Phoronix

It's been a while since having anything new to report on the 0 A.D. open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game but this week marked the 0 A.D. Alpha 27 release that they also hope will be their last alpha version...

This Week in GNOME is out with its newest development summary as we embark on the GNOME 48 feature freeze...

The Steam on Linux marketshare ended 2024 with a 2.29% against Windows at 96.1% and macOS at 1.61%. The Steam Survey numbers for January were posted this evening and they show a sizable dip for the Linux gaming use but there are also other odd discrepancies with the updated monthly figures...

GTK developers have been holding another hackfest this week for the annual FOSDEM developer conference happening this weekend in Brussels. GTK developers are working toward the GTK 4.18 stable release and continuing to think more about GTK 5...

Merged on Friday to the Linux 6.14 kernel were the Kbuild feature changes for this cycle. Most notable with these kernel build changes is the introduction of the gendwarfksyms tool that is used as part of the ongoing Rust programming language push within the Linux kernel...

During the month of January on Phoronix were 292 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 13 featured-length Linux hardware reviews and other multi-page benchmark specials. Here's a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source news and content over the past month...

The RISC-V CPU architecture feature updates have now been submitted and merged for the nearly-over Linux 6.14 merge window...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly recap of all the interesting KDE Plasma changes for the past week. With less than two weeks until the Plasma 6.3 stable release, Nate Graham began his weekly update by remarking that the Plasma 6.3 desktop is "looking pretty good!"..

While Wine 10.0 recently debuted with the initial Wine Wayland driver, that native Wayland support is still in early form with various limitations and yet-to-be-implemented features... One of the newly-opened merge requests for filling in another gap is clipboard support for the Wine Wayland driver...

Red Hat engineers have been working on Nova as an open-source driver successor to the Nouveau driver for upstream NVIDIA GPU support within the Linux kernel that can be used with the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. Unlike the prior larger RFC patch series, sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today were some small patches for introducing "NOVA-Core" that would serve as the initial base for this modern NVIDIA Linux kernel DRM driver. Over time and succeeding kernel releases, the NOVA code would be built up until ultimately becoming a usable state for end-users...

While we are approaching the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window with Linux 6.14-rc1 expected on Sunday, the fun isn't over quite yet... Among other last minute pull requests today were a set of patches to work on better optimizing the TLB flushing scalability for modern Intel and AMD x86_64 processors...

As another last minute change for GNOME 48 ahead of its feature freeze this weekend, the default font of the GNOME desktop has changed...

Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5's full 512-bit data path support compared to the "double pumped" approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.

The Servo open-source browser engine written in Rust has published some of their development statistics and other figures for 2025. Additionally they have shared their planned roadmap for 2025...

Along with other Intel TDX changes and AMD SEV updates separately sent out for thei n-development Linux 6.14 kernel, there is the usual hearty batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization updates too...

One of the important pieces of open-source software still working toward proper Wayland support is the Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" that in turn is depended upon by software like Steam, OBS Studio, Spotify, and many other software packages for having an in-app browser-type experience. The good news is there has been some recent progress on native Wayland support for CEF...

The FUSE code within the Linux kernel for enabling file-systems in user-space has a new performance capability up its sleeve with now supporting IO_uring communication between kernel and user-space...

All of the Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) driver updates were merged this week as we reach the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window...

Mesa 25.0 feature development is now over with the code having been branched from Mesa Git and the Mesa 25.0-rc1 release candidate issued. Mesa 25.0 is to be the next quarterly feature release for these open-source 3D graphics drivers and will hopefully see its stable debut before the end of February. In turn Mesa 25.0 will be found with the likes of Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.04 for providing the newest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, including for upcoming AMD RDNA4 graphics...

GParted as the GNOME Partition Editor as one of the most robust solutions for GUI-driven partition and file-system management on Linux is out with a new feature release...

Intel Co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus announced during their Q4 earnings call this evening that they will not be bringing their "Falcon Shores" AI / HPC chip to market. Falcon Shores was to be their next-gen GPU accelerator to effectively succeed their Gaudi AI chips. Instead Falcon Shores will be used as an internal test vehicle while preparing the hardware/software ecosystem for Jaguar Shores as its successor...

Over the past week I have published a number of GeForce RTX 5090 Linux compute benchmarks as well as the GeForce RTX 5080 on Linux. With that early NVIDIA R570 Linux driver build as part of the CUDA 12.8 package I was asked to wait on Linux gaming benchmarks until the proper RTX 50 Linux driver is released. Well, it was released this morning with the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux beta availability and have in turn been pushing the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 through a number of Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks.

Last week saw the big set of Bcachefs updates merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel that included the last anticipated big on-disk format change as well as scalability improvements. It was a particularly big pull after Bcachefs missed out on any changes being upstreamed for Linux 6.13. This week a set of follow-on fixes/improvements have been merged for this experimental copy-on-write file-system...

One of the details not too widely talked about with Intel's newest Core Ultra Series 2 processors is the introduction of the Partner Security Engine, which is a new dedicated security engine on the SOC that is capable of running the Microsoft Pluton firmware and software. Intel today published more details around their Partner Security Engine...

Just ahead of the GNOME 48 feature freeze this weekend, gdctl has been merged into GNOME's Mutter as the GNOME Display Control Utility...

Internet tech company Yandex announced the open-source release today of Perforator as a tool to help identify and evaluate code inefficiencies at scale. They say Perforator can lead to businesses saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure."..

Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement...

The NVIDIA 570.86.16 beta Linux driver was just published in time for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards hitting store shelves this morning...

In addition to the AMDXDNA driver being merged for Linux 6.14 for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs, this next kernel version is introducing another new AMD kernel driver that hasn't been previously covered on Phoronix: AMD AE4DMA...

The open-source Intel Linux Mesa graphics driver code has merged support for a "major improvement" found with next-gen Xe3 graphics... Variable Register Thread (VRT) as one of the nifty features that will help with Intel integrated and discrete graphics performance...

All of the MIPI SoundWire related updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel. SoundWire as a reminder is the standard interface for modern, small audio peripherals...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) updates have been sent out and merged for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel...

Now that the full-functioning NTSYNC driver is ready for Linux 6.14 for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives on Linux, the merge request has been opened for upstream Wine to land the NTSYNC integration on its side for in-process synchronization...

AMD today announced two new software projects to better enhance their software support for Instinct accelerators / graphics deployments within the data center: AMD GPU Operator and AMD Metrics Exporter...

Lead RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has provided some insight into the support expectations for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 "RDNA4" graphics cards...

About five years ago X.Org / FreeDesktop.org was experiencing a cloud hosting crisis with their cloud costs running out of control after losing free credits for Google Cloud and the continuous integration (CI) testing driving up expenses. They ended up switching public cloud providers over to Equinix. Equinix ended up sponsoring the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org with their cloud/hosting needs but now on short notice that is coming to an end...

PyTorch 2.6 is out today as the newest feature release to this widely-used machine learning library...

Following a discussion on the Ubuntu development mailing list, Ubuntu developers have decided to adopt Matrix for their official real-time communication channels while deprecating IRC chat...

Last week was the review embargo lift on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card while today the review embargo lifts on the GeForce RTX 5080, both of which graphics cards are officially available in the retail channel tomorrow (30 January). Due to waiting on the official NVIDIA R570 Linux driver release that is recommended for the RTX 50 series Linux gaming, today's tests at Phoronix are looking at the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU compute performance.

As expected, GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 is now available as the newest half-year feature release to this important C library for Linux systems and other environments...

Bytedance is praising eBPF as the in-kernel virtual machine for dynamic programs to help speed-up network packet processing, greater tracing and profiling abilities, and a wide-range of other purposes for these dynamic in-kernel programs. By tapping eBPF, Bytedance is reporting a 10% improvement to their networking throughput...

AMD Mesa driver guru Marek Olak has landed a new set of 48 patches into Mesa 25.0-devel Git for refactoring various AMD-related driver code to work on improving the ACO compiler support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Canonical has been maintaining experimental/testing ISOs of Ubuntu Linux for Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops. New ISOs for testing were recently published and allow enabling more features/functionality for these ARM laptops under Ubuntu...

The Network File System (NFS) client and server changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window...

The LLVM 20 compiler stack saw its code branched from the mainline Git codebase last night as release preparations begin for what will be LLVM 20.1 as the inaugural stable release...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent out the pull request of all the driver core updates for Linux 6.14, which ends up being a big deal for those interested in the prospects of Rust drivers for the Linux kernel...

Following last month's release of ROCm 6.3.1, ROCm 6.3.2 was just tagged today from its various open-source repositories and binaries beginning to come down the pipeline. ROCm 6.3.2 is another point release but brings a decent set of refinements for this AMD graphics compute stack...

Apple is the latest CPU vendor being affected by side-channel attacks. All Mac laptops since 2022, all Mac desktops since 2023, and all iPhones / iPad Pro / iPad Air / iPad Mini models since 2021 are affected by these new SLAP and FLOP attacks...

System76 this morning announced the 2025 version of their Meerkat mini Linux PC. This new mini PC designed for Linux pairs an Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoC with dual 2.5G Ethernet and booting using Coreboot for a intriguing combination whether it's for a lightweight Linux desktop PC or a small office/home server...

Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it's been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.