Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 49 min ago
JPEG-XL libjxl 0.12 Brings More Performance Optimizations
A new release of libjxl is now available for this reference implementation of the JPEG-XL image format, including both image encode and decode support...
Box3D Debuts As New Open-Source 3D Physics Engine
Erin Catto who has been developing the Box2D 2D physics engine for games announced the release of Box3D. Box3D is now providing a new open-source 3D physics engine that is forked off from the Box2D code...
Fedora Council Seeks To Shutdown Current Discussions Over AI Developer Desktop
Stemming from the widely varying views over the recent Fedora proposal for an "AI Developer Desktop" catering to running local AI and machine learning workloads in pre-configured environments with a seamless hardware-accelerated experience, the Fedora Council issued a statement this evening to effectively shutdown discussions for now over a Fedora AI Developer Desktop and to pause the Fedora Community Initiatives process...
Steam On Linux Usage Receded A Bit In June
Back in March Steam on Linux use shot up to 5.33% as a big 3.1% improvement over February. In April it dropped to 4.52% and then fell to 3.99% in May. Valve just published the Steam Survey numbers for June and it points to another minor setback from the recent all-time high of Steam on Linux...
KDE Linux Introduces "Developer Mode" Option, Easier Log Collection
With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux...
System76 Launches New Lemur Pro Laptop Powered By Intel Panther Lake
System76 today announced their new Lemur Pro high-end Linux laptop that is now powered by the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs...
Linux 7.3 To Overcome "Significant Bottleneck" For Small I/O With PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs
While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs...
AMD Sends Out Latest Linux Patches For RMPOPT Optimization
Earlier this year AMD disclosed the RMPOPT instruction that given the timing will seemingly be introduced with upcoming Zen 6 EPYC "Venice" processors. The RMPOPT feature amounts to a performance optimization for AMD EPYC SEV-SNP enabled servers by cutting down on the associated Reverse Map Table (RMP) overhead. Linux enablement of AMD RMPOPT remains ongoing and out this week is the latest iteration of the enablement...
Glibc Introduces /etc/tunables.conf For System-Wide Tunables
Red Hat has contributed new system-wide tunables infrastructure to the GNU C Library "glibc" that allows specifying system-wide tunables via the new /etc/tunables.conf configuration file...
RADV & RadeonSI Drivers See New Fixes For AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues taking special focus on AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era GPUs for enhancing the open-source graphics driver support for these aging graphics cards...
GCC 16.2 Being Planned For Early August Release
For those that prefer waiting until the first bug-fix/point release before upgrading to a major new feature series, GCC 16.2 is being planned for an early August release for delivering back-ported bug fixes to the GCC 16 compiler...
Asahi Linux Fixes Booting With macOS 27, Progress On M3 & Apple Video Decode
The Asahi Linux project published a new blog post outlining recent development efforts in getting Apple Silicon hardware working with their downstream Linux distribution. There is ongoing work on bringing up Apple M3 support, fixing boot support for macOS 27 beta systems, Apple Video Decoder (AVD) support progress, and more...
Arch Linux AUR Malware, Linux 7.2 Developments & Other June Highlights
Last month on Phoronix there were 294 original news articles and 18 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Beyond Phoronix.com turning 22 years old in June, there were also a lot of exciting Linux hardware and open-source software developments worth recapping...
ASUS ROG Strix Laptop Sees Driver Fix For Linux Performance Too Low Compared To Windows
With modern laptops, proper platform/WMI drivers are becoming more depended upon not only for supporting all typical functionality from keyboards to backlights and other handling, but also for achieving proper performance. For many laptop vendors, the Linux platform drivers are maintained by the open-source community and actual customers. The latest example of the challenges of the community-maintained support rather than from the vendor is with the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop seeing inappropriate power values set in the open-source driver that were incorrect and led to lower power/performance than Windows...
NVIDIA Working On New "TLV" Firmware Binary Format For Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers have been developing a new binary format for their GPU firmware images for use with the in-development, open-source Nova kernel driver. With this new TLV binary firmware format it aims to be easier to parse by their Rust-based driver code...
Performance Optimizations, NVIDIA Vera, Arc Pro B70 & Other Linux Highlights From Q2
As the last planned article on Phoronix of Q2, here is a look back at what excited readers the most in the second quarter. There were 872 original news articles this quarter as well as 54 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is what excited readers the most over these past three months...
COSMIC Epoch 1.2 Desktop Fixes Flickering Issues For Intel Graphics
Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76...
GraalVM CE 25.1.3 Gets Native Image "Hello World" Program Down To
GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow...
Fedora 45 Looks To Finally Offer Install Support For Stratis Storage
Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change...
Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, USB4STREAM, AMD ISP4, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL
Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today's feature overview.
