Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News (original) (raw)
GCC ASCII Art Visualizations, Timely Znver5 & Other Compiler Highlights Of 2024
26 December 05:26 PM EST - Programming - Open-Source Compilers
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.
KDE Enjoyed A Stellar 2024 With The Debut Of The Plasma 6 Desktop
26 December 12:30 PM EST - KDE - KDE 2024 Highlights
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.
The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS
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.
Intel Linux Performance Optimizations & Intel's Other Open-Source Wins From 2024
26 December 08:55 AM EST - Intel - Intel 2024 Highlights
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 PCs May See More Power Savings Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 6.14
26 December 06:55 AM EST - AMD - AMD P-State Change
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.
Reiser5 Would Be Turning Five Years Old But Remains Dead
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.
Pre-Content fanotify / fanotify Hierarchical Storage Management Expected For Linux 6.14
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.
Hash-Based Integrity Checking Proposed For Linux To Help With Reproducible Builds
26 December 06:00 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Reproducible Kernel Builds
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.
25 December
Linux RNDIS Removal Branch Updated For Disabling Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers
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 Highlights For 2024 From Run0 To Varlink To Advancing systemd-homed
25 December 09:46 AM EST - systemd - systemd 2024
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.
Intel Mesa Code Lands Big Patch Series For Treating Convergent Values As SIMD8
25 December 06:46 AM EST - Intel - Intel SIMD8 Compiler Bits
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 Programming Language Brings "it", Better Performance For YJIT
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.
New Intel Mesa Driver Patches Implement AV1 Decode For Vulkan Video
25 December 05:00 AM EST - Intel - Vulkan Video AV1 Decode
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.
CachyOS Had A Really Great Year Advancing This Performance-Optimized Arch Linux Platform
The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS.
24 December
Rust Drama, Russian Kernel Maintainers & Other Top Linux Kernel Happenings Of 2024
24 December 04:12 PM EST - Linux Kernel - 2024 Linux Kernel News
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.
SDL3 Adds Cross-Platform System Tray Support
24 December 01:56 PM EST - Linux Gaming - SDL System Tray Support
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.
BIOS Optimizations For AMD 5th Gen EPYC Yield Greater HPC Performance & Power Efficiency
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.
AMD GPU Driver Engineer Marek Olšák Lands Mesa 25.0 Optimizations For Christmas
24 December 09:30 AM EST - Mesa - Open-Source Goodness
Longtime open-source Radeon graphics driver developer Marek Olšák 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.
Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Production Support For Battlemage GPUs
24 December 08:40 AM EST - Intel - Intel Compute Runtime + Battlemage
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.
Uncached Buffered I/O Aims To Be Ready For Linux 6.14 With Big Gains
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.
libcamera 0.4 Released For Open-Source Camera Stack/Framework
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.
Linux 6.14 AMD PMF Driver To Handle Custom BIOS Inputs
24 December 06:14 AM EST - AMD - AMD PMF Custom BIOS
The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver is set to see some enhancements come the Linux 6.14 merge window.
FFmpeg Landing A Number Of Improvements For HDR
24 December 05:54 AM EST - Multimedia - FFmpeg HDR
The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library saw a number of commits land yesterday for enhancing the support around High Dynamic Range (HDR) content.
23 December
GIMP 3.0 RC1 Makes It Into Ubuntu 25.04
23 December 04:08 PM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 25.04 + GIMP 3.0
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.
ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 Arrives For Linux Testing
23 December 02:06 PM EST - Intel - ASRock B570
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.
Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade To The Raspberry Pi 400
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.
Linux 6.14 Looks To Land Rust PCI / Platform Device Driver Support
23 December 09:30 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.14 Rust Device Drivers
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.
Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux Distribution Goes Into Alpha
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.
Faster AES-GCM & AES-XTS Crypto For AMD CPUs With Linux 6.14
23 December 06:46 AM EST - AMD - AMD Zen Optimizations
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 Adding GNU Debugger "GDB" Support For Intel GPUs
23 December 06:25 AM EST - Intel - GDB / GNU Debugger
Intel engineers are working on contributing upstream support to the GNU Debugger (GDB) for debugging software running on Intel GPUs.
EVBUG Driver Being Dropped From Linux 6.14 - Useless For Years & Known Security Threat
23 December 06:19 AM EST - Hardware - evbug
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.
AMDVLK 2024.Q4.3 Brings Vulkan 1.4 Support, More Game Tuning
23 December 05:58 AM EST - Radeon - AMDVLK 2024.Q4.3
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.
22 December
Linux 6.13-rc4 Released For Kernel Testing Ahead Of The Holidays
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 Open-Source Video Editor Brings New Default Theme, Better Wayland Support
22 December 03:01 PM EST - Multimedia - OpenShot 3.3
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.
Linux Kernel Patches To Use AMD INVLPGB Instruction Show Huge Speed-Up
22 December 09:27 AM EST - AMD - AMD INVLPGB + Linux Kernel
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 To Use Both Family 18 And Family 19 Identification For Upcoming CPUs
22 December 07:14 AM EST - Intel - Intel Family 18 + Family 19
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.
LLVM 20 Merges An Initial Telemetry Framework
22 December 06:49 AM EST - LLVM - LLVM Telemetry Framework
Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework.
Linux Driver Posted For The EC Found On Most Snapdragon X1 Laptops
22 December 06:32 AM EST - Arm - X1E Embedded Controller
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.
SysVinit 3.12 Brings Fixes & Better Documentation For Christmas
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.