Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News (original) (raw)
SteamOS 3.8.10 Stable Released With Updated Arch, Steam Machine Support & Wayland Desktop Default
12 Minutes Ago - Valve - SteamOS 3.8 Stable
Overnight Valve released SteamOS 3.8.10 into the stable channel. for succeeding SteamOS 3.7. There's a lot happening across the board to their in-house Linux platform for the likes of the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine hardware.
Linux 7.2 Protects Against "Stupid Or Malicious" DoS Attempts By Arming Timers In The Past
There are a number of time(r) core subsystem changes for the Linux 7.2 kernel to better harden the kernel.
17 June
AI/LLM Patch Craziness Having An Impact On ARM64 Linux Kernel Development
10 Hours Ago - Arm - AArch64 Linux
The ongoing rise in AI/LLM-generated patches hitting the mailing lists and affecting development workflows continues to impact Linux kernel development. For the ARM64 architecture updates in Linux 7.2 is an interesting anecdote over over feeling like this activity has "slowed us down a little on the feature side" and having to deal with this AI/LLM patch activity resulted in some features now being postponed from making it for this current Linux kernel development cycle.
Bcachefs Tools 1.38.6 Brings Many Performance Improvements
Kent Overstreet announced the release today of Bcachefs-Tools 1.38.6 as the user-space tools built around the Bcachefs copy-on-write file-system. There are a few new features and a lot of performance work in v1.38.6 without bringing any on-disk format breakage.
Linux 7.2 Slab Changes Include More Performance Optimizations
The slab memory allocation changes for Linux 7.2 have been merged and continue to see more work around shaves and performance optimizations.
AMD's Lemonade AI Server Now Much More Useful With MCP Server Integration
17 June 03:43 PM EDT - AMD - Lemonade 10.8
The open-source Lemonade AI server for "100% free and private" AI usage across Windows and Linux in leveraging AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, Radeon GPUs, and x86_64 CPUs, is now much more powerful with today's v10.8 release.
Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Targets Modern DisplayLink Hardware
17 June 12:23 PM EDT - Hardware - Vino DRM Driver
The original DisplayLink USB display adapters were great for working with an upstream, open-source driver while sadly the newer DisplayLink tech has been limited to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space daemon. But posted today is an experimental "Vino" driver that is a clean-room, reverse-engineered driver for newer DisplayLink hardware.
Epic Games Announces Lore Open-Source Version Control System
Epic Games announced today they have created a new version control system that is now open-source as Lore. Given the proliferation and excellence of Git, you may be wondering why Epic Games is pursuing another VCS option... They are specifically catering Lore to games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes.
Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake Performance On Linux 7.1
After recently noting the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage performance improving with Linux 7.1 and similarly finding performance gains for the Arc Pro B70 on Linux 7.1, several Phoronix readers have been wondering whether the newer Xe3 graphics with Panther Lake similarly benefit. Here are some CPU and iGPU benchmarks of the Core Ultra X7 358H "Panther Lake" SoC between Linux 7.0 and the recently stabilized Linux 7.1 kernel.
Myna Announced As Speech-To-Text Solution For The Ubuntu Desktop
17 June 09:34 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Myna
Earlier this month plans were shared publicly of Ubuntu 26.10 aiming to build a context-aware desktop with local AI features and one of the first capabilities to be integrated speech-to-text support. Now we have more details on the speech-to-text plans with Canonical announcing the Myna project.
Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL Support Successfully Merged For Linux 7.2
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display and accelerator driver changes have been merged for Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 DRM merge is headlined by the long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support for the AMDGPU open-source driver as part of the larger effort of finally proceeding with a full HDMI 2.1 implementation for this AMD Radeon Linux driver.
Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support
17 June 06:31 AM EDT - Qt - Qt Creator + AI Agents
The Qt Creator integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ programming is out today with Qt Creator 20 and this new version is headlined by adding AI agent support.
GCC 17 Lands Initial Infrastructure For C++29
17 June 06:23 AM EDT - GNU - -std=c++29
Merged yesterday to the GCC Git development codebase for next year's GCC 17 release is the initial infrastructure laying out support for -std=c++29 and the like for targeting the C++29 standard not anticipated for release until around 2029.
FreeBSD Updates Its Graphics Driver Port From Linux 6.12 LTS
17 June 06:04 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD drm-kmod Port
As part of improving the experience of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have updated their drm-kmod port against the state of the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel.
Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support
17 June 05:40 AM EDT - Apple - AppleTalk + Linux
While the AppleTalk networking protocols were innovative when they first appeared for their plug-and-play capabilities, Apple itself ended their AppleTalk support back in 2009. Now 17 years later, the Linux kernel is ending AppleTalk support due to a recent surge of AI-generated patches.
IO_uring, NVMe & Other Block + Device Mapper Changes Merged For Linux 7.2
Linux 7.2 continues seeing a fair amount of storage-related changes from file-systems to the block device code itself, software RAID, the wonderful IO_uring interface, and more. Here is some of the latest feature work that has been merged for Linux 7.2.
16 June
Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance
16 June 08:46 PM EDT - Mozilla - Firefox + zlib-rs
Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs.
Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel
There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such as FTRFS and VMUFAT being some of the most recent and then even having multiple NTFS drivers for Linux, there is now documentation in place to formally lay out criteria for new file-systems to be accepted.
KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware
It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution.
Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2
16 June 04:20 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Btrfs Changes For Linux 7.2
The Btrfs file-system feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with a few noteworthy changes for this copy-on-write file-system.
Wayland's Weston 16 Alpha Brings HDR Improvements, Vulkan Renderer Fixes
16 June 01:52 PM EDT - Wayland - Weston 16 Alpha
Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.
Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More
16 June 01:05 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - Faster anon_pipe_write
Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.
Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental "LEO"
16 June 11:41 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Nova Lake
Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.
Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency
A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.
Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system.
Wine Wayland Lands Fractional Scaling Support
16 June 09:22 AM EDT - WINE - Wine Wayland + Fractional Scaling
Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver.
Linux 7.2 Continues Removing Old i486 Code Remnants, Adds Rugged Panther Lake
The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.
XFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2
16 June 06:38 AM EDT - Linux Storage - XFS + Zoned Storage Devices
The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag.
Linux 7.2 Power Management Adds New Hardware Support While Dropping AMD Elan
16 June 06:18 AM EDT - Hardware - Linux 7.2 Power Management
The power management changes merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel are aplenty as usual. New hardware support, dropping obsolete hardware support, and various bug fixes and other enhancements throughout this important area of the kernel.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements
16 June 05:48 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7
Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.
Linux 7.2 Drops Driver For The 40+ Year Old Hercules Monochrome ISA Graphics Card
16 June 05:45 AM EDT - Hardware - Hercules Monochrome ISA
After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers, there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play.
15 June
Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code
In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage.
FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements
15 June 08:56 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 15.1
After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system.
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners
15 June 05:22 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0
The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July.
Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations
15 June 04:15 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Performance Skills
The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux.
FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
15 June 03:08 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD + AI
The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI.
GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
15 June 02:51 PM EDT - GNU - GCC + WebAssembly
Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC.
Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR
15 June 12:43 PM EDT - Arch Linux - Arch Linux AUR
After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware, the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages.
Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI
15 June 11:15 AM EDT - Mozilla - Firefox 152
The Firefox 152.0 release binaries are now available ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling. With Firefox 152 there is now the JPEG-XL support code being compiled by default for the release albeit still disabled at run-time by default behind a preference for now.
Reading /proc/filesystems Is Surprisingly Done Very Often & Now As Much As 444% Faster
Reading /proc/filesystems for obtaining a list of file-systems supported by the running kernel is done frequently on Linux. Namely due to being read by the SELinux library (libselinux), reading of /proc/filesystems is done more often than one would typically expect and now the Linux 7.2 kernel is optimizing for it to yield much better performance.
Framework Computer Making Progress On Coreboot For Their Modern Intel-Powered Laptops
15 June 09:05 AM EDT - Coreboot - Framework Computer + Coreboot
While we have seen Coreboot work-in-progress support for older Ryzen-powered Framework Laptops, it seems there is a recent uptick in development around supporting Coreboot on Framework Computer's modern Intel-powered wares.
Cache Aware Scheduling Merged For Linux 7.2 For Boosting Modern Intel & AMD CPUs
15 June 08:31 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - Cache Aware Scheduling
The scheduler updates were merged this morning for the Linux 7.2 kernel and it's exciting. Cache Aware Scheduling has finally been merged! This is a win for especially modern Intel and AMD processors with multiple last level caches (LLCs).
Linux 7.2 Introducing The Rust Zerocopy Library To Eliminate More "Unsafe" Code
Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel.
Linux 7.2 To Better Communicate File-System Casefolding For Helping Windows NFS & More
Newly-merged code for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel will now expose the case-folding (case insensitive) behavior of local file-systems so that Linux file servers and others can properly report the actual behavior rather than guessing if case-folding is actually used/supported.
GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal
15 June 05:55 AM EDT - GNU - GNU Linux-libre 7.1
Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom.
14 June
Linux 7.2 To Raise LLVM/Clang Compiler Requirement, Add Support For Distributed ThinLTO
Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today's Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates.
Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics
Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it's coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.
Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack
14 June 06:32 AM EDT - Arch Linux - Arch Linux AUR Malware
Just a day after Arch Linux developers believed they got their malware AUR incident under control with 1,500+ packages affected by malware, another round of of AUR malware is now being discovered. This latest round is more sophisticated as with code obfuscation to better conceal the intent.
Revised AVX-512 xor_gen() Implementation For Linux RAID Yielding More Performance Gains
A few days back I wrote about Google's Eric Biggers spearheading an AVX-512 implementation of xor_gen() as the Linux kernel function used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5/RAID6. That initial implementation was yielding up to 41% better performance while a new implementation has now been posted for scoring some additional victories.
pkgcli As PackageKit's Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface
Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.
13 June
Wine-Staging 11.11 Released With 289 Patches Atop Upstream
13 June 08:52 PM EDT - WINE - Wine-Staging 11.11
Following Friday's exciting release of Wine 11.11 with Wayland driver improvements, Wine-Staging 11.11 is now available for this experimental/testing derivative that continues carrying nearly 300 patches atop the upstream codebase.
Intel Ending Development Of BigDL: An Open-Source AI/LLM Effort Getting Axed
13 June 10:38 AM EDT - Intel - Intel BigDL
Among Intel's ongoing reduction in open-source projects they maintain, their BigDL open-source project focused on running large language models across Intel XPUs from Core Ultra laptops to discrete GPUs to cloud / data center hardware all in a low-latency manner, is being ended.
Fedora 45 Considering A Lightened GRUB Bootloader For Confidential Compute
13 June 08:22 AM EDT - Fedora - GRUB Light
Among the changes being considered for the in-development Fedora 45 is a lightened version of the GRUB UEFI bootloader that would focus on being a minimal implementation suitable for confidential computing.
Intel Thermald 2.5.12 Released... With Initial Support For ARM
13 June 06:47 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Thermald Comes To ARM
Released on Friday was the newest version of Intel Thermald, the thermal daemon developed by Intel for their processors on Linux for monitoring and helping control temperatures across modern Intel-powered laptops and desktops. Catching me immediately by surprise was Intel Thermald 2.5.12 introducing support for ARM.
GCC 17 Merges Function Multi-Versioning For APX & AVX10.2
13 June 06:20 AM EDT - GNU - Optimize That Code
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel working on function multi-versioning support for APX and AVX10.2 with the GCC compiler. This allows developers to write optimized code paths specifically targeting Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) or Advanced Vector Extensions 10.2 capabilities of future processors while being able to otherwise fall-back to generic or other optimized code paths for other ISA target features. This work is now merged for GCC 17.
Haiku OS Now Enables AVX-512 Support, Other Hardware Improvements
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Sees Last Minute Fixes Ahead Of Next Week's Release
13 June 05:46 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Next Week
Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.