Phoronix

An initial patch series sent back out in April proposed PCACHE as a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of the CXL block device driver and brings some benefits over the likes of BCache and dm-writecache...

FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for improving their operating system support for laptops. While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it's still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will likely declare their wireless support as "unstable" to allow time for making future breaking modifications...

Last month I began the much anticipated AMD Strix Halo Linux benchmarking at Phoronix by testing the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 that features 16 cores / 32 threads and the very impressive Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. Coming in one step below that flagship Strix Halo SoC is the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 with Radeon 8050S graphics. Coming out today on Phoronix - coincidentally timed for the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com - is the first benchmarks of the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 along with the Radeon 8050S graphics.

For some very fun Linux benchmarking on this 21st anniversary of starting Phoronix is looking at the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 Linux performance, the 12-core Strix Halo SoC with Radeon 8050S Graphics. While there have been various benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ (PRO) 395 in recent weeks on Phoronix and other publications, the other Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs haven't been as widely seen in the industry yet. The 12-core Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 was tested within another HP ZBook Ultra G1a for a very interesting look at the high-end/premium Linux laptop/workstation performance.

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical announced they will be sunsetting their Bazaar distributed revision control system code hosting with Launchpad. Git wins...

In addition to a number of new Rust abstractions in different Linux kernel subsystems, the main Rust infrastructure pull request was submitted and merged yesterday as we approach the end of the Linux 6.16 merge window...

Last week many Bcachefs performance optimizations, recovery work, and enhanced error messages were merged at the start of the Linux 6.16 merge window. Now ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc1 release coming on Sunday to cap off the merge window, a second round of Bcachefs enhancements and fixes were merged...

Phoronix has made it another year. Today marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com with a focus on providing Linux hardware reviews. Linux hardware support is a night and day difference then to today as is the overall ecosystem with all the major hardware vendors these days having some -- often significant -- levels of interest in Linux support. No longer is it typically a worry of whether your mouse, 56K modem, WiFi adapter, or other basic peripherals working but most often just a matter of how well the performance is on Linux, whether there is LVFS/Fwupd firmware updating support, and if other non-show-stopping features are supported. We still haven't managed the "year of the Linux desktop" but it's been wild with Chrome OS and Android being based on Linux, Linux coming to dominate the server world, Linux being ubiquitous to cloud computing, and Valve revolutionizing the Linux gaming space...

FEX 2506 released today as the newest version of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems...

For those not liking the direction of the Linux desktop with its Wayland-first focus, the Rust-written Redox OS has begun rolling out X11 support within its Orbital display server...

Mesa 25.1.2 is out today as the newest stable bi-weekly point release to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan/video drivers widely relied upon by Linux systems...

In addition to the memory management "MM" changes merged last week that included features like Kernel HandOver "KHO" support, a second batch of MM changes were submitted and merged this week for Linux 6.16...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 6.15.1 as the first stable point release to the Linux 6.15 kernel that first shipped a week and a half ago. Linux 6.15.1 brings an initial batch of fixes, which are particularly noteworthy if trying to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptop on Linux...

In addition to the excitement this morning of the Radeon RX 9060 XT review embargo lift, today also serves as another special day at AMD as they announced they have acquired software firm Brium...

Ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card hitting retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on this latest addition to the RDNA4 family. Here are the initial Linux graphics performance benchmarks for this new $349 graphics card compared to other AMD Radeon graphics cards as well as the NVIDIA GeForce and Intel Arc competition.

Fwupd 2.0.11 is now available as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating tool for Linux systems...

A big project was merged into FFmpeg overnight in providing a WHIP muxer for sub-second latency streaming...

Linux kernel developers continue building out the support around the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification for benefiting modern high performance servers. With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there are more CXL features now in place...

Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the "linux-firmware" package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It's nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the out-of-the-box hardware support on Ubuntu Linux...

One of the niftiest kernel innovations to be upstreamed into Linux over the past year was sched_ext for extensible scheduler behavior in allowing kernel schedulers to be implemented via BPG programs. Sched_ext can allow for interesting scheduler improvements with a variety of use-cases and showed much potential even before being upstreamed. The work on sched_ext isn't yet over though and yet more improvements landed for Linux 6.16...