Phoronix

Canonical announced today they have released Ubuntu developer images for the Orange Pi RV2, a new RISC-V single board computer that is low-cost with the SBC featuring 8GB of RAM costing just $64 USD...

It turns out the Hierarchical Z "HiZ" implementation with AMD RDNA4 GPUs with the GFX12 graphics engine for early rejection of fragments before hitting the rendering pipeline is slightly buggy. Driver workarounds are needed for the HiZ/HiS support with RDNA4 GPUs to avoid potential hangs...

Following IBM engineers doing a lot of open-source compiler work around a new "arch15" that we suspected to be IBM z17 with Telum II processors, this morning IBM officially announced their next-generation mainframe hardware...

In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project has published its March 2025 status report that outlines exciting progress made over the past month...

Via Mozilla's Mozilla Builders initiative for fostering open-source AI projects is LocalScore, an interesting local AI large language model (LLM) benchmark for Windows and Linux systems. LocalScore has a lot of potential and also builds off the Mozilla Ocho Llamafile project as an easy-to-distribute LLM framework. LocalScore is still in its early stages but is already working well and will also be used in future hardware reviews on Phoronix...

At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" servers is even more exhilarating. As the first of a lot more Ubuntu 25.04 server benchmarks to come, today is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance on AMD EPYC 9005 compared to Ubuntu 24.10 and the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS releases.

DXVK 2.6.1 was just released as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other softwarefor enjoying older Windows games on Linux...

For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor...

FFmpeg is known for carrying a lot of hand-optimized Assembly code for speeding up this widely-used multimedia library and taking advantage of AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA capabilities. Merged yesterday was support for making use of AES-NI for those relying on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) within FFmpeg for encrypted video streams...

When it comes to compiler support for Apple Silicon and their hardware at large, Apple has long been focused on the LLVM/Clang toolchain given their long history with it, employing many of the developers, and Xcode being based on LLVM. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though may soon see upstream support for the newer Apple Cores thanks to the work of GCC developer Iain Sandoe along with the input of engineers from Arm and the Apple open-source team...

For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading to a new feature release, Linux 6.14.1 was released this morning with an initial collection of fixes atop the Linux 6.14 codebase from two weeks ago...

On Sunday prior to releasing Linux 6.15-rc1, one of the last feature pulls was merging updates for the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree. The Turbostat tool provides CPU frequency and power statistics along with the ability to query temperatures and other CPU metrics on AMD and Intel processors...

The Linux 6.15 merge window has been capped off with the Linux 6.15-rc1 test kernel having been just released...

As a win for the open-source community from NVIDIA, the company recently announced they are making their PhysX and Flow GPU-accelerated source code open-source...

As we close out the Linux 6.15 merge window this weekend culminating with the Linux 6.15-rc1 release, the input driver updates were merged that include introducing the new Apple Z2 driver...

In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations...

One of the early pull requests for Linux 6.15 that I've been meaning to highlight are the VFS iomap updates sent in by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner. In particular, the VFS iomap pull brings preparations for large atomic writes and its upcoming usage by the XFS and EXT4 file-systems...

Merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.15 kernel were all of the performance events updates for which there are a few notable patches on the AMD and Intel side this cycle...

Among the pull requests coming in at the tail end of the Linux 6.15 merge window with 6.15-rc1 expected tonight are all of the Kbuild updates as the infrastructure for building out the kernel...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 merge window are quite exciting with some optimizations for modern x86_64 Intel/AMD processors enticing us the most...

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release...

APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years...

In addition to all the KDE Plasma activity this week, GNOME developers have also been quiet busy working on a variety of improvements to the open-source desktop on their side of the pond...

LACT 0.7.3 is out this weekend as the newest feature update to this Linux GPU configuration and monitoring tool. LACT helps make up for the lack of any official GUI-based GPU configuration tool on Linux provided by AMD or Intel. It also works on NVIDIA GPUs too for providing a nice unified app for GPU configuration from all three major GPU vendors...

FEX 2504 is out with its newest monthly feature update for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts. This alternative to QEMU and Box64 continues focusing on new performance optimizations to further enhance the appeal and speedy potential of this x86_64-on-ARM64 emulator...

Intel's Open Image Denoise library that is part of their oneAPI Rendering Toolkit as a set of open-source, high performance denoising filters for ray-traced images is out with a new release. Open Image Denoise is used by applications like Blender and with this version 2.3.3 release is expanded GPU support...

It's been a busy start to April for KDE Plasma developers as they continue working toward the Plasma 6.4 feature release. There have been yet more crash fixes along with other polishing and stability enhancements to kick off the new month...

Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve's Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere...

Vulkan 1.4.312 is out today as the newest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual mundane clarifications and fixes, this update brings two new extensions from Qualcomm and NVIDIA...

Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel...

With Rust turning ten years old this year, they are reflecting and working to draft plans for the next decade. They have started the Rust Vision Survey where they are looking for feedback from all Rust skill-sets as they look toward the future...

With having a new Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop in the lab, a lot of Linux benchmarks are forthcoming from this ThinkPad laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. This AMD Zen 5 SoC with Radeon 880M RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics had me curious how the Windows 11 vs. Linux iGPU performance is looking now more than a half-year after launch. Prior to blowing out the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation that shipped on the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and loaded with the latest AMD drivers and Windows 11 updates, I ran some graphics benchmarks for seeing how they stack up against the open-source AMD graphics drivers found on the brand new Ubuntu 25.04 release.

The ZLUDA open-source project for "CUDA on non-NVIDIA GPUs" continues being developed for enabling CUDA like GeekBench and AI workloads on AMD GPUs and other hardware vendors. The ZLUDA project hopes to have PyTorch up and running on it this year along with eyeing 32-bit PhysX support since NVIDIA has dropped support upstream for the 32-bit PhysX libraries with the recent RTX 50 Blackwell launch...

Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code...

Sven Peter who remains one of the very active Asahi Linux developers and working on upstreaming various elements of Apple Silicon support for the Linux kernel has sent up warning flares around the eventual Apple M4 support...

In addition to all of the memory management "MM" changes merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel, a secondary round of MM updates was submitted and subsequently merged for this next kernel version. Interesting here is using the recent MSEAL system call for being able to now seal system mappings...

Yet another Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptop seeing new DeviceTree patches for enabling Linux support is the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q...

The Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture will enjoy slightly better support with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel...

For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution...

AMD software engineers today released AOMP 21.0-0 as the newest snapshot of their LLVM/Clang compiler downstream focused on providing the best OpenMP/OpenACC GPU offloading support to AMD GPUs and Instinct accelerators via the ROCm software stack...

The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.18 specifications as the latest incremental update to OpenCL 3.0...

Last month I posted benchmarks showing the performance when using the new 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver on Linux using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This optimizer driver allows tuning the "amd_x3d_mode" for indicating your preference for the CCD with the higher frequency or larger cache size. For some additional insight into the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver performance impact on Linux, here are benchmarks looking at the difference while using the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D.

Two separate patch series updated this week for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack is the still-ongoing work around the DRM sharpness property for the new adaptive sharpening filter with Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics and then separately is the work to bring VRAM Self Refresh (VRSR) over to the modern Xe kernel driver...

Among the changes that landed this week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the memory management "MM" updates, of which there are several notable patch series included...

For those looking into some insight around the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) utilization with modern Core Ultra systems, pending Linux patches will finally introduce the ability for user-space to obtain the current NPU frequency...

Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn't until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel's staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements...

All of the Device Mapper "DM" changes have been merged to mainline for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel...

Rust 1.86 is now available today as the latest version of this popular programming language...

Not to be confused with the modern Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, but IBM's Coherent Accelerator Interface "CXL" / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface "CAPI" support was stripped away today from the mainline Linux kernel...