Phoronix

Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms...

Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix...

The KDE desktop progress made over the course of 2024 was particularly stand-out thanks to the Plasma 6.0 debut near the beginning of the year and then Plasma 6.1 and 6.2 further stabilizing and polishing this open-source desktop. It was a very fine year for the KDE desktop...

Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.

In addition to the exciting hardware launches this year particularly around Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake processors, and the new low-cost Battlemage graphics cards, what remains particularly exciting and consistent are all of Intel's great investments around open-source and Linux. Over 2024 there were many exciting performance optimizations, new Linux kernel features, GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain improvements, and countless other enhancements made throughout the open-source ecosystem by Intel engineers...

AMD Ryzen systems with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel may see increased power savings out-of-the-box due to an AMD P-State driver change queued up as part of the new power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel...

It was on New Year's Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn't been touched in quite a while...

Queued up by way of linux-fs.git's "for_next" Git branch is the fanotify HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) implementation via the pre-content fanotify patch series...

An interesting request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted on Christmas for introducing hash-based integrity checking to help with the reproducible builds initiative around the Linux kernel...

There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic...

Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more...

A patch series six months in the making and consisting of 24 patches by longtime Intel Linux graphics engineer Ian Romanick was merged on Christmas Eve for Mesa 25.0...

Ruby 3.4 is out today as yet another annual major feature release for this programming language known for its major updates on Christmas Day...

While there has been Vulkan Video support within Intel's open-source "ANV" driver since early 2023 and extended over time to handle H.265/HEVC decode, H.264 and H.265 encode, and more, the AV1 decode support has lagged behind until now...

The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS...

With 2024 drawing quickly toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux kernel news of the year ranging from exciting performance optimizations and new features such as QR code error messages over to kernel drama around Russian kernel developers, Bcachefs disturbances, and the contentious growing Rust programming language use within the kernel...

A new feature landing in the SDL3 software/hardware abstraction library today that is commonly used by cross-platform games is a native system tray implementation that works across operating systems...

Using the 5th Gen EPYC BIOS tuning guide published by AMD, I recently looked at the impact of AI and machine learning optimized performance by adjusting some simple BIOS knobs as well as the Java throughput, latency and power efficiency for the EPYC 9005 class processors. In this article is following the AMD BIOS tuning guide to see what performance difference there is for high performance computing (HPC) workloads following the BIOS tuning recommendations compared to the defaults with an AMD EPYC 9575F server.

Longtime open-source Radeon graphics driver developer Marek Olak that is well known for his Mesa improvements over the years and countless optimizations even before being employed by AMD has seen some exciting patches merged just in time for Christmas...

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.48.31907.7 just released a few minutes ago as a Christmas Eve treat for Intel Linux graphics compute users. This updated open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero driver stack now advertises production support for Battlemage (BMG / Xe2) discrete graphics along with other optimization and feature work...

Linux I/O expert and storage expert Jens Axboe of Meta is hoping to have the uncached buffered I/O support squared away for Linux 6.14 -- a feature that's been a half-decade in the making...

A new release of libcamera is now available for this open-source camera stack solution that is increasingly used now for getting newer web cameras working on Linux and similar. With the libcamera 0.4 release there is improved hardware support and other enhancements to this camera framework solution...

The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver is set to see some enhancements come the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library saw a number of commits land yesterday for enhancing the support around High Dynamic Range (HDR) content...

As a follow-up to the article about Ubuntu 25.04 preparing for GIMP 3.0 in its repositories, this past week finally brought the GIMP 3.0 release candidate into the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" repository...

The Intel Arc Graphics B570 graphics card isn't hitting retailers until January and the review embargo doesn't expire until then, but fair game now are pictures/video of the Arc B570 hardware... The ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 arrived today for Linux testing at Phoronix in the coming weeks for this second Battlemage graphics card...

Four years ago already the Raspberry Pi 400 was announced as a Raspberry Pi keyboard computer built around the Raspberry Pi 4, passively-cooled, and all packaged up nicely in a keyboard form factor. Announced earlier this month was the Raspberry Pi 500 as the successor and now built around the Raspberry Pi 5. For $90 USD this keyboard computer is a very versatile and convenient compact Linux PC.

The patch series in the works for a while to provide the necessary kernel abstractions for the Rust programming language to actually implement real device drivers looks like it will finally premiere in the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

It's been a few months since hearing anything new out of Serpent OS, the original Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty, who started Solus Linux and also was involved with Intel's Clear Linux. As a Christmas surprise, Serpent OS has now reached the alpha stage of development...

Eric Biggers of Google who has pursued countless CPU optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto subsystem over the years has some noteworthy optimizations coming for AMD processors with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

Intel engineers are working on contributing upstream support to the GNU Debugger (GDB) for debugging software running on Intel GPUs...

Linux 6.13 cleared out more than 100k lines of old and unmaintained code while that end of year code cleaning isn't stopping... With Linux 6.14 at least another old and seemingly useless driver is being gutted from the input subsystem: evbug...

AMD has squeezed in one more open-source Vulkan driver update for the year to benefit Linux gamers and others wanting to use this official AMD Vulkan Linux driver option...

This past week Intel published an Intel Core Ultra 200S Series "Arrow Lake" performance status update following mixed reviews since launch around the Arrow Lake gaming performance that were inconsistent with Intel's internal findings. Among Intel's findings detailed in their report this past week were some new BIOS performance optimizations, some misconfigured performance settings in early/reviewer BIOSes, and also some Windows 11 updates being pushed down to help with different performance issues. ASUS already started releasing new BIOSes that incorporate the 0x114 Arrow Lake intended to help the situation. While it's been a Windows-focused issue, I couldn't help but to run Intel Arrow Lake performance comparison benchmarks on Linux with the new microcode / BIOS.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.13-rc4 kernel as the newest weekly test release leading up to Linux 6.13 stable by mid to late January...

OpenShot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular open-source video editor. This Qt-based cross-platform non-linear video editor has a new default theme and many other enhancements in time for editing any of your year-end or holiday videos...

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits...

Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using both Family 18 and Family 19 identification for future processor models...

Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework...

For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there's a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that's found on most of the X1 laptop models...

For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system...

Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs...

In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application...

The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system...

The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers...

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code...

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update...

It's not only KDE seeing nice improvements ahead of the holidays but GNOME developers were also busy this week preparing new improvements to their open-source desktop stack. There's been some rather exciting changes on the GNOME front as we prepare to cap off the year...

While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes...

Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there's been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements...