Phoronix

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors...

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild...

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode...

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel...

Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices...

Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.

SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms...

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency...

Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads...

Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.

Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders...

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about...

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete...

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding...

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller...

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system...

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to land initial haptic touchpad support as part of the HID subsystem updates...

It was just a few days ago that a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel. Separate from that proposal from Multikernel Technologies, it turns out Bytedance has been working on their own similar solution called Parker. Today Bytedance lifted the lid on Parker as their solution for running multiple kernels simultaneously on the same hardware/system...

With DKMS packages now being available for Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions for running the latest out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver support with ease and reproducibility, I decided to try out the updated Bcachefs driver on Ubuntu Linux to see how the performance is relative to the upstream Linux 6.17 kernel with its now-frozen Bcachefs support.

Two pull requests were submitted this weekend of new Apple Silicon material ready for upstreaming with the soon-to-start Linux 6.18 kernel cycle...

For further enhancing the upstream Linux kernel support for the AMD (Xilinx) Versal SoCs, a new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver is set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel for the Versal NET SoCs with DDR memory...

A set of 13 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for optimizing the online defragmentation handling by the EXT4 kernel driver. The online defragmentation improvements for EXT4 can net a nice performance win with a very significant improvement in a variety of scenarios...

Merged to Mesa 25.3-devel on Monday is SPIR-V shader replacement support as a new feature for helping Mesa's Vulkan drivers in testing and debugging issues...

Beyond the continued flow of new performance optimizations via hand-written Assembly, with the FFmpeg project it's also interesting to monitor their ever-expanding scope of supported audio/video formats. The newest to land in FFmpeg Git is support for AHX audio files...

Out today is the Qt 6.10 release candidate for this forthcoming toolkit release...

OBS Studio 32.0 stable is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop recording and screencasting software popular with game streamers and for a variety of other recording/casting purposes...

While the Rust Coreutils project has been generating a lot of interest recently from the uutils initiative, the upstream GNU Coreutils project isn't slowing down and today is out with GNU Coreutils 9.8 for shipping the newest features...

RPM 6.0 is out today as the newest major update to the RPM Package Manager as the package management system most commonly associated with Red Hat / Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia / OpenMandriva, and others...

With last week's official release of ROCm 7.0 failing to mention the AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs on the supported GPU list, a number of Phoronix readers and from elsewhere were inquiring whether or not Strix Halo works with the new ROCm release. Various AMD folks have mentioned Strix Halo with ROCm, so I decided to run some benchmarks for myself of ROCm 7.0 on Ubuntu Linux with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics on the Framework Desktop.

XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives...

Queued up into DRM-Next is a last batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window that is expected to begin next week. With this last minute Intel Xe driver activity is also a new power management knob for those wanting to run their Intel graphics slightly more efficient...

The beta release of the Qt Creator 18 integrated development environment is now available for testing for this Qt/C++-focused IDE...

Version 1.4.327 of the Vulkan API specification was released on Friday and with it comes one new extension, which is a Valve vendor extension...

The third weekly alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing...

Raspberry Pi today announced the M.2 HAT+ Compact as a new smaller version of their M.2 HAT+ for these single board computers...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc7 as the last planned release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel that is expected to go final next weekend...

Not to be confused with AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), but Google's PSP Security Protocol (PSP) for encryption in-transit for TCP network connections is now ready for the mainline kernel. This initial PSP encryption support for network connections is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel...

Code was open-sourced this week and posted to the Linux kernel mailing list as a "request for comments" (RFC) for a multi-kernel architecture. This proposal could allow for multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel could run on dedicated CPU Cores while sharing underlying hardware resources. This could also allow for some complex use-cases such as real-time (RT) kernels running on select CPU cores...

The past few years Google engineers have been reimplementing Android's Binder driver in the Rust programming language. Binder is a critical part of Android for inter-process communication (IPC) and now with Linux 6.18 it looks like the Rust rewrite will be upstreamed...

While years ago it was a annual ritual and closest thing to a vacation around here (even though the daily original content persisted), the Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich sadly remains on hiatus. Web publishing operations remain difficult given the state of the industry and rampant ad-block use make even daily operations tight. But for those wishing to show their support for Phoronix during this autumn/fest period, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to help the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

A patch queued into the PCI subsystem's "next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window will uniformally expose the PCI device serial number of devices via sysfs for easy programmatic parsing...

Developers behind the Git distributed revision control system are debating whether to make Rust programming language support mandatory...

Rather than needing to parse package/history log files manually and akin to functionality provided by Red Hat's DNF, a merge request is pending to add a built-in history command for APT...

When it comes to AMD's incredible Strix Halo platform, the leading laptop option is the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. The HP ZBook Ultra G1a works great overall on Linux with the main caveat being the web camera due to making use of AMD's latest SoC capabilities for offloaded image processing. The AMD ISP4 open-source driver fixes that for the ZBook Ultra G1a and is also important for future laptop models employing AMD's ISP IP...

With Bcachefs now being "externally maintained" with the upstream kernel not accepting any further feature changes for now to this copy-on-write file-system, Bcachefs is pursuing a nice DKMS experience for distributing updated file-system kernel driver support out-of-tree. Convenient DKMS Debian packages of Bcachefs are now available on Ubuntu and Debian Linux platforms...

While KDE Plasma 6.5 beta released this week, KDE developers have been busy landing last-minute minor features and fixes into this next desktop release...

Linux 6.17 is an interesting time to carry out fresh file-system benchmarks given that EXT4 has seen some scalability improvements while Bcachefs in the mainline kernel is now in a frozen state. Linux 6.17 is also what's powering Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box to make such a comparison even more interesting. Today's article is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, Bcachefs and then OpenZFS too.

Merged to Mesa Git are new contributor guidelines added to the documentation. This can help new users in submitting patches to Mesa. It also lays out a policy of allowing AI-generated/assisted code but the author submitting the code must be able to understand the code in question and take responsibility for it...

Announced last month was the Ubuntu "Dangerous" Desktop Images as a new form of the Ubuntu Linux desktop images that would ship with leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu development images... Basically, pulling in the very latest Snaps to go along with the latest Ubuntu development Debian packages...

In addition to working on optimizing the performance of Zink for workstation graphics, Mike Blumenkrantz has also been tackling support for OpenGL mesh shaders with this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan open-source driver...