Phoronix

Following last month's release of ROCm 6.3.1, ROCm 6.3.2 was just tagged today from its various open-source repositories and binaries beginning to come down the pipeline. ROCm 6.3.2 is another point release but brings a decent set of refinements for this AMD graphics compute stack...

Apple is the latest CPU vendor being affected by side-channel attacks. All Mac laptops since 2022, all Mac desktops since 2023, and all iPhones / iPad Pro / iPad Air / iPad Mini models since 2021 are affected by these new SLAP and FLOP attacks...

System76 this morning announced the 2025 version of their Meerkat mini Linux PC. This new mini PC designed for Linux pairs an Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoC with dual 2.5G Ethernet and booting using Coreboot for a intriguing combination whether it's for a lightweight Linux desktop PC or a small office/home server...

Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it's been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.

In addition to sending out the char/misc pull request that completed work on the NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman yesterday also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt pull request for Linux 6.14. The USB/Thunderbolt updates include new hardware support, Chrome OS improvements, and other changes...

The open-source WavPack lossless audio compression format is out with a new release today for this BSD-licensed software around this audio code container...

Following a call by Intel developers last month for making the SPIR-V back-end an official target within LLVM as a promotion to its existing "experimental" backend status, the change has now been made ahead of the upcoming LLVM 20 release...

Last week saw the new Bcachefs features and Btrfs changes land along with XFS real-time improvements for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel while overnight the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes were merged for that other exciting and actively-advancing open-source file-system...

The Z3fold allocator for compressed pages was quietly deprecated several months ago with users encouraged to use zsmalloc instead. With no one vocally objecting, the Z3fold allocator code is now being positioned for removal from the Linux kernel source tree...

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0, Hangover 10.0 is now available as this adaptation for running Windows games and applications on ARM64 Linux and other non-x86_64 CPU architectures...

The "char/misc" pull request was submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window and already merged to the Linux Git tree... As expected, the completed code around the NTSYNC driver has landed for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives as a big win to Wine / Steam Play (Proton) Windows gaming on Linux...

In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmarks delivered last week a number of readers asked about AI performance and in particular the Llama.cpp performance with the RTX 5090 flagship graphics card. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the GeForce RTX 5090 performance in Llama.cpp compared to prior RTX 40 and RTX 30 graphics cards.

Released last November following the AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 as their deep neural network library optimized for EPYC/Ryzen processors. ZenDNN 5.0 is their updated version of their neural network library that is compatible with the APIs from Intel oneDNN/DNNL and in turn can be used with the likes of PyTorch. It turns out ZenDNN 5.0 is capable of delivering a 400% performance uplift over their prior ZenDNN software release on the same hardware...

Hyprland 0.47 is out to begin a new week with some exciting enhancements to this visuals-focused Wayland compositor...

It's still not looking like triple buffering will land for GNOME 48 with the feature freeze set for next weekend. But that Mutter dynamic triple buffering support has been improved upon and now at least is working for direct scan-out situations as well as variable rate refresh (VRR)...

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. As usual the x86 platform driver updates are predominantly to benefit the many different Intel/AMD laptops out there with various OEM vendor features/functionality. Plus within the platform-drivers-x86 space is a growing number of AMD SoC drivers for not only laptops but also desktops/servers...

With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend...

In addition to all of the exciting "MM" changes for Linux 6.14 that were submitted by Andrew Morton's pull request, he also sent out the set of "non-MM" updates for the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. As happens with most kernel releases, there are a number of already-launched desktop motherboards beginning to see working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary...

While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security...

For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release...

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings...

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications...

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware...

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver...

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025...

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd...

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel...

All of the Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window...

The SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer is a modern web UI driven installer for the SUSE/openSUSE Linux distributions. It's modern, sports a cleaner UI and underlying architecture, and supports more features. The Agama 11 installer update was released this week in preparing for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta with this new installer as well as new openSUSE Leap 16 builds...

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. The EFI updates this cycle aren't the most exciting but the kernel has finally bid farewell to the long obsolete UGA graphics protocol support...

This week saw an updated KDE Plasma 6.3 beta release and more bug fixing taking place there while also beginning to see early feature work toward the follow-on Plasma 6.4 desktop...

Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version...

The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too...

Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API...

While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.

Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer...

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel...

While there are many exciting new features in the GNOME 48 Alpha as well as a new app with Decibels becoming the official audio player, there isn't a new official video player for this desktop release...

In addition to the Bcachefs features and new Btrfs code for Linux 6.14, the XFS file-system changes were merged on Thursday for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch...

It's not only AI start-ups running into space and power capacity bottlenecks but the Fedora Project has been pushing the limits of its main data center and is preparing for a move to a new data center to allow for more physical space and power capacity. In turn one item mentioned is allowing space for possible RISC-V build systems for Fedora...

The GNOME 48 Alpha release was issued this morning for helping to test this updated desktop environment debuting as stable in March...

Building off last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta, Oracle today published the Oracle Linux 10 Developer Preview for a first glimpse at this next RHEL10-derived operating system...

The Linux x86 32-bit PAE kernel support for Physical Address Extensions allows addressing more than 4GB of memory for those still running 32-bit processors or otherwise opting to still run a 32-bit OS. While the Linux x86 32-bit specific code rarely sees new improvements in the past number of years, a set of patches were posted today in looking to enhance the x86 32-bit PAE mode...

Earlier this month was the release of the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta while today a second beta was issued...

All of the power management feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel were sent out earlier this week and subsequently merged. As we've been seeing with recent Linux kernel releases, AMD continues investing a lot into their AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for better power efficiency on Ryzen processors and since the prior kernel also now being used with the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors too...