Phoronix

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel could land initial Tenstorrent vendor support and provide initial support for the Blackhole SoC with the initial Blackhole P100/P150 PCIe accelerator cards...

Well this wasn't on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There's long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is "NTFSPLUS" as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3...

Earlier this month Intel Linux graphics driver engineers began posting the initial Intel Xe3P graphics enablement code with a focus on the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake. Xe3P will also later be found in Intel discrete graphics cards like Crescent Island and more. That very early Intel Xe3P code is now expected to be merged as part of the Linux 6.19 kernel as what will be the first Linux kernel release of 2026...

It was to much surprise waking up this morning and seeing the Servo 0.0.1 release for this Rust-based web layout engine that began as a Mozilla project and is now being developed independently via Linux Foundation Europe and other parties...

Linux 6.18-rc2 is now available with another week's worth of fixes for Linux 6.18, which is anticipated to be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

Linux 6.16 introduced the ability to report the cause of AMD system resets/reboots thanks to specialized information available on AMD Zen platforms for indicating the detected cause of previous resets. This is a handy addition and the information is automatically reported to the kernel log on the next system boot, but in some instances that information could be stale/inaccurate. Today's Linux 6.18-rc2 will fix that...

There has already been hardware monitoring support and other functionality in place under Linux for various AYANEO devices while a new platform driver is being worked on for the new AYANEO 3 device...

At the start of the calendar year there was a proposal for a new GCC front-end for the Algol 68 programming language. GCC developers deferred merging Algol 68 support into GCC for this rarely talked about vintage programming language. But as talked about back at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025, the developer is still working on the support. Sure enough, this week brought a new version of this GCC front-end...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list one month ago were patches for a multi-kernel architecture design to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on the same single physical machine. This could let some CPU cores be running real-time "RT" kernels or other non-traditional uses between CPU cores. It wasn't clear how far the multi-kernel patches would get especially with some initial negative views toward it and Bytedance separately proposing "Parker" for multi-kernel usage just days later. In any event, today a second version of the multi-kernel Linux patches were posted...

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 2 is out as the newest weekly test release of FreeBSD working its way toward a stable release in early December...

Back during the Linux 6.18 merge window Linus Torvalds commented on "mindless and completely crazy Rust format checking" and that the RUst format checking "is all bass-ackwards garbage" with condensing multi-line import statements into single lines. Merged minutes ago to Linux Git ahead of tomorrow's Linux 6.18-rc2 are fixes to the Rust format checking and updated guidelines to address Torvalds' criticism...

Since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite last month, Linux patches for the X2 Elite "Glymur" platform have begun flowing. Among the recent Linux patches for the Snapdragon X2 is this past week seeing initial display support...

For those evaluating new options for high performance, cross-platform graphics and/or compute for simulations and other purposes, Tellusim Technologies has made their Tellusim Core SDK publicly available via GitHub...

A few days back we reported on a Meta engineer uncovering an architectural issue with RDSEED usage on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs. It ended up being found to affect more CPU models than originally anticipated and a new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list would disable RDSEED usage across all AMD Zen 5 processors...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 10.17 is now wine-Staging 10.17 that is carrying 295 extra patches atop the upstream Wine codebase for testing at the leading edge of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux...

LACT 0.8.2 is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this Linux GPU control application. This Rust-based software provides a GUI for controlling AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs under Linux with various monitoring metrics, information reporting, power configuration, thermals configuration, and overclocking with supported hardware...

With plans to release next Tuesday (21 October), KDE developers this week have been putting the finishing touches on this next open-source desktop update. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham says he thinks it's going to be "a pretty darn good release" when it officially debuts...

Following the release of Wine 10.16 with initial NTSYNC support from two weeks ago, Wine 10.17 is now available as the latest development release in working toward Wine 11.0 stable in early 2026...

For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner...

An interesting technical collaboration between AMD and Intel as well as other industry players like Google, Bytedance, Microsoft, MiTAC, HPE, and others is openSFI. The new openSFI "Open Silicon Firmware Interface" project is aiming to work toward vendor-neutral low-level firmware interfaces for more interoperable firmware solutions across vendors...

Due to Intel CPU microcode sizes continuing to get larger and late-loading new CPU microcode onto a running system can lead to (brief) disruptions/downtime while the update is applied, future Intel CPUs are introducing a microcode "staging" feature to reduce that microcode updating downtime. The Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year is set to support the Intel microcode staging feature with capable processors...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 25.10 we have seen some nice performance improvements on the likes of AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake compared to prior Ubuntu releases. But what about ARM? In this article is a look at the Ampere Altra performance between Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 using the popular System76 Thelio Astra workstation.

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...