the 8-channel DDR5 memory found with the initial AmpereOne processors. They said at the time AmpereOne M would be shipping in Q4-2024. Now half way into 2025, it looks like they quietly announced the AmpereOne M processors...

As an alternative to the likes of the Pungi tool, Kurchu is a newer project within the CentOS/Fedora space for assembling content collections or ISO images of Linux distribution builds. Kurchu is already seeing use by the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for assembling their images while additional functionality continues to be worked on for those wanting to craft their own Fedora/CentOS install images...

With Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical is planning to make use of more Rust-written system components and so far most of that talk has been about transitioning to Rust Coreutils "uutils" in place of GNU Coreutils. It's also been firmed up today that Canonical is planning on using sudo-rs by default as a replacement to sudo...

PoCL 7.0 is on approach as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that began as a CPU-based OpenCL driver implementation but with time has added support for other back-ends from Intel Level Zero to NVIDIA PTX and AMD HSA...

The Btrfs file-system looks like its new "CLEAR_FREE" feature will be ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel was AMD INVLPGB support for broadcast TLB invalidation on recent Zen cores. AMD INVLPGB use by the Linux kernel can provide for some nice performance gains while now similar support for Intel processors is coming via a kernel patch series working on Intel RAR TLB invalidation support...