Phoronix

The FreeType library for rendering text onto bitmaps that is widely used by a variety of applications has landed a set of three patches today providing an important performance improvement to address a significant inefficiency within the existing FreeType codebase...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a few new Linux kernel stable point releases today for Easter and also capping off the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle in the process...

The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel...

Just a few days ago there was talk of potentially removing the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the Linux kernel considering they had been orphaned for a decade and beginning to cause a maintenance burden. After briefly being marked for deprecation, it now looks like the drivers may be maintained with new maintainers alleging to step-up to the role...

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH" allows for offloading sensor polling and other tasks to a low-power co-processor to help reduce overall system power consumption for extending battery life with tablets, embedded devices, and 2-in1 laptops...

While the FFmpeg multimedia library merged Vulkan Video encode support last year, it was initially limited to H.264 and H.265 formats. With a new patch posted for review this week, AV1 encode support using the Vulkan Video API is now underway...

GNU/Hurd has long struggled with hardware support and is still working on its x86_64 support while having a host of various hardware limitations but it also appears they are eager to explore Hurd on RISC-V platforms...

Engineers from Google are proposing that distributed ThinLTO build support be introduced for LLVM/Clang when compiling the Linux kernel. The distributed ThinLTO mode for link-time optimizations can lead to quicker build times than the current in-process ThinLTO mode while also being more convenient and work with kernel live-patching solutions...

KDE developers continue to be very busy working toward the Plasma 6.4 desktop release and making other enhancements throughout this open-source desktop...

Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc3 kernel test release on Sunday were the set of "x86 fixes" for the week. Of these x86 fixes are two notable changes in particular...

In recent kernel releases there have been performance enhancements to the AES implementations and other cryptographic subsystem code for speeding up the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors. With Linux 6.16 there will be at least some additional small gains to find with Intel and AMD processors bearing AVX-512 when employing AES-XTS...

Earlier this week the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti launched and there were launch-day Linux CUDA/OpenCL compute benchmarks on Phoronix. But for the Linux gaming performance tests we were waiting on a new supported driver release, which happened to be on launch day with the NVIDIA 575.51.02 Linux beta. Now that the gaming-ready Linux driver is available for the GeForce RTX 5060 series, here are some initial benchmarks of the PNY GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB up against other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards using the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04.

Back in the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver added fan speed reporting support. Finally for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle that fan speed reporting will also be working with the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver used by default with Intel's latest integrated and discrete graphics processors...

Following the GCC 15 code branching after working its way down to zero "P1" regressions of the highest priority, GCC 15.1 Release Candidate 1 is out today for testing...

With Fedora 42 having released earlier this week, more feature development work and planning around Fedora 43 is heating up. Another one of the early change proposals now filed for Fedora 43 is changing the CMake build system's default generator from Make to Ninja...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with the Fwupd client makes it wonderfully easy to enjoy seamless system UEFI and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. LVFS is backed by a growing number of major OEMs/ODMs and serves up millions of firmware files. But they are in need of more financial resources from the biggest hardware vendors...

Following this week's updated Intel Graphics Compiler release, a new version of the Intel Compute Runtime was also published in providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero GPU compute support on Windows and Linux systems...

Patches for Linux posted on Thursday by Intel prepare for a new version of Speed Select Technology Turbo Frequency (SST-TF) handling for future processors with more cores...

While the Radeon RX 9070 series as the first of the AMD RDNA4 graphics cards do perform well on Linux, the one area the performance has been less enticing remains with Vulkan ray-tracing while using the Mesa RADV driver. For example, AMDVLK vs. RADV on the RX 9070 series shows the Mesa driver struggling with ray-tracing compared to the official AMD driver. But the good news is there's a concerted effort now to improve the AMD RDNA4 ray-tracing performance with RADV...

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel last year was the alienware-wmi-wmax driver for enabling thermal control support on various Alienware and Dell G-Series systems. Being merged today as a "fix" for Linux 6.15 is extending that thermal control support to a number of additional Dell/Alienware systems...

Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I've spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it's been terrific. Framework 13's modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics. If you are on a fresh Linux distribution the support is in great shape and paired with great performance for delivering a great 2025 Linux laptop option.

Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images are now available for download along with the various flavors of this newest six-month, non-LTS Linux distribution update...

Arch Linux is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) code was branched today to the releases/gcc-15 branch and GCC 16.0.0 is now the version on the main development branch...

In addition to this week's updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel's software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors...

LXQt 2.2 was christened today as the newest stable update to this lightweight, open-source Qt desktop environment...

Released on Wednesday was IGC 2.10.8 as the newest update to the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their Compute Runtime OpenCL/Level-Zero stack on Windows and Linux as well as being used as their graphics shader compiler under their Windows driver...

Following the recent Plasma 6.3 desktop release, KDE Gear 25.04 is now available for shipping all of the latest and greatest KDE applications...

While Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" SoCs with on-package memory has been reported to be a one-off design, besides the integrated memory it was also notable for being a hybrid core design while lacking Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support. The notion of hybrid P/E core CPUs without SMT looks like it will continue with Intel software engineers still exploring Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) around such layouts...

Released at the end of 2023 was TurnkeyML as an open-source collaboration between ONNX and AMD developers. TurnkeyML has evolved into focusing on making it easy to use the most important tools within the ONNX ecosystem and their Lemonade SDK to deploy large language models on various devices/accelerators Out today is TurnkeyML 6.2 with a focus on delivering better AMD Ryzen AI NPU support...

While Fedora 42 was just released yesterday, already Red Hat developers and the Fedora development community have been busy thinking about Fedora 43 that will debut this autumn. Among the early change proposals this week is one for better supporting Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with this next Fedora Linux release...

Now that Mesa 25.1 is branched for this quarter's Mesa 3D feature release, Mesa 25.2 has entered development on the main Git branch. One of the first merged changes for Mesa 25.2 is removing the old OpenCL Gallium3D "Clover" driver...

Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names...

Eric Engestrom is once again stepping up to manage the next quarterly Mesa driver feature release and thus today we have the on-time branching of Mesa 25.1 from Mesa Git and already the release of Mesa 25.1-rc1. This release brings many improvements to the collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers that should be ready for their stable debut in May...

With today's launch of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA has also introduced their first Linux driver beta in the R575 driver series...

Yesterday NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 5060 "Blackwell" graphics cards as their new, most affordable offering of the RTX 50 series. While the $299 GeForce RTX 5060 isn't shipping until next month, today the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB goes on sale for $379 USD and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is also hitting Internet retailers today and starting out at $429 USD. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB the past several days under Linux and have initial GPU compute benchmarks to share today.

Following yesterday's official Fedora 42 release, Fedora 42 for RISC-V is now available. The delay in the Fedora 42 RISC-V builds is due to RISC-V not yet being a primary architecture and the RISC-V builds being unofficial and produced by the Fedora community...

Merged last month to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was an initial Vulkan-based decoder for FFV1 for the FF Video 1 lossless video coding format. Should you be interested in using this FFV1 decoder on AMD GPUs, there's a reported 3x performance improvement with the newest code...

Additional improvements for AMD GFX12 as the graphics engine IP of RDNA4 graphics with the Radeon RX 9000 series have been merged ahead of this quarter's Mesa 25.1 feature release...

Over the past two years Qt has been working to embrace generative AI for enhanced coding capabilities within Qt Creator for Qt/QML/C++ applications. It started with GitHub Copilot integration and has been continuing well beyond that and today marks the debut of the Qt AI Assistant v0.9...

The GNOME Help Browser "Yelp" for viewing HTML / man page / DocBook and other documentation formats from the GNOME desktop is subject to a yet-to-be-patched-upstream security vulnerability that is now public and can allow for arbitrary file reads and could be funneled through your web browser...

The GCC 15.1 compiler release is expected in the coming weeks as the first stable version of GCC 15 as this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. As we approach the finish line, some last minute changes were merged for the AMD Zen 5 "znver5" CPU target...

Adding to the busy week of Linux distribution releases from Ubuntu 25.04 to Manjaro 25.04 and Fedora 42, TrueNAS 25.04 debuted today as a major step forward for this open enterprise storage platform...

Following the recent benchmarking of Ubuntu Server 25.04 in its near final state compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases, I turned my attention to Fedora Server 42. On the same AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Fedora Server 42 compared to the prior Fedora Server 41 and other Linux distribution releases for seeing how Fedora 42 is competing with other Linux distributions on this 5th Gen AMD EPYC dual socket server.

With the newest Mesa 25.1-devel Git code merged today the Panfrost Gallium3D and PanVK Vulkan drivers for Arm Mali open-source graphics are supporting Mali 5th Gen gen 1 (v12) and gen 2 (v13) devices...

Fedora 42 is out today as a fabulous update to this prominent leading-edge Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. I've been running Fedora 42 on several systems already -- including upgrading my main production system to it -- and it's been working out very well. Fedora 42 is packed full of new features and software updates making it a great H1'2025 Linux operating system release...

There's the possibility raised that the mainline Linux kernel might remove its file-system kernel drivers for Apple HFS and HFS+ this year...

The Intel Video Processing Library GPU Runtime "VPL-GPU-RT" as the run-time component to the Intel VPL API for video processing with a variety of video encoders/decoders and filters is preparing to end mainline support for Intel graphics prior to Tiger Lake...

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle...

In addition to yesterday's alpha release of the semi-immutable Majaro Summit distribution, Manjaro Linux has now resolved Manjaro 25.0 as the newest version of this (non-immutable) Arch Linux based desktop operating system...