Phoronix

The Intel Observation Architecture "OA" performance counters support has been upstreamed to Mesa for upcoming Xe3 Panther Lake integrated graphics...

Following the release of Linux 6.16-rc1 last Sunday that capped off the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linux 6.16-rc2 is now available with an initial week's worth of bug/regression fixes. Linux 6.16 development continues in aiming toward a stable release around the end of July...

Back in May a big patch series was published for reworking the Linux kernel to make the SMP support unconditional. Right now those that happen to be running Linux in a uniprocessor (1 CPU core) configuration can build with "CONFIG_SMP" disabled but the proposed patches would make symmetric multi-processing support always present. Those patches took a step forward this week and could be merged for the Linux 6.17 cycle later in the summer...

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code...

While the Linux 6.16 merge window just passed one week ago, already there are new feature changes beginning to queue for the Linux 6.17 kernel later in the summer...

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver...

Linux 6.15 mistakenly shipped with a nasty power regression for some systems, such as those relying on the "nosmt" option to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading / Hyper Threading. That idle power regression was fixed for Linux 6.15.2 and Linux 6.16 Git by reverting the troubled patch that introduced the regression. Now merged ahead of Linux 6.16-rc2 is a proper fix for that problematic patch so it could be re-merged without the power fallout...

Sasha Levin just sent out an initial "request for comments" patch series for the Linux kernel in aiming to establish a Kernel API Specification Framework...

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland...

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue and there being a number of recent controversial changes to the desktop platform...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS published their latest monthly report to outline progress made over the past month...

While KDE Plasma 6.4 is set for release next week, there are already exciting feature improvements brewing for Plasma 6.5...

Wine 10.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle, including the ability to auto-fix more file-system check "fsck" errors...

In addition to Intel recently upstreaming Linux support for new QAT "Gen 6" hardware as their next-generation QuickAssist Technology IP, Intel today began posting Linux kernel driver patches for a new version of their Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA). It looks like upcoming Xeon processors will be rolling out a lot of new accelerator IP...

LibreOffice 25.8 beta is now available for this popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice 25.8 has been baking many improvements for this popular Microsoft Office alternative and leading office suite option for the Linux desktop...

Back in April at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of the new C4D family of VMs powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Back on launch day I looked at the C3D vs. C4D performance at some of the smaller, more common VM sizes. In today's article is a look at the top-end performance of the C4D family with 384 vCPUs. For those wondering about the compute potential of the c4d-standard-384, here are some benchmarks of this 192-core / 384-thread EPYC Turin configuration compared to the prior C3D AMD EPYC Genoa based instance that topped out at 360 vCPUs.

Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions...

Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out...

Introduced last week with Vulkan 1.4.317 was Vulkan Video support for VP9 video decoding. Following that the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver landed its VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 support and now similarly the open-source Intel Vulkan driver has too...

Two years ago DreamWorks Animation open-sourced their MoonRay renderer that is an award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer used for a number of feature films. Since then they have continued advancing this open-source code as OpenMoonRay and adding more features. The newest feature release of OpenMoonRay is now available with yet more capabilities for this impressive renderer...

Sound Open Firmware 2.13 debuted today as the newest feature update to this open-source audio DSP stack started by Intel. With Sound Open Firmware 2.13 comes support for new Intel platforms and other enhancements...

On top of announcing today the AMD Instinct MI350 series, ROCm 7.0, and introducing the AMD Developer Cloud, AMD also teased the next-generation Instinct MI400 / Instinct MI450 series coming in 2026...

What will likely be one of the most under-reported announcements from AMD AI Day 2025 is the AMD Developer Cloud... It's set to play a big role moving forward but today isn't as exciting itself as the likes of the Instinct MI350 series and ROCm 7.0 software...

Following the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 release going GA in May, Rocky Linux 10.0 is now available as this free alternative to RHEL 10...

Alongside announcing the AMD Instinct MI350 series at their AI day, ROCm 7.0 was also introduced and will be available today in preview form...

While OpenZFS 2.3 has been stable for several months, for those still relying on the OpenZFS 2.2 series there is a new stable point release...

AMD at its Advancing AI Day event in San Jose announced the Instinct MI350X and MI355X accelerators. Exciting open-source fans will be that the Instinct MI350 series features fully open-source driver support and that is already mainline within the Linux kernel...

Merged yesterday for Mesa 25.2 is an exciting change for those still making use of vintage Radeon GPUs... OpenGL 4.6 support is now exposed for the Radeon R600g Gallium3D driver...

While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 and Ryzen AI Max+ 395 are very similar processors just as the Ryzen PRO processors are to other non-PRO parts, one of the differences with the AMD PRO Technologies come down to AMD Memory Guard providing full system memory encryption. From the HP BIOS with the ZBook Ultra G1a there is a convenient toggle for this full memory encryption support and thus I decided to carry out some benchmarks to measure the performance cost to this memory encryption feature on this AMD Strix Halo SoC.

Back in April I published Linux benchmarks of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 with the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. Some follow-up benchmarks I did back then that I have been meaning to publish is looking at the ACPI Platform Profile impact on performance and power for this ThinkPad laptop under Linux. Here are those numbers...

Over the past month I have been testing out the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO Strix Halo. Simply put: WOW! I don't remember the last time I have been so fascinated by a laptop SoC from its incredible performance generationally and even compared to existing AMD SoCs within the Ryzen AI 300 series and outright dominating against the Intel Lunar Lake for its Xe2 integrated graphics. The HP ZBook Ultra G1a thanks to AMD Strix Halo offers an incredibly potent integrated GPU and allowing up to 16 cores / 32 threads offers immense CPU performance too. HP packages Strix Halo up into a very well built, mobile workstation oriented laptop design to create an amazing laptop. It's a reliable laptop with captivating performance but does carry a high price tag but with good Linux support too except for one caveat.

PCI Express 7.0 was announced back in 2022 as coming in 2025 with 128 GT/s Since then draft specifications were published while today PCI-SIG is announcing the formal PCI Express 7.0 specification release along with a new PCIe Optical Interconnect Solution...

DAMON is a nifty data access monitoring solution for the Linux kernel developed by Amazon and other parties for system monitoring and performance/efficiency optimizations and more. But it's not so ground-breaking that it's worth enabling by default in all Linux kernel builds, Linus Torvalds has decided...

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium today published the UEC Specification 1.0 release. Nearly two years ago the Ultra Ethernet Consortium was started by Intel, AMD, Meta, HPE, and others and hosted by the Linux Foundation for open and high performance networking with an emphasis on AI and HPC...

With the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop sporting the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics it offers incredible performance potential as shown in my many benchmarks over the past month on Ubuntu Linux. But if wanting to push the Ryzen AI Max even further, with performance-optimized Linux distributions like CachyOS and Intel's Clear Linux it's possible to tap some additional performance out of this 16-core Zen 5 laptop.

DragonFlyBSD has updated its Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver code that it ports over from what's available in the upstream Linux kernel. The latest revision to the DragonFlyBSD kernel graphics driver code enables support for some new hardware platforms but remains woefully behind the latest generation dGPUs/iGPUs and what is found in the upstream Linux kernel...

In late May the Rust-written "Rusticl" OpenCL driver within Mesa landed support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM). Following that, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver has now seen its support merged for SVM...

With less than one year to go until the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release and trying to get any major changes into Ubuntu 25.10 for extra baking, Ubuntu engineers have been evaluating some Ubuntu Server seed changes...

With AMD continuing to be focused on their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end for their GPU compiler needs from compute to graphics shaders, the AMD GPU/accelerator hardware support within the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" has long taken a backseat and left to third-party firms to implement. Posted today was an experimental patch providing very early support for the AMD Instinct MI300 series hardware with the GCC compiler...

The Linux 6.15 kernel cycle started off a bit rough with a heavy hitting performance regression spotted and then fixed but to only then discover another Linux 6.15 performance regression affecting modern AMD CPUs. Fortunately those issues were cleared out in time for the recent Linux 6.15 stable release. Linux 6.15 stable is looking good especially on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" servers with some recent benchmarks showing some modest gains over the Linux 6.14 kernel.

On the GNOME Foundation blog today is an interesting post how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ended up sponsoring and powering all of the GNOME web infrastructure...

Along with releasing Linux 6.14.11 today to end-of-life the Linux 6.14 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.15.2 as the newest stable point release. There is a notable fix here for the CPU idle power regressing on some systems since moving to Linux 6.15...

DXVK 2.6.2 was released this morning as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation. DXVK continues to be most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for running countless Windows games well on Linux...

Following last week's AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Linux graphics/gaming review for launch day, today's article is providing an initial look at the GPU compute performance for this new RDNA4-powered ~$349 graphics card on Linux with ROCm 6.4.1.

In aligning with upstream GNOME 49 expected to ship with X11 support disabled by default, Canonical announced today that the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release will also ship without support for running the GNOME desktop on X11...

Going back to last year there have been patches worked on by SUSE for upstreaming Raspberry Pi's RP1 PCI device support. It looks like for the Linux 6.17 kernel later this year that work will finally be upstreamed...

An ongoing area of work for AMD's Linux client team is on enhancing the power management and overall power savings/efficiency support for Ryzen platforms on Linux. An updated patch series was posted on Monday for making the system S5 power state handling more ideal when powering off the system...

Last year there was some ideas raised around potentially making use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring functionality for graphics drivers to help with better performance and synchronization. It turns out Qualcomm engineers have recently been exploring IO_uring use for the DRM accelerator drivers with very promising results on their Cloud AI hardware in seeing around 50% speed-ups in ioctl execution time...

Following the release of Vulkan 1.4.317 back on Friday that brought the long-awaited VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 extension for VP9 codec support for Vulkan Video, the Mesa RADV driver is now the first prominent open-source Vulkan driver merging support for VP9 decode...