Phoronix

Intel is phasing out 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with modern upscaling tech like XeSS / FSR / DLSS being superior and more performant plus there being alternative anti-aliasing techniques. Upcoming Xe3 graphics are seeing 16x MSAA support retroactively disabled as the Intel graphics driver moves away from this highest-level MSAA sampling count...

The Linux 6.17 sound subsystem code last week introduced support for AMD ACP 7.2 as the next version of AMD's Audio Co-Processor IP. This appears to be for yet-to-be-released hardware and now over in the SoundWire subsystem is similar enablement work landing for AMD ACP 7.2...

PyTorch 2.8 released today as the newest feature update to this widely-used machine learning library that has become a crucial piece for deep learning and other AI usage. There are a few interesting changes worth highlighting with the new PyTorch 2.8 release...

The KVM feature changes were merged a few days ago with all of their enhancements for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. Some nice improvements made it this cycle for enhancing the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Microsoft today released an updated version of Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" that allows running Linux binaries atop Windows 11. There is only one change noted and it's for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability...

Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents...

Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop...

On top of all the Linux 6.17 kernel graphics driver feature changes that landed last week like promoting Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics to on-by-default, SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs, multi-GPU preparations, Wildcat Lake enablement work, and more, some additional Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for merging to Linux 6.17 in the coming days...

The AlmaLinux project announced today that there is now "native" NVIDIA graphics driver support for AlmaLinux 10 and AlmaLinux 9 using NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules that are now conveniently packaged in an AlmaLinux repository for easy usage complete with NVIDIA's closed-source user-space packages like CUDA...

Merged last week for Linux 6.17 were the FUTEX locking changes that include addressing an observed performance bottleneck...

On Linux 6.15.3+ there have been increased reports of log tree corruption being hit by users of the Btrfs file-system. Fortunately, a fix has now been submitted for Linux 6.17 Git and then for back-porting to the recent stable kernel versions...

Merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel to benefit the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D AMD drivers are improved scheduling heuristics for the ACO compiler back-end developed by Valve...

Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems...

All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3...

Released two weeks ago was systemd 258-rc1 with many changes throughout its massive codebase. Out today is a second release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 258...

The Rust project put out a status update concerning its 2025 project goals to summarize what has been accomplished during the first half of the year...

The PCI-SIG announced today the PCI Express 8.0 specification due out in 2028 will double the data of the PCI Express 7.0 specification, taking it to 256 GT/s...

If all goes according to plan Debian 13.0 will be released this weekend. Already in its effectively final state aside from any last minute fixes, I've begun running Debian 13 testing builds on various systems in the lab to great success. With two years since Debian 12, the new software packages of Debian 13 help in delivering better performance especially on modern systems. Here is a look at Debian 12 versus Debian 13 performance on an AMD EPYC server across 130 benchmarks. Coincidentally, Debian 13 is coming in at 13% faster than Debian 12.

Following yesterday's F2FS pull request, the exFAT file-system updates were sent out and since merged for the ongoing Linux 6.17 kernel merge window...

For several years now Intel has been working on SYCL support within LLVM and various related efforts like the LLVM SPIR-V back-end as part of their oneAPI ambitions and Data Parallel C++ across their spectrum of hardware. The latest hitting upstream LLVM is libsycl as a SYCL run-time library...

Oxmiq Labs exited stealth mode today as a new startup led by Raja Koduri of AMD / Apple / Intel fame to focus on GPU software and licenseable graphics IP. Oxmiq Labs is a new GPU software and IP startup that has been in development for two years already and built a team of talented GPU and AI architects...

For Linux gamers relying on the X.Org Server, the SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed support for precision/pixel scrolling...

FFmpeg developers are known for delivering some really wild performance gains from hand-optimized Assembly code especially around Intel/AMD AVX-512 optimizations for various features of this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Merged this week was enhancing the Bwdif deinterlacing video filter with a 23~28x speed-up over the basic C code path when using AVX-512...

Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...

Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms...

Working toward the stable openSUSE Leap 16.0 release in late 2025, the release candidate period has begun for this Linux distribution aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 sources...

Sent out today for the Linux 6.17 merge window and already merged hours later were the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) feature updates...

Junio Hamano announced the release of Git 2.51-rc0 to kick off the new week and the first step toward Git 2.51 as the next milestone for this open-source distributed version control system...

Over the past three months we have been excitedly testing AMD's Strix Halo SoC with the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 flagship model as well as the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 as one step below. Strix Halo offers excellent CPU and GPU performance capabilities at the top-end if your budget allows. But at the opposite end and a step below the Strix Point SoCs that have been available the past year is Krackan Point. Krackan Point is for the mid-range offerings in the Ryzen AI 300 series. Recently I've been testing an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 laptop that offers pretty impressive performance/value when considering it can be found brand new for as little as $449 USD with the HP OmniBook 5.

Along with today's NVIDIA R580 Linux driver beta, the CUDA 13.0 toolkit is now available to download and depends upon the new R580 Linux driver series...

Merged a short time ago to Mesa 25.3-devel Git and marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 series is advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs...

NVIDIA today published the v580.65.06 as their first beta driver version in the new NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series...

Canonical engineer John Johansen sent out the AppArmor pull request today for the Linux 6.17 merge window that is heavy on changes for this Linux kernel security module...

Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland...

In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability...

Along with the release of the Mutter 49 beta, GNOME Shell 49 beta was released on Sunday in preparation for the imminent GNOME 49 beta release. Notable here is long sought after support for having the ability to restart or shutdown the computer from GNOME's lock screen...

NetBSD 11.0 release preparations have begun. The NetBSD developers are hoping to officially release NetBSD 11.0 in October and for that to happen the release candidate would be out in September and daily beta builds can already be tested...

The GNOME 49 Mutter beta release is now available for testing ahead of the stable release of GNOME 49 coming up In September...

A few days ago the Intel QuickAssist "QAT" accelerators were demoted by FSCRYPT in the Linux 6.17 development code due to being slow and bug prone with AVX-512 showing to be much faster than leveraging the QAT accelerators in this file encryption framework. With the Linux 6.17 crypto subsystem is a second separate demotion to Intel's QAT support for kernel use...

Earlier this year there was talk of Linux potentially dropping its Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers as they had been orphaned for a decade and proving to be a maintenance burden. Following that some developers stepped up to better maintain the code for HFS and HFS+ file-system support. In Linux 6.17 we are seeing some of the fruits of that work...

For those shopping for a high-end desktop power supply for use under Linux and interested in being able to take advantage of sensor monitoring capabilities, the 2025 edition of the Corsair HX1200i PSU can now enjoy working sensor monitoring under Linux...

The Compute Express Link code changes landed this weekend for the Linux 6.17 kernel with development continuing to be quite active around this subsystem for supporting latest and next-generation servers...

As has been the trend with recent Linux kernel releases, a lot of Rust programming language abstractions and other additions are coming for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel...

All of the memory management "MM" changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window...

Newelle is a virtual AI assistant developed for the GNOME desktop that supports voice chat and can handle carrying out web searches, terminal command execution, website reading, file management, document editing, and more. Newell v1.0 was released this week for advancing this GNOME AI virtual assistant...

All of the HID subsystem device driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.17 merge window...

FEX 2508 as the open-source emulator that allows running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play, is boasting some "big juicy" optimizations with its new release. Many games are now significantly faster atop FEX...

While Apple removed FireWire support from the upcoming macOS 26 "Tahoe" release, Linux support for the IEEE-1394 standard continues. With the in-development Linux 6.17 there is some modernization work on the FireWire subsystem code with plan still being to maintain FireWire support on Linux until at least 2029...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on the interesting Plasma desktop changes for the week. This week a long-sought feature for the Plasma desktop was finally merged...

Back in February Steam on Linux was at a 1.45% marketshare, then was corrected to 2.33% for Linux gaming in March, 2.27% for April, a nice jump to 2.69% for Linux gaming in May, and June came in at 2.57% for the Linux gaming population as a percent of Steam users. The July numbers were published this evening and show a new recent high for Linux gamers...