IBM Announces The z17 Mainframe Powered By Telum II Processors
Following IBM engineers doing a lot of open-source compiler work around a new “arch15” that we suspected to be IBM z17 with Telum II processors, this morning IBM officially announced their next-generation mainframe hardware… ⌘ Read more

New Documentation Aims To Help Improve AMD Zen System Debugging On Linux
In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Redox OS Makes USB 3.x Improvements, Async NVMe Driver Support
The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project has published its March 2025 status report that outlines exciting progress made over the past month… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Builders’ LocalScore: An Interesting Local AI LLM Benchmark
Via Mozilla’s Mozilla Builders initiative for fostering open-source AI projects is LocalScore, an interesting local AI large language model (LLM) benchmark for Windows and Linux systems. LocalScore has a lot of potential and also builds off the Mozilla Ocho Llamafile project as an easy-to-distribute LLM framework. LocalScore is still in its early stages but is already working well and will also be used in future hardware reviews on Phoronix… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 Boosting AMD EPYC 9005 Performance Even Higher: ~14% Faster Than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen “Turin” servers is even more exhilarating. As the fir … ⌘ Read more

DXVK 2.6.1 Released With More Bug Fixes & Performance Optimizations
DXVK 2.6.1 was just released as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) and other softwarefor enjoying older Windows games on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Five Year Old Ubuntu Bug For NVIDIA Suspend/Resume Experience: Now Working On X11, Wayland Not Yet
For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor… ⌘ Read more

Apple M1 / M2 / M3 Core Support Might Soon Be Merged For The GCC Compiler
When it comes to compiler support for Apple Silicon and their hardware at large, Apple has long been focused on the LLVM/Clang toolchain given their long history with it, employing many of the developers, and Xcode being based on LLVM. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though may soon see upstream support for the newer Apple Cores thanks to the work of GCC developer Iain Sandoe along with the input of engineers from Arm and the Apple o … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14.1 Released With An Initial Set Of Fixes & Hardware Quirks
For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading to a new feature release, Linux 6.14.1 was released this morning with an initial collection of fixes atop the Linux 6.14 codebase from two weeks ago… ⌘ Read more

Turbostat Utility Bumps 1024 CPU Core Limit To 8192 Cores After HPE Breaches It With 1152 Cores
On Sunday prior to releasing Linux 6.15-rc1, one of the last feature pulls was merging updates for the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree. The Turbostat tool provides CPU frequency and power statistics along with the ability to query temperatures and other CPU metrics on AMD and Intel processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15-rc1 Released With New Performance Optimizations, Updated Zstd & New Hardware
The Linux 6.15 merge window has been capped off with the Linux 6.15-rc1 test kernel having been just released… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Makes PhysX & Flow GPU Code Open-Source
As a win for the open-source community from NVIDIA, the company recently announced they are making their PhysX and Flow GPU-accelerated source code open-source… ⌘ Read more

Apple Z2 Touchscreen / Touch Bar Driver Lands In Linux 6.15
As we close out the Linux 6.15 merge window this weekend culminating with the Linux 6.15-rc1 release, the input driver updates were merged that include introducing the new Apple Z2 driver… ⌘ Read more

PostgreSQL Turns To AVX-512 For CRC32 Computations: Up To 3x Faster
In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations… ⌘ Read more

Large Atomic Write Preparations Land In Linux 6.15
One of the early pull requests for Linux 6.15 that I’ve been meaning to highlight are the VFS iomap updates sent in by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner. In particular, the VFS iomap pull brings preparations for large atomic writes and its upcoming usage by the XFS and EXT4 file-systems… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Performance Events Adds Support For AMD Zen 5 Load Latency Filtering
Merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.15 kernel were all of the performance events updates for which there are a few notable patches on the AMD and Intel side this cycle… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Kbuild Adds Support For LoongArch Debian & Faster gendwarfksyms
Among the pull requests coming in at the tail end of the Linux 6.15 merge window with 6.15-rc1 expected tonight are all of the Kbuild updates as the infrastructure for building out the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Crypto Subsystem Delivers Faster AES-CTR For AMD Zen 5 & Other x86_64 CPUs
The cryptography subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 merge window are quite exciting with some optimizations for modern x86_64 Intel/AMD processors enticing us the most… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V With Linux 6.15 Adds Support For BFloat16 “BF16” Instructions
Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release… ⌘ Read more

Debian APT 3.0 Stable Released With New Package Solver & Refined Text UI
APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years… ⌘ Read more

Resources 1.8 Released As A Great System Resource Monitor For GNOME
In addition to all the KDE Plasma activity this week, GNOME developers have also been quiet busy working on a variety of improvements to the open-source desktop on their side of the pond… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2504 Ships More Optimizations For Running x86_64 Linux Binaries On ARM64
FEX 2504 is out with its newest monthly feature update for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts. This alternative to QEMU and Box64 continues focusing on new performance optimizations to further enhance the appeal and speedy potential of this x86_64-on-ARM64 emulator… ⌘ Read more

LACT 0.7.3 Further Enhances This GPU Configuration & Monitoring Tool
LACT 0.7.3 is out this weekend as the newest feature update to this Linux GPU configuration and monitoring tool. LACT helps make up for the lack of any official GUI-based GPU configuration tool on Linux provided by AMD or Intel. It also works on NVIDIA GPUs too for providing a nice unified app for GPU configuration from all three major GPU vendors… ⌘ Read more

Intel Open Image Denoise Adds Support For AMD RDNA4 & NVIDIA Blackwell
Intel’s Open Image Denoise library that is part of their oneAPI Rendering Toolkit as a set of open-source, high performance denoising filters for ray-traced images is out with a new release. Open Image Denoise is used by applications like Blender and with this version 2.3.3 release is expanded GPU support… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma Lands More Crash Fixes This Week, Refines Its Crash Reporting Wizard
It’s been a busy start to April for KDE Plasma developers as they continue working toward the Plasma 6.4 feature release. There have been yet more crash fixes along with other polishing and stability enhancements to kick off the new month… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.5 Brings Vulkan H.264 Video Decoding, Mono 10.0 & Bluetooth Pairing
Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve’s Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.312 Brings Two New Extensions From NVIDIA & Qualcomm
Vulkan 1.4.312 is out today as the newest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual mundane clarifications and fixes, this update brings two new extensions from Qualcomm and NVIDIA… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 USB/Thunderbolt Changes Include The New PS883X Driver
Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Rust Is Looking For Your Feedback To Help Guide Its Future
With Rust turning ten years old this year, they are reflecting and working to draft plans for the next decade. They have started the Rust Vision Survey where they are looking for feedback from all Rust skill-sets as they look toward the future… ⌘ Read more

AMD RDNA 3.5 Graphics On 2025 Drivers: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 25.04 iGPU Performance
With having a new Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop in the lab, a lot of Linux benchmarks are forthcoming from this ThinkPad laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. This AMD Zen 5 SoC with Radeon 880M RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics had me curious how the Windows 11 vs. Linux iGPU performance is looking now more than a half-year after launch. Prior to blowing out the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation that shipped on the … ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA Continues Working On PyTorch Support, Eyes 32-bit PhysX Support
The ZLUDA open-source project for “CUDA on non-NVIDIA GPUs” continues being developed for enabling CUDA like GeekBench and AI workloads on AMD GPUs and other hardware vendors. The ZLUDA project hopes to have PyTorch up and running on it this year along with eyeing 32-bit PhysX support since NVIDIA has dropped support upstream for the 32-bit PhysX libraries with the recent RTX 50 Blackwell launch… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Engineer Fixes Early Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Affecting AMD GPU Drivers
Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code… ⌘ Read more

MSEAL Protection Of System Mappings Merged For Linux 6.15
In addition to all of the memory management “MM” changes merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel, a secondary round of MM updates was submitted and subsequently merged for this next kernel version. Interesting here is using the recent MSEAL system call for being able to now seal system mappings… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Being Worked On For The HP EliteBook Ultra G1q
Yet another Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptop seeing new DeviceTree patches for enabling Linux support is the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q… ⌘ Read more

Coreboot 25.03 Released With Support For 22 More Motherboards
For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s AOMP 21.0 Switches To New Fortran Compiler, Delivers More Performance
AMD software engineers today released AOMP 21.0-0 as the newest snapshot of their LLVM/Clang compiler downstream focused on providing the best OpenMP/OpenACC GPU offloading support to AMD GPUs and Instinct accelerators via the ROCm software stack… ⌘ Read more

OpenCL 3.0.18 Published With New Extensions & Other Updates
The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.18 specifications as the latest incremental update to OpenCL 3.0… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D Impact Of The 3D V-Cache Optimizer Linux Driver
Last month I posted benchmarks showing the performance when using the new 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver on Linux using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This optimizer driver allows tuning the “amd_x3d_mode” for indicating your prefereoce for the CCD with the higher frequency or larger cache size. For some additional insight into the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver performance impact on Linux, here are benchmarks looking at the difference while using the … ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates Linux Patches For Adaptive Sharpness Property, Xe VRAM Self Refresh
Two separate patch series updated this week for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack is the still-ongoing work around the DRM sharpness property for the new adaptive sharpening filter with Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics and then separately is the work to bring VRAM Self Refresh (VRSR) over to the modern Xe kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15’s New “hugetlb_alloc_threads” Option Can Help Speed-Up Boot Times
Among the changes that landed this week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the memory management “MM” updates, of which there are several notable patch series included… ⌘ Read more

Intel Patches Finally Exposing NPU Frequency Under Linux
For those looking into some insight around the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) utilization with modern Core Ultra systems, pending Linux patches will finally introduce the ability for user-space to obtain the current NPU frequency… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Brings Improvements For Five Decade Old GPIB Bus
Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn’t until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel’s staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Device Mapper Brings Inline Crypto Passthrough For DM-Stripe
All of the Device Mapper “DM” changes have been merged to mainline for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Rust 1.86 Released With Trait Upcasting, Deprecates i586-PC-Windows-MSVC
Rust 1.86 is now available today as the latest version of this popular programming language… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Removes Support For IBM’s CXL/CAPI Drivers
Not to be confused with the modern Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, but IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Interface “CXL” / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface “CAPI” support was stripped away today from the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Further Improves AMD P-State Driver, Intel Dev Tackles A ~50% SPEC Regression
Linux power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki last week sent out the assortment of ACPI/PM material for the new Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. The AMD P-State driver continues to be heavy with its code churn and there have been various other optimizations and code clean-ups. The CPUIdle Menu governor also received some performance tuning worth mentioning… ⌘ Read more

Framework Laptop 12 Pre-Orders Open Next Week
Back in late February when Framework announced a slew of new hardware products they will be launching next year, they also teased the Framework Laptop 12 as a new, smaller laptop while continuing to be modular/upgradeable. They announced today that Framework Laptop 12 pre-orders will begin next week… ⌘ Read more

GNOME & KDE Plasma Wayland Sessions Outperforming Xfce + LXQt On Ubuntu 25.04 For Linux Gaming
Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn’t even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to … ⌘ Read more

Many KVM Updates Merged For Linux 6.15
This morning’s Intel TDX update reminded me that I still hadn’t gotten around to digging into the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. Here is a look at the KVM changes this cycle that continue to be particularly heavy on Intel and AMD virtualization improvements… ⌘ Read more

Intel TDX Is Becoming Potentially Faster, Avoiding “Slow & Buggy” Code Path On Linux
Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for providing hardware-backed isolation and confidential computing support for virtual machines (VMs) on modern Xeon processors is about to become more reliable and potentially faster for some workloads… ⌘ Read more