Phoronix

Go 1.25 is out today as the newest half-year update to this popular programming language. What I find most exciting with Go 1.25 is the new experimental garbage collector yielding 10~40% reduction in overhead...

Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%...

This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities...

While most Linux gamers are content using Valve's Steam Play (Proton) these days for Linux gaming, a new release of CodeWeavers' CrossOver is now available for enjoying other Windows applications and games on Linux as well as macOS. CrossOver 25.1 enhances the stability of the Microsoft Office office suite on Linux among other changes...

This Patch Tuesday the only new security fix merged to the Linux kernel is addressing a vulnerability affecting AMD SEV-SNP secure virtual machines...

Last week alongside our Framework Desktop review with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" SoC I posted benchmarks of the Strix Halo performance compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X / 9950X3D socketed desktop processors. For those wondering similarly how the top-end Strix Halo SoC in the Framework Desktop competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" flagship in performance and power efficiency, here are those comparison benchmarks.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie", Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 has been released as the state of Trixie while running atop Hurd rather than Linux...

Following the NVIDIA 580 Linux beta driver from just one week ago, today NVIDIA issued a new R580 series Linux driver build...

ZLUDA as the open-source solution bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware has been seeing a nice uptick in activity the past several months for its latest take on life. The latest feature merged to ZLUDA is the all-important kernel cache to help with performance...

The GCC 14 compiler had marked the Itanium IA-64 code as being obsolete and slated for removal in GCC 15. But then last year the Itanium port was un-deprecated with plans to "support this for some years to come." Now one year later it's back to talking about deprecating/obsoleting the Itanium IA-64 compiler code in GCC...

Intel has introduced another new PCI device ID to their open-source Linux graphics driver stack for signifying another likely product on the way based on the Battlemage BMG-G21 GPU...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week approved a number of additional features for the upcoming Fedora Linux 43 release...

The beta release of Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" is now available for testing of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base...

Intel today announced their August 2025 Software Update to Project Battlematrix and the release of the LLM-Scaler 1.0 container for optimized AI inference support on Intel Arc B-Series graphics hardware...

Even prior to the Linux 6.17-rc1 release on Sunday I already had kicked off some Linux 6.17 Git benchmarking in being eager to see how the performance is beginning to shape up for this next kernel release that is set to power the likes of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43. There is some good news and bad news with my early testing on the ZBook Ultra G1a for AMD Strix Halo...

The Linux Foundation's Alliance for OpenUSD "AOUSD" and the Academy Software Foundation "ASWF" announced today an updated Inclusive Language Guide...

For over a year now Intel has been working on a new DRM sharpness property for making use of Lunar Lake's new adaptive sharpening filter capabilities built into its display engine. This new sharpening filter with Lunar Lake and future SoCs can hep with sharpening blurred or upscaled content and over the past year has gone through several rounds of code review. The latest patches were sent out last week for this DRM sharpness property...

While there is already MoltenVK for Vulkan implemented over Apple's Metal graphics API, the graphics engineers at LunarG have announced KosmicKrisp as a Mesa-based driver implementing Vulkan over Metal...

Recently we looked at the performance of the AMD EPYC 4545P that is a 16 core 65 Watt processor in the EPYC 4005 "Grado" series. This is quite an interesting processor for those after low-power servers, edge AI deployments, and other purposes with no similar Ryzen 9000 series processor or competition from Intel offering sixteen performance cores at around 65 Watts. Complementing all the performance and power data from that review article, here are some additional tests putting its performance and efficiency compared to the original AMD EPYC 7601 flagship processor that ushered in the EPYC family eight years ago.

Intel engineer Chen Yu posted a fresh round of Linux kernel patches working on cache-aware scheduling/load-balancing for this functionality being sought after both by Intel and AMD. The new patches should address some performance regressions observed in the prior patches...

For those making use of the Network File System (NFS), the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel is bringing some nice improvements both for the NFS server and client code...

For hybrid CPU core designs from recent Intel Core (Ultra) processors to ARM big.LIITTLE, a patch series was posted today in seeking to enhance the generic ACPI processor idle driver around processors with multiple types of CPU cores...

While there was previously talk of Blender 5.0 likely defaulting to using the Vulkan API for rendering but keeping the OpenGL driver around, those plans look like they may be changing. OpenGL-by-default looks to now be on the table for Blender 5.0 due out later this year...

With the increased popularity of Linux gaming these days, a patch has been proposed to improve the hardware support for the Logitech G13 gameboard under Linux. The only problem is the hardware is now 16 years old and since been discontinued...

Back in May the Ubuntu engineers at Canonical announced plans to ship Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 given their recent commitment to always shipping with the latest upstream Linux kernel version. They still are committing to it even if it means the kernel and Ubuntu schedules don't perfectly align and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box may end up being on an unstable "-rc" kernel...

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release continues to increase in excitement with this weekend Vulkan hardware acceleration for Apple's ProRes RAW codec being merged...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17-rc1 kernel a few hours ahead of his typical release regiment due to currently being in Europe. That marks the end of the Linux 6.17 merge window with many exciting changes merged this cycle. This is notable with Linux 6.17 expected to power Ubuntu 25.10 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases...

Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved...

In preparing for the GNOME 49 beta release, GNOME Shell this weekend released 49.beta.1 with a few changes worth highlighting...

Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged...

Amid the ongoing discussion over what will happen too Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel, an interesting anecdote around Btrfs was mentioned...

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" is now officially out as the newest two-year stable release to Debian GNU/Linux...

The EFI code updates were merged today for the nearly-over Linux 6.17 kernel with two changes worth mentioning...

Vulkan 1.4.325 was released on Friday with one new extension in tow: VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers for untyped pointers...

Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window...

GNU/Hurd has made it as an official platform target within SDL that is the open-source library widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions across operating systems...

There were a lot of interesting changes that landed in GNOME's Mutter compositor codebase to end out the weekend and ahead of next month's big GNOME 49 release...

Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting Plasma changes for the week. There continues to be a lot of feature work and polishing that is building up for the Plasma 6.5 desktop release...

Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel...

There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer...

We still don't know what's going to happen for Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 kernel even with the merge window set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release. Linus Torvalds commented over one month ago that they would be parting ways for Linux 6.17. At the start of the Linux 6.17 merge window a Bcachefs pull request was submitted but nearly two weeks later it's still not been pulled and Linus Torvalds hasn't commented on the matter...

A few new firmware files were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository for supporting a new GFX12.0.1 (RDNA4) "Kicker" graphics processor. There was also an AMDGPU kernel graphics driver patch that just landed as well in Linux 6.17 for the RDNA4 Kicker variant...

Last week the Threadripper 9000 series began shipping and as shown in our launch-day Linux testing there was stunning performance with the 32-core Threadripper 9970X and 64-core Threadripper 9980X processors. Beyond the improvements thanks to the Zen 5 microarchitecture enhancements, the new Threadrippers while working as a drop-in replacement to existing TRX50 workstation motherboards now can handle DDR5-6400 R-DIMMs up from DDR5-4800 R-DIMMs with the Threadripper 7000 series. For those wondering about the gain attributed to the faster memory modules, here are benchmarks looking at the DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6400 real-world performance impact for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X and 9980X CPUs.

While we eagerly await the release of ROCm 7.0, ROCm 6.4.3 is out today as the newest point release to the ROCm 6.4 open-source GPU compute stack...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a "fair use" quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers...

The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors...

The PCI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.17 merge window. There is new PCIe controller support and some other additions worth mentioning with the new PCI feature code...

Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions...

Following the release of GCC 15.1 at the end of April as the first stable version of the GCC 15 compiler, GCC 15.2 is now available with a variety of bug fixes back-ported...

LACT 0.8.1 is out with a few important changes for this open-source Linux GPU control application that is written in Rust and rendered using GTK...