How NVIDIA Vera CPU Performance Compares To The Ampere Altra Max
Last month on Phoronix was an exclusive first look at the NVIDIA Vera CPU performance compared to prior-generation NVIDIA Grace as well as the current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition. Following that was looking at how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved over the past eight years of AArch64 Linux servers. A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested wanting to see how Vera compares to Ampere Altra. While Ampere Altra has been in the … ⌘ Read more

EXT4 Reworks Fast Commit Handling & Faster Directory Hash Computation
The EXT4 file-system improvements were merged today for Linux 7.2 with some enticing optimizations… ⌘ Read more

Rust PNG Image Decoder Now Even Faster: Benefiting Chrome, GNOME, Etc
The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it’s even faster… ⌘ Read more

Claude AI Assists In Fixing Years Old AMD Radeon Linux Display Bug Affecting Numerous Laptops
A bug in the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver leading to some laptop displays freezing after periods of use may finally be close to being resolved. Given the length and quantity of bug reports and one of the problematic commits being tracked back to 2017, it’s a heavy hitting issue for some Linux users. With the help of Claude Code, it looks like a fix is on the way to the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

AF_ALG Deprecation Approved For Linux 7.2, Useless & Insecure Crypto Driver Code Removed
The cryptographic subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Flavors Now Mandated To Participate In Beta Releases For Official Status
Canonical and the Ubuntu Release Team have implemented an important policy change for Ubuntu flavors moving forward. If they are to have an official release, they must now successfully submit a beta release… ⌘ Read more

Latest LLVM Patch Further Points To AMD GFX1250/GFX1251 Being Instinct Hardware
With the ongoing work around the AMD GFX1250 (and GFX1251) in the open-source AMD Linux driver stack, it’s led to a lot of speculation about these parts in the GFX12 series associated with RDNA4. RDNA4 refresh? Or a lot of signals have pointed to GFX125x being possible AI/HPC accelerators such as for the upcoming Instinct MI400 series. Adding to the intrigue is GFX1251 being an APU. The latest LLVM compiler activity is further pointi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 EDAC Drivers Prep For Diamond Rapids, Nova Lake H
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) drivers, such as for dealing with ECC memory error reporting, are heavy on the Intel side with Linux 7.2 in preparing for upcoming hardware… ⌘ Read more

SteamOS 3.8.10 Stable Released With Updated Arch, Steam Machine Support & Wayland Desktop Default
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… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Protects Against “Stupid Or Malicious” DoS Attempts By Arming Timers In The Past
There are a number of time® core subsystem changes for the Linux 7.2 kernel to better harden the kernel… ⌘ Read more

AI/LLM Patch Craziness Having An Impact On ARM64 Linux Kernel Development
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 L … ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Lemonade AI Server Now Much More Useful With MCP Server Integration
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… ⌘ Read more

Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Supports Modern DisplayLink
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

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. ⌘ Read more

Myna Announced As Speech-To-Text Solution For The Ubuntu Desktop
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support
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… ⌘ Read more

GCC 17 Lands Initial Infrastructure For 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… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Updates Its Graphics Driver Port From Linux 6.12 LTS
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… ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance
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… ⌘ Read more

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 … ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With 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… ⌘ Read more

Wayland’s Weston 16 Alpha Brings HDR Improvements, Vulkan Renderer Fixes
Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More
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… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental “LEO”
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things
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… ⌘ Read more

Wine Wayland Lands Fractional Scaling Support
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

XFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2
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… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Power Management Adds New Hardware Support While Dropping AMD Elan
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… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements
Today’s the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners
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… ⌘ Read more

Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations
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… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
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… ⌘ Read more

GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
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… ⌘ Read more

Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The 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… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI
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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

Framework Computer Making Progress On Coreboot For Their Modern Intel-Powered Laptops
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… ⌘ Read more

Cache Aware Scheduling Merged For Linux 7.2 For Boosting Modern Intel & AMD CPUs
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)… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more

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… ⌘ Read more