Phoronix

The Linux 6.15 kernel is set to remove support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those server platforms from around two decades ago that used the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture processors. IBM Cell Blades at the time powered a few supercomputers but these IBM QS20 / QS21 / QS22 platforms are no longer relevant and the IBM Linux kernel maintainers no longer even have these platforms available/running. With no apparent users remaining, it's time to say goodbye to the IBM Cell Blades from the mainline kernel...

Intel engineers today released LPMD 0.0.9, the newest version of their open-source Low Power Mode Daemon for Linux systems to optimize active idle power consumption on Intel Core processors...

With the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel there are two new features worth mentioning...

Among other Linux Virtual File-System (VFS) changes submitted and already merged for Linux 6.15 was a set of minor performance optimizations around VFS file operations...

Merged today for the recently-opened Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the "x86/core" changes that are particularly heavy on new feature work for both Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 processors. This is easily quite one of the most significant Intel/AMD CPU set of updates in a given kernel cycle in quite some time...

XZ 5.8 is out today as the first notable feature release since last year's malicious backdoor in XZ 5.6 inserted by a then-co-maintainer of the project. XZ 5.6.2 was out last May while XZ 5.8.0 is now stable today for bringing new features to this lossless data compressor project...

MPV 0.40 was just released as the newest version of this open-source media player derived from MPlayer/MPlayer2. With the MPV 0.40 release there is support for HDR videos on Wayland using the new color management protocol along with a variety of other new features...

Earlier this month for launch-day there were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU compute benchmarks. The graphics/gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 5070 on Linux were held up by waiting for a new R570 Linux driver release with proper support for this new Blackwell graphics card. Last week that new Linux driver arrived in the form of the NVIDIA 570.133.07 Linux build. That new NVIDIA Linux driver is working out great with the GeForce RTX 5070 Founder's Edition and in this article are some initial Linux gaming/graphics performance benchmarks for that new graphics card competing with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series.

Fwupd 2.0.7 brings the newest plug-ins and expanded hardware support for being able to update a variety of system and device/peripheral firmware under Linux...

Over the past week a lot of new Rust "gccrs" code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality...

An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing... Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors...

In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version...

The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA's Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell...

The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD's INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores...

Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux...

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code...

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered...

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2...

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15...