Going back to last year an AMD engineer has been pursuing "Attack Vecotr Controls" to rethink CPU security mitigation handling. Attack Vector Controls aims to make it easier to manage CPU security mitigation settings by focusing on the class/scope of vulnerabilities rather than managing the mitigations at an individual level. It's looking like the initial attack vectors control code will be ready for mainlining in the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle but stopping short of the complete implementation...

For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I've been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. The performance implications of using full disk encryption have went down over time and in most real-world workloads you'll see minimal to any difference out of it. As it's been a while since running any reference benchmarks looking at no disk encryption to full disk encryption, here are some results on the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 paired with the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point".

The Debian developer community is pursuing a General Resolution for voting on their policy around AI models...

In the event of your AMD Ryzen or EPYC system being randomly reset or unexpectedly rebooted under Linux, the Linux kernel with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is gaining the ability to report the reason for that reset. This is making use of a technical capability found going back to the AMD Zen 1 processors that the Linux kernel is now tapping into for reporting the cause of any previous system reset...

This week's batch of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc5 test kernel due out on Sunday...

The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers...

OpenZFS 2.3.2 is out today with a number of bug fixes for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.3.2 also comes official support for the Linux 6.14 stable series...

Like clockwork with the start of the new month comes the updated Steam Survey results from Valve to reflect the latest Linux gaming hardware and software trends...

KDE Plasma open-source developers were meeting the past week in Graz, Austria to plot out fundamental changes and improvements moving forward for this great desktop. Among the changes decided on were ending their practice of Plasma LTS releases, enhancing the telemetry capabilities to be more useful, and more...

Last year Redis made the much criticized move to Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL) licensing. The move was widely panned by the open-source community and led to the Linux Foundation forking it as Valkey and also other forks like Redict coming about. In the months since many Linux distributions have switched from Redis to Valkey. Now Redis Labs announced today that with the Redis 8.0 release, they are adding AGPLv3 to the licensing mix...

Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now formally open for development...

With the recently released GCC 15 (GCC 15.1) compiler besides adding new language features, enhancements to help developers in debugging build failures, and other refinements, there is the never-ending quest of compiler performance optimizations. Since the recent GCC 15.1 release candidate I've been testing this annual compiler feature release on more hardware, including several AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" servers to great success compared to the prior GCC 14 stable series.

Mediatek engineers have proposed Kcompressd as a new addition to the Linux kernel to improve the efficiency of memory reclamation. Mediatek engineers testing these patches on their handheld Linux devices have found huge benefit in alleviating memory pressure and enhancing system responsiveness...

As a follow-up to the Phoronix article a few days ago entitled A Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Hits Modern AMD CPUs, there continues to be activity to address this issue with the performance impact catching the upstream kernel developers off guard. I've tested a patch now that does address the issue while still carrying the KVM protections desired...

LibreOffice supports Zip compression for ODT and DOCX files, among other compression uses. There's now work beginning to be merged for supporting Zstandard (Zstd) compression moving forward...

During the past month on Phoronix were 249 original news articles and another 23 featured Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting topics in April from the launch of the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Strix Point, an interesting and cheap RISC-V board coming about, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 proving to be an interesting low-power Linux laptop, Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing, and much more...

Sculpt OS 25.04 hasbeen released as the newest version of this general purpose OS built atop the Genode OS operating system framework...

For those that have spent any length of time in the open-source world have likely come across osuosl.org when downloading open-source projects that often are mirrored at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL). The OSU OSL over the past two decades has also provided VMs for various architectures from x86 and AArch64 to POWER for CI and testing purposes to open-source projects, among many other support roles. Unfortunately, the OSU OSL risks closure this year...

For fans of the DragonFlyBSD operating system, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 has been released after two and a half years to ship various bug fixes for this popular BSD...

Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a superb job managing the Mesa releases with today bringing the timely Mesa 25.1-rc3 release candidate as well as the new Mesa 25.0.5 stable point release...

Intel's AI Flame Graphs software is now open-source. This is a project that started for Intel's Tiber AI Cloud to provide more insight into AI accelerator/GPU usage and hardware profiling of the full software stack. After being an internal/customer-only software project for some months, AI Flame Graphs is now open-source...

Merged a few minutes ago to the Mesa 25.2-devel graphics driver code for the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is proper memory pool support. In turn this can deliver some magnificent performance improvements on the likes of Lunar Lake and other newer Intel graphics processors...

OpenSUSE announced the beta release today of openSUSE Leap 16.0, their next-generation Linux distribution from from SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 (SLE 16) and its new base of SUSE Linux Framework One that was previously known as the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP)...

LibreSSL 4.1 released today as the newest version of this SSL/TLS library project forked a decade ago by OpenBSD from OpenSSL...

Bytedance engineers are exploring faster inter-process communication (IPC) on Linux via a new approach they call Run Process As Library (RPAL). Their initial benchmarks of RPAL are very promising for faster Linux IPC performance...

Ben Skeggs formerly of Red Hat who had been the maintainer of the Nouveau Linux kernel driver for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver support had joined NVIDIA last year and continued his engagements with the open-source Linux community. For ending out April there's a big surprise... The NVIDIA engineer posted a set of 60 patches enabling support for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs atop the open-source Nouveau kernel driver...

Firefox 138 was released yesterday and wasn't particularly exciting besides enhanced profile management and Tab Groups support... Aside from that it was a pretty basic release. In turn Firefox 139 is now in beta and that release does bring some items worth mentioning like faster HTTP/3 upload performance...

AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 was released today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan driver since the previous release in mid-March. AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 brings new hardware support, new Vulkan API extensions, and other new features...

Pixman as the open-source pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server and Cairo graphics library is out today with Pixman 0.46 as the newest feature release...

Valve and CodeWeavers today announced the much anticipated beta release of Proton 10.0 as the newest version of their downstream version of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Introduced last month in the Vulkan 1.4.311 spec was VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for supporting BF16 types within SPIR-V shaders. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is that BFloat16 support for Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

It's almost majestic: HDR display support working on the Linux desktop. If you asked me at the start of the calendar year if I'd expect to see modern Linux distributions shipping with working HDR display support in H1'2025, I would have been doubtful. But after a lot of miraculous work that landed across numerous upstream repositories over the past two months or so, everything has come together just in time for the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42. There still are apps not supporting HDR and the like, but the core infrastructure is in place and working. The past two weeks I've begun testing out the Linux HDR desktop experience with the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM 27-inch 4K display. Between the ASUS PG27UCDM's QD-OLED display and HDR support enabled under Linux, it delivers a very beautiful Linux desktop experience.

Sent out today was a batch of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window. There are a few notable changes here as part of the Direct Rendering Manager updates for the core code and smaller kernel drivers...

In addition to the recent merge to Mutter for improving fullscreen apps with direct scanout enhancements for GNOME 49, another early addition also landed today in Mutter: support for Wayland's toplevel tag protocol...

For nostalgic open-source fans, React OS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications can now work with the 3dfx Voodoo 5 driver...

On top of the Intel Xe driver changes already queued in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window, an additional set of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were mailed out yesterday...

Another round of x86 platform driver updates was sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window. Besides some fixes, there is also new hardware support making it into this week's platform-drivers-x86 updates...

MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 was released today as the first test release of this updated Apple iOS / macOS / tvOS / visionOS layer that implements the Vulkan API atop the Apple Metal drivers. With MoltenVK 1.3 there is Vulkan API 1.3 support finally in tow...

Meson 1.8 was released this afternoon as the newest update to this popular, cross-platform and open-source build system / build automation tool...

Separate from last week in uncovering a big performance regression on Linux 6.15 affecting workloads like Nginx and that regression getting fixed, I unfortunately discovered another heavy-hitting regression on Linux 6.15. This latest performance regression has been bisected and a possible fix is being thought through by the relevant party, but for the moment has yet to be fixed upstream and affects modern AMD processors.