
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 19 min ago
OpenZFS 2.3.2 Released With Linux 6.14 Compatibility
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...
Valve Releases Steam Survey Results For April 2025
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...
Plasma LTS Releases Being Discontinued, Better KDE Telemetry Like Valve's Steam Survey
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...
Redis 8.0 Released: Now Tri-Licensed With AGPLv3
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" Opens For Development
Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now formally open for development...
GCC 15 Compiler Demonstrating Measurable Performance Gains For AMD EPYC Turin
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.
Kcompressd Proposed For Accelerated Memory Compression On Linux
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...
Patch Posted For Addressing The AMD CPU Performance Regression On Linux 6.15
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 Begins Landing Zstd Integration
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...
Framework 13 With Strix Point, Cheap RISC-V & Linux Kernel Happenings Topped April
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 Released With Support For Intel Meteor Lake
Sculpt OS 25.04 hasbeen released as the newest version of this general purpose OS built atop the Genode OS operating system framework...
OSU Open Source Lab At Risk Of Closure This Year Due To Lack Of Funding
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...
DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 Released With Many Bug Fixes
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...
Mesa 25.1-rc3 & Mesa 25.0.5 Deliver More Graphics Driver Fixes
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 Makes "AI Flame Graphs" Open-Source
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 profilining of the full software stack. After being an internal/customer-only software project for some months, AI Flame Graphs is now open-source...
Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Memory Pool Support For Some Massive Performance Gains
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 Leap 16 Available For Beta Testing - Built From SUSE Linux Enterprise 16
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 With Faster SHA-1/SHA-256/SHA-512 On Modern AMD & Intel CPUs
LibreSSL 4.1 released today as the newest version of this SSL/TLS library project forked a decade ago by OpenBSD from OpenSSL...
Bytedance Proposes Faster Linux Inter-Process Communication With "Run Process As Library"
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...
NVIDIA Posts 60 Patches For Open-Source Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support On Nouveau
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...