Phoronix

With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here's a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025...

Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we've been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.

An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance...

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light...

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors...

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues...

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64...

A change proposal filed today for the in-development Fedora 42 is looking at making use of the EROFS file-system for all of the live media images...

George Hotz' Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a "completely sovereign" software stack for GPU compute on AMD...

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is poised to introduce support for Intel THC... The Touch Host Controller IP block found in the PCH of modern Intel laptops for dealing with touchscreen, touchpads, and similar functionality...

An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital...

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code...

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling...

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests...

Libvirt 11.0 was christened today as the newest version of this open-source Virtualization API for managing VMs on Linux and other platforms while supporting KVM, QEMU, Xen, VMware ESX, LXC, Bhyve, and other hypervisors...

In development for several years has been LACT as a Linux GPU Control Application to allow adjusting various GPU/driver settings via a convenient graphical application. AMD and NVIDIA graphics have been supported to date while now Intel graphics are also supported with the brand new LACT 0.7...

Added today to the Mesa documentation for the open-source Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems is a set of "performance tips" for ensuring an optimal Intel Linux graphics 3D accelerated experience...

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news...

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now...

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels...

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal...

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience...

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running...

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing...

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update...

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment...

Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel...

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March...

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux...

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not...

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday...

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards...

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path...

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation...

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays...

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates...

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January...

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs...

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14...

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!..

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors...

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts...

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance...

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages...

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver...