Phoronix

Just shy of 1,000 new patches were merged on the SoC side for the Linux 7.2 kernel. Among all those patches are enabling five more SoCs to work with the mainline Linux kernel -- including the long-awaited Apple M3 support...

Just days after AMD engineers released a new Lemonade AI server with MCP server integration to make it much more useful, they have now released a new release of their GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" open-source software. With AMD GAIA 0.21.2, they have introduced a bash coding agent is their latest big ticket item in the AI space...

For those interested in Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with modern Intel Xeon processors for confidential computing but also view system uptime as critical, beginning in Linux 7.2 the TDX support is now much more practical with allowing live updates without the need to reboot the running system in the event of security updates and similar...

For those that enjoy keeping an eye on all their system vitals from temperatures to voltages, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" updates have seen many device additions for Linux 7.2...

The media subsystem changes were merged tonight for the Linux 7.2 merge window and it includes the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver now in the mainline kernel.. This ISP4 driver is what completes the loop for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops...

The Linux kernel has dropped the last of its architecture-specific optimized MD5 hashing algorithm implementations...

Godot 4.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

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 marketplace now for more than five years, they are some of the most readily available ARM Linux server options for DIY/enthusiast builds given the scarcity of AmpereOne and lack of other readily available socketed ARM CPU options. This article shows how the performance compares between Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA Vera.

The EXT4 file-system improvements were merged today for Linux 7.2 with some enticing optimizations...

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...

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...

The cryptographic subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window...

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...

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 pointing to GFX1250/GFX1251 being for enterprise hardware...

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...

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...

There are a number of time(r) core subsystem changes for the Linux 7.2 kernel to better harden the kernel...

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 Linux kernel development cycle...

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...

The slab memory allocation changes for Linux 7.2 have been merged and continue to see more work around shaves and performance optimizations...