Phoronix

Well known AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olšák landed some nice Mesa 25.0 optimizations for Christmas and now in kicking off the new year he's managed another interesting set of patches for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...

Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA...

Queued up this week via the tip/tip.git's "x86/bugs" Git branch for the Linux kernel is AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" support as a new SRSO/Inception mitigation handling seemingly for Zen 5 processors and beyond...

With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code...

With 2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles for 2024. In addition to the three thousand original Linux/open-source news articles last year, there was 191 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by myself. AMD Zen 5 on Linux easily dominated the list of most popular articles for the year along with ZLUDA and several of the Intel Arrow Lake and Granite Rapids articles plus the Framework 16 laptop...

Last month I wrote about a Lenovo Legion Linux driver being posted for enabling more power/performance settings under Linux. Following a significant rework, a second iteration of those patches have now been posted with just being referred to as the Lenovo "Gaming Series" WMI drivers without the Legion reference...

For the Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU found within the Snapdragon X1 series of laptop chips, an Adaptive Clock Distribution "ACD" feature is currently being wired up to the open-source MSM kernel driver to help with power and performance...

Within the mainline Linux kernel has been the open-source SteelSeries HID driver while newly posted patches are tacking on support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset...

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times...

Following the recent Serpent OS alpha builds for this original Linux distribution led by well known developer Ikey Doherty, the project has now outlined both some of their short term and longer term plans for this from-scratch Linux platform...

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop...

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language...

During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year...

The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...

The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...

With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...

In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...

One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...