https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Archive-License-Pkg-Team https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Archive-License-Pkg-Team Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place... Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:08:08 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Apple-ProRes-Decode https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Apple-ProRes-Decode The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content... Sun, 26 Oct 2025 06:45:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/EXT4-BS-Greater-Than-PS https://www.phoronix.com/news/EXT4-BS-Greater-Than-PS Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size. Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes... Sun, 26 Oct 2025 06:31:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-Multi-Device-SVM-Code https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-Multi-Device-SVM-Code As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support... Sun, 26 Oct 2025 06:23:05 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Legion-Linux-Extreme https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Legion-Linux-Extreme Derek Clark who has been leading the efforts around Lenovo Legion gaming drivers for Linux and ensuring good support for the Lenovo Legion Go handheld on Linux sent out a new Linux patch series this weekend... Sun, 26 Oct 2025 06:11:10 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-Linux-6.19-First https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-Linux-6.19-First AMD on Friday sent in their first patch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes they are ready to begin queuing in the DRM-Next tree until the Linux 6.19 merge window kicks off in December and leading to a stable release around February... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 20:25:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Resources-1.9 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Resources-1.9 Resources is the open-source app aligned with GNOME/GTK for system resource monitoring. Resources has proven to be quite versatile with a nice UI and able to display CPU, GPU, NPU, disk, and other metrics. Out today is Resources 1.9 with the latest capabilities for this app... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 09:11:49 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Nova-Next-Gen-Boot42 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Nova-Next-Gen-Boot42 NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 06:29:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-September-2025-Highlights https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-September-2025-Highlights The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 06:13:54 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.6-winver https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.6-winver Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it's already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 06:05:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.0-Beta-3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.0-Beta-3 The newest weekly test release of the FreeBSD 15.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the planned December official release... Sat, 25 Oct 2025 05:45:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Coreutils-0.3-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Coreutils-0.3-Released The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:21:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenGL-October-2025-Extensions https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenGL-October-2025-Extensions It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:11:13 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sheaves-Replace-CPU-Slabs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sheaves-Replace-CPU-Slabs Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:49:41 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-618-rc3-Fix-Chromebook-PM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-618-rc3-Fix-Chromebook-PM Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:49:50 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/aws-m8a-m8g-m8i-benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/review/aws-m8a-m8g-m8i-benchmarks With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks. Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ISP4-Linux-Driver-v5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ISP4-Linux-Driver-v5 AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:02:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.330-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.330-Released Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 09:10:37 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-M3-m1n1-Update https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-M3-m1n1-Update The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:33:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/VCE-1.0-For-AMDGPU-Patches https://www.phoronix.com/news/VCE-1.0-For-AMDGPU-Patches Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:22:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Pantina-13.0-Rust-UEFI-Firmware https://www.phoronix.com/news/Pantina-13.0-Rust-UEFI-Firmware Patina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Patina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:10:59 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Kconfig-No-Longer-Orphaned https://www.phoronix.com/news/Kconfig-No-Longer-Orphaned Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on, no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed... Fri, 24 Oct 2025 05:55:38 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Nova-Lake-Mesa-Xe3P https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Nova-Lake-Mesa-Xe3P Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:36:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-43-Next-Week https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-43-Next-Week Fedora 43 complete with its rocket-themed default desktop background on Fedora Workstation 43 is cleared for lifting off next week... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:12:43 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Radeon-AI-PRO-R9700-1299 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Radeon-AI-PRO-R9700-1299 Back in May AMD announced the Radeon AI PRO R9700 with 128 AI accelerators, 32GB of GDDR6 video memory, and other advantages for this AI-focused RDNA4 based graphics card over the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7900. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 was supposed to be available in July while today AMD announced it will be going on sale next week... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:14:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.5-Overlay-Planes-KWin https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.5-Overlay-Planes-KWin KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl published a new blog post today outlining the KMS overlay planes support present within the newly-released Plasma 6.5 desktop. While not yet enabled by default, enabling the overlay planes functionality can result in some nice power savings such as during video playback... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:46:52 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/cache-aware-scheduling-amd-turin https://www.phoronix.com/review/cache-aware-scheduling-amd-turin The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today. Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Canonical-Academy https://www.phoronix.com/news/Canonical-Academy In addition to announced Snap-based silicon-optimized AI large language models, Canonical used the ongoing Ubuntu Summit 25.10 virtual event to announced Canonical Academy. Canonical Academy is their new effort for badges/certifications around Ubuntu Linux... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 12:22:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-Broken-Upgrade https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-Broken-Upgrade Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10's unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:44:19 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Snap-Optimized-LLMs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Snap-Optimized-LLMs Canonical's new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:09:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK-4.22-Native-SVG https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK-4.22-Native-SVG GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:23:41 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/ESWIN-EBC7702-Mini-DTX-RISC-V https://www.phoronix.com/news/ESWIN-EBC7702-Mini-DTX-RISC-V For those looking for a new RISC-V desktop option, ESWIN is launching a EBC7702 mini-DTX board powered by the EIC7702X dual-die SoC. The EBC7702 Mini-DTX is aiming for developers who want RISC-V under their desk for working on AI and other development tasks... Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:25:05 -0400 Michael Larabel