Phoronix

Improvements to the Linux kernel's AES-GCM Galois/Counter Mode crypto block cipher code will yield up to 74% faster performance for AMD Zen 3 processors with the Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year...

In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance, separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL...

With Fedora 43 releasing in the coming weeks, Fedora stakeholders are beginning to plot their feature ideas for next year's Fedora 44 release. One of the early F44 feature submissions pending approval is switching /boot on Fedora Cloud images to being a Btrfs file-system subvolume...

One of the early changes merged for the in-development Mesa 26.0 is adding support to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for supporting the low-latency hint supported by the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver...

Ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc2 release on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the week were sent out today. There is the usual assortment of different kernel graphics driver fixes, mostly with the Intel and AMD drivers as usual. In particular a few Intel driver fixes make this week's pull worth mentioning...

Valve's Linux graphics driver team contributions aren't limited to just enhancing the rasterization and ray-tracing graphics performance of the open-source Linux GPU drivers for gaming. Beyond other interesting contributions from that talented group of open-source Linux graphics developers over the years and for other areas like enhancing old GPU hardware support, merged this week for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is a massive improvement to benefit the Llama.cpp AI performance...

Fedora 43 had been planning for an early final target release date of 21 October. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen as a "No-Go" was declared at the Fedora Linux 43 release meeting...

Over the years we have seen various workarounds like disabling RDSEED for select AMD CPUs due to hardware bugs and early on in the Zen days were also some RdRand issues due to different problems. It turns out the newest AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors have a new RDSEED issue...

A Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report from 2015 now getting renewed interest... Linux software RAID via MD RAID, DRBD, LVM RAID, and similar software-based solutions can be broken from user-space around O_DIRECT usage. The issue is that these RAID arrays can be put silently into an inconsistent state across disks...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and GNU Binutils mailing list today is an intriguing message from a longtime x86/x86_64 expert around a "a corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" using some x86 opcodes not used by AMD or Intel processors...

With Linux 6.18 now past the merge window and many new features and changes introduced (https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-features), I have begun testing out this kernel on various servers, desktops, and laptops at Phoronix. Linux 6.18 is quite important with expected to become this year's LTS kernel version upon its stable debut in December. Up today is a first look at Linux 6.17 vs. 6.18-rc1 performance using Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids server performance.

AOMP 22.0-1 was released on Wednesday as the newest routine update to this downstream of LLVM/Clang/Flang maintained by AMD that continues to carry their latest modifications for enhancing the C/C++/Fortran compiler offloading support to AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware using the likes of OpenMP and OpenACC...

Merged today to LLVM Git for next spring's LLVM 22.0 release is support for the Intel Nova Lake ISA targeting with the "-march=novalake" option...

Just days ago Valve developer Autumn Ashton announced initial NVIDIA DLSS upscaling for the open-source Mesa NVK driver. One of those needed Vulkan extensions, VK_NVX_image_view_handle, is already merged to Mesa Git...

Posted to the Linux networking mailing list on Wednesday were the latest patches for enabling the Homa transport protocol. Homa is the clean-sheet design aiming to become an alternative to TCP within data centers and capable of offering 10~100x reductions in tail latency for short messages...

Announced nearly one year ago was the OpenWrt One as a router/AP that is "hacker-friendly" and open-source. The OpenWrt One is powered by a Filogic 820 SoC and features WiFi 6. This official OpenWrt device is manufactured by Banana Pi. While there is downstream open-source code available for customizing the OpenWrt One to your heart's content, the upstream Linux kernel support to date hasn't been full-featured...

SYCLBIN has been proposed by a longtime Intel compiler expert as a new way for storing SYCL device code for use as part of their GPU/XPU programming ambitions...

The latest Mesa Git code is now under version Mesa 26.0-devel with the Mesa 25.3 code being branched overnight for what will become this quarter's stable feature release...

Arm has been working on an open-source Linux kernel accelerator "accel" driver for their Ethos NPUs. That kernel driver continues being revised and under review for inclusion into a future mainline Linux kernel release. Already though a Gallium3D driver for Mesa has been merged for leveraging the Ethos NPU...

The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support...

Valve's open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve's stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old...

PyTorch 2.9 is out today ahead of the PyTorch Conference happening next week in San Francisco. Notable with PyTorch 2.9 is better AMD ROCm and Intel XPU installation support via expanded wheel variant support...

Mesa 25.2.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Particularly if you are on Intel graphics of Battlemage or Lunar Lake and potentially older, Mesa 25.2.5 contains a very important bug fix for various rendering issues and potential game hangs/crashes...

It's been four years now since the Open 3D Engine was born out of Amazon's Lumberyard project and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Today marks the release of the Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 25.10 release with the newest features and fixes for this cross-platform game/graphics engine...

In preparation for Panther Lake laptops shipping in early 2026, after Intel appears to have largely wrapped up work on the Linux driver enablement they are now ensuring the necessary firmware bits are out in time...

Last week Amazon/AWS announced the new EC2 M8a instances as their latest-generation, general-purpose compute instances now powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Amazon announced the M8a as having up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price performance over M7a. With my testing of both at 32 vCPUs, the new AMD EPYC Turin instance provided 1.59x the performance over the prior-generation EPYC Genoa instance!

Apple today announced the M5 SoC as the newest in the Apple Silicon family and with claims of 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI of the M4...

Merged today to the Tinygrad deep learning framework is a Mesa NIR back-end to allow targeting that common intermediate representation used by these open-source Linux GPU drivers. Initially supported with this Tinygrad NIR back-end is the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" with its Rust-based NAK compiler as well as the CPU-based LLVMpipe driver...

AMD's HIP-RT is used by the Blender 3D modeling software for GPU-accelerated ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs. For Blender 5.0 the AMD HIP-RT support is expected to be declared "stable" but will not be enabled by default until Blender 5.1...

While the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers saw Panther Lake support added in early 2024, only overnight was support upstreamed to GCC and Clang for the similar Wildcat Lake target...

In development for around the past year was the cross-vendor mesh shading extension for OpenGL. Last week GL_EXT_mesh_shader was merged to the OpenGL Registry for this mesh shader support and first new GL extension in a while...

David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead...

A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support...

Autumn Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn't ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone...

The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary...

There's been work to get the Nix functional package manager available on Fedora Linux for those wanting to leverage its available packages or features like supporting side-by-side packages of different versions, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, non-root user for installing software, and other features. One of the hurdles though is that the Nix package manager relies by default on the /nix directory, which goes against Fedora's default directory requirements. Now though the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted permission for using the /nix directory hierarchy...

Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering.

Intel Linux engineers have begun posting patches for enabling the Xe3P architecture. While Xe3P is also expected to be found with next-generation Intel discrete GPUs, the initial focus is on enabling support for Nova Lake...

Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel...

Firefox 144.0 is now available but it's not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support...

A low-level Linux kernel improvement being worked on by engineers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is for introducing a PCI Configuration Space Cache "PCSC" to help with dense SR-IOV deployments that can end up hitting significant overhead with the current Linux kernel...

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...

Even prior to the recent ending of the Linux 6.18 merge window and its many new features, the first "drm-misc-next" pull request of new material intended for Linux 6.19 was already submitted for inclusion to DRM-Next...

Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread...

Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has published their September 2025 progress report to outline recent work on this open-source OS...

It's been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group...

Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics...

A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU security mitigations to all be toggled at run-time...

While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that's quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux...