https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/Axboe-60p-Faster-Per-Core-Perf https://www.phoronix.com/news/Axboe-60p-Faster-Per-Core-Perf Following a presentation at last week's Linux storage, file-system, memory management and BPF summit (LSFMM) in Croatia where Linux I/O overhead compared to the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) was presented, Jens Axboe was motivated to pursue some new Linux kernel optimizations for greater per-core I/O performance. This lead IO_uring developer and Linux block maintainer has managed to achieve around a 60% increase to the per-core I/O performance with his latest patches... Sun, 10 May 2026 07:13:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Must-Ship-Reproducible https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Must-Ship-Reproducible With half-way through the Debian 14 "Forky" development cycle, the Debian release team is out with an update this weekend and some big news... Sun, 10 May 2026 06:40:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Prom21-xHCI-Temp-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Prom21-xHCI-Temp-Driver The newest open-source AMD Linux driver on the Linux kernel mailing list that has recently been undergoing review is prom21-xhci that exposes the temperature sensors found on the AMD Promontory 21 chipsets' xHCI controllers... Sun, 10 May 2026 06:28:59 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kconfirm https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kconfirm New tooling being worked on for possible mainline Linux kernel inclusion is Kconfirm as a new tool for detecting misusage and efforts stemming from Kconfig, the configuration system for kernel builds... Sat, 09 May 2026 20:29:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Azure-Linux-3.0.20260506 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Azure-Linux-3.0.20260506 Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects... Sat, 09 May 2026 14:56:47 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nocturne-1.0-GNOME-Music https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nocturne-1.0-GNOME-Music While since GNOME 48 Decibels is the new audio player of the GNOME desktop, there is no shortage of other GNOME/GTK-aligned music players. Last month was the big Amerbol music player update and there are Lollypop and others. The latest GNOME-aligned music player now hitting the 1.0 milestone is Nocturne... Sat, 09 May 2026 10:24:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hyprland-0.55-Wayland-Comp https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hyprland-0.55-Wayland-Comp Hyprland 0.55 is out today as a big feature update for this Wayland-based compositor... Sat, 09 May 2026 09:56:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-2605-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-2605-Released FEX 2605 is out this weekend as the newest monthly feature release to this emulator for running Linux x86_64 binaries on ARM64 (AArch64) devices. This is the open-source project sponsored by Valve and planned for use with the upcoming Steam Frame as well as being relevant to Linux gaming on other 64-bit ARM laptops and other devices... Sat, 09 May 2026 06:58:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Touch-24.04-1.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Touch-24.04-1.3 Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution... Sat, 09 May 2026 06:45:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver-0.0.17 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver-0.0.17 The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that's motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA's packaged Linux driver... Sat, 09 May 2026 06:19:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DMR-ACR-Linux-Enable https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DMR-ACR-Linux-Enable Merged as part of the perf subsystem fixes overnight is enabling Auto Counter Reload (ACR) functionality for upcoming Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. This ACR enabling for Diamond Rapids "DMR" is happening in time for Linux 7.1-rc3 on Sunday while the work is also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernels... Sat, 09 May 2026 06:12:45 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-HDR-ICC https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-HDR-ICC KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing additional Plasma 6.7 desktop features ahead of the stable release due out in mid-June... Fri, 08 May 2026 20:53:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.1-Beta-2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.1-Beta-2-Released FreeBSD 15.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in June. Out today is FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2... Fri, 08 May 2026 20:22:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-z6-g5-a-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-z6-g5-a-2026 In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I've been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to convenient LVFS/Fwupd support and delivers stellar performance with the Zen 5 Threadripper and NVIDIA Blackwell combination. Fri, 08 May 2026 10:35:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-CUDA-Oxide-0.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-CUDA-Oxide-0.1 A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs... Fri, 08 May 2026 10:17:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DM-INLINECRYPT-For-Linux-7.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/DM-INLINECRYPT-For-Linux-7.2 Queued for merging as part of the DeviceMapper changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is the new dm-inlinecrypt target for leveraging inline block device encryption... Fri, 08 May 2026 09:11:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Creator-20-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Creator-20-Beta The Qt Group released the Qt Creator 20 Beta today for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE). In building off the trends of recent releases of Qt Creator and development tools at large, AI integration continues to be a big area of focus... Fri, 08 May 2026 08:02:37 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZL-0.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZL-0.2-Released Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there's finally a new OpenZL software release available... Fri, 08 May 2026 06:26:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-Gmail-Integration https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-Gmail-Integration AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account... Fri, 08 May 2026 06:12:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Bartlett-Lake-7GHz-Linux https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Bartlett-Lake-7GHz-Linux With Intel's recently-launched Bartlett Lake P-core-only processors intended for the embedded market, there is a rather surprising oversight under Linux: the Intel P-State driver reporting a 7.0+ GHz clock speed. While many would yearn for a 7GHz CPU, the Core 9 273PE where this issue was discovered in reality can only boost up to 5.7GHz for its maximum turbo frequency... Fri, 08 May 2026 06:01:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dirty-Frag-Linux https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dirty-Frag-Linux One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this "Dirty Frag" vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated... Thu, 07 May 2026 20:08:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-K5-CPUs https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-K5-CPUs Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors... Thu, 07 May 2026 17:44:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Realtek-RTL8159-Linux-7.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Realtek-RTL8159-Linux-7.2 The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek's out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer... Thu, 07 May 2026 12:03:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RadeonSI-MM-Reorganized https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RadeonSI-MM-Reorganized Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver... Thu, 07 May 2026 11:21:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Flat-Image-Tree-1.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Flat-Image-Tree-1.0 The Flattened Image Tree "FIT" 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file... Thu, 07 May 2026 10:26:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-instinct-mi350p https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-instinct-mi350p While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series. Thu, 07 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Elan-Linux-Driver-Removal https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Elan-Linux-Driver-Removal Merged for the current Linux 7.1 cycle was beginning to phase out the Intel 486 processor support from the mainline kernel moving forward. That initial step with Linux 7.1 was dropping the various Kconfig options to allow compiling Linux kernel builds for targeting various i486 platforms. As part of that, the AMD Elan SoC configuration patches were dropped. The next step is proceeding on the AMD Elan side with beginning to remove the actual driver code... Thu, 07 May 2026 08:20:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-Faster-WL-SHM https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-Faster-WL-SHM KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland... Thu, 07 May 2026 06:29:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-WASM-WebAssembly https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-WASM-WebAssembly When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain... Thu, 07 May 2026 06:17:13 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-AI-SR-IOV-VF https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-AI-SR-IOV-VF AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units... Thu, 07 May 2026 06:06:17 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-April-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-April-2026 Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project... Wed, 06 May 2026 20:22:57 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/D7VK-1.9-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/D7VK-1.9-Released D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API... Wed, 06 May 2026 19:43:51 -0400 Michael Larabel