Due to Intel CPU microcode sizes continuing to get larger and late-loading new CPU microcode onto a running system can lead to (brief) disruptions/downtime while the update is applied, future Intel CPUs are introducing a microcode "staging" feature to reduce that microcode updating downtime. The Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year is set to support the Intel microcode staging feature with capable processors...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 25.10 we have seen some nice performance improvements on the likes of AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake compared to prior Ubuntu releases. But what about ARM? In this article is a look at the Ampere Altra performance between Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 using the popular System76 Thelio Astra workstation.

Improvements to the Linux kernel's AES-GCM Galois/Counter Mode crypto block cipher code will yield up to 74% faster performance for AMD Zen 3 processors with the Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year...

In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance, separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL...

With Fedora 43 releasing in the coming weeks, Fedora stakeholders are beginning to plot their feature ideas for next year's Fedora 44 release. One of the early F44 feature submissions pending approval is switching /boot on Fedora Cloud images to being a Btrfs file-system subvolume...

One of the early changes merged for the in-development Mesa 26.0 is adding support to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for supporting the low-latency hint supported by the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver...

Ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc2 release on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the week were sent out today. There is the usual assortment of different kernel graphics driver fixes, mostly with the Intel and AMD drivers as usual. In particular a few Intel driver fixes make this week's pull worth mentioning...

Valve's Linux graphics driver team contributions aren't limited to just enhancing the rasterization and ray-tracing graphics performance of the open-source Linux GPU drivers for gaming. Beyond other interesting contributions from that talented group of open-source Linux graphics developers over the years and for other areas like enhancing old GPU hardware support, merged this week for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is a massive improvement to benefit the Llama.cpp AI performance...

Fedora 43 had been planning for an early final target release date of 21 October. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen as a "No-Go" was declared at the Fedora Linux 43 release meeting...

Over the years we have seen various workarounds like disabling RDSEED for select AMD CPUs due to hardware bugs and early on in the Zen days were also some RdRand issues due to different problems. It turns out the newest AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors have a new RDSEED issue...

A Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report from 2015 now getting renewed interest... Linux software RAID via MD RAID, DRBD, LVM RAID, and similar software-based solutions can be broken from user-space around O_DIRECT usage. The issue is that these RAID arrays can be put silently into an inconsistent state across disks...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and GNU Binutils mailing list today is an intriguing message from a longtime x86/x86_64 expert around a "a corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" using some x86 opcodes not used by AMD or Intel processors...

With Linux 6.18 now past the merge window and many new features and changes introduced (https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-features), I have begun testing out this kernel on various servers, desktops, and laptops at Phoronix. Linux 6.18 is quite important with expected to become this year's LTS kernel version upon its stable debut in December. Up today is a first look at Linux 6.17 vs. 6.18-rc1 performance using Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids server performance.

AOMP 22.0-1 was released on Wednesday as the newest routine update to this downstream of LLVM/Clang/Flang maintained by AMD that continues to carry their latest modifications for enhancing the C/C++/Fortran compiler offloading support to AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware using the likes of OpenMP and OpenACC...

Merged today to LLVM Git for next spring's LLVM 22.0 release is support for the Intel Nova Lake ISA targeting with the "-march=novalake" option...

Just days ago Valve developer Autumn Ashton announced initial NVIDIA DLSS upscaling for the open-source Mesa NVK driver. One of those needed Vulkan extensions, VK_NVX_image_view_handle, is already merged to Mesa Git...

Posted to the Linux networking mailing list on Wednesday were the latest patches for enabling the Homa transport protocol. Homa is the clean-sheet design aiming to become an alternative to TCP within data centers and capable of offering 10~100x reductions in tail latency for short messages...

Announced nearly one year ago was the OpenWrt One as a router/AP that is "hacker-friendly" and open-source. The OpenWrt One is powered by a Filogic 820 SoC and features WiFi 6. This official OpenWrt device is manufactured by Banana Pi. While there is downstream open-source code available for customizing the OpenWrt One to your heart's content, the upstream Linux kernel support to date hasn't been full-featured...

SYCLBIN has been proposed by a longtime Intel compiler expert as a new way for storing SYCL device code for use as part of their GPU/XPU programming ambitions...

The latest Mesa Git code is now under version Mesa 26.0-devel with the Mesa 25.3 code being branched overnight for what will become this quarter's stable feature release...

Arm has been working on an open-source Linux kernel accelerator "accel" driver for their Ethos NPUs. That kernel driver continues being revised and under review for inclusion into a future mainline Linux kernel release. Already though a Gallium3D driver for Mesa has been merged for leveraging the Ethos NPU...

The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support...

Valve's open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve's stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old...

PyTorch 2.9 is out today ahead of the PyTorch Conference happening next week in San Francisco. Notable with PyTorch 2.9 is better AMD ROCm and Intel XPU installation support via expanded wheel variant support...