Last year a patch was raised for the Linux kernel that would report outdated CPU microcode versions as a security vulnerability. With Intel routinely issuing new CPU microcode updates for security vulnerabilities and addressing other functional issues, the Linux kernel would begin warning users when recognizing that outdated CPU microcode is deployed for a given processor. That patch has now been queued into a tip/tip.git branch and thus looking like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

With the recently released AMD ROCm 6.4 release for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware there are yet more indications around AMD's growing software ecosystem expansion. With ROCm 6.4 are additions to the HIP API for allowing linking of SPIR-V code objects, which is the intermediate representation used by Vulkan as well as with OpenCL and other Khronos APIs...

A 2021 era patch for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been revived and discussed in recent days around simplifying the memcpy and memset inlining strategies when compiling code with the "-mtune=generic" option. The patch takes the approach during that generic tuning to try to avoid branches. In doing so, some nice performance benefits are observed in some benchmarks...

Earlier this month was a look at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 using a Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 "Strix Point" SoC within a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. That was an interesting benchmark battle and providing a fresh look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack relative to Radeon Software on Windows. For those curious about the current Zen 5(C) performance, today's article are all of the CPU benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 performance under the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 and Windows 11 as pre-loaded by Lenovo.

Intel engineers have recently been working on the notion of cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for benefiting the likes of Intel and AMD processors sporting multiple caches. Posted today was the newest iteration of these patches that are still seeking to get more feedback and testing around this potential useful addition to the Linux kernel...

One year ago we covered Micron working on FamFS as a new file-system for fabric-attached memory with an emphasis on Compute Express Link (CXL) devices. That started off as a conventional kernel driver while now the newest patches posted this weekend are morphing it into a user-space driver via FUSE...

Merged last year in Linux 6.11 was getrandom() support in the vDSO for x86/x86_64 and then in Linux 6.12 was extended to LoongArch and ARM64. With the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle, this support for faster while still secure RNG for user-space is set to come to RISC-V...

After missing its bi-weekly development release regiment this past Friday, Wine 10.6 was tagged on Sunday as the newest routine update to this open-source software that enables Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other platforms...

Easter doesn't get in the way of Linus Torvalds' weekly kernel release regiment: Linux 6.15-rc3 is now available for testing the latest kernel fixes ahead of the stable Linux 6.15 kernel release coming around the end of May...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork...

Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library...

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...