Phoronix

Queued up into DRM-Next is a last batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window that is expected to begin next week. With this last minute Intel Xe driver activity is also a new power management knob for those wanting to run their Intel graphics slightly more efficient...

The beta release of the Qt Creator 18 integrated development environment is now available for testing for this Qt/C++-focused IDE...

Version 1.4.327 of the Vulkan API specification was released on Friday and with it comes one new extension, which is a Valve vendor extension...

The third weekly alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing...

Raspberry Pi today announced the M.2 HAT+ Compact as a new smaller version of their M.2 HAT+ for these single board computers...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc7 as the last planned release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel that is expected to go final next weekend...

Not to be confused with AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), but Google's PSP Security Protocol (PSP) for encryption in-transit for TCP network connections is now ready for the mainline kernel. This initial PSP encryption support for network connections is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel...

Code was open-sourced this week and posted to the Linux kernel mailing list as a "request for comments" (RFC) for a multi-kernel architecture. This proposal could allow for multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel could run on dedicated CPU Cores while sharing underlying hardware resources. This could also allow for some complex use-cases such as real-time (RT) kernels running on select CPU cores...

The past few years Google engineers have been reimplementing Android's Binder driver in the Rust programming language. Binder is a critical part of Android for inter-process communication (IPC) and now with Linux 6.18 it looks like the Rust rewrite will be upstreamed...

A patch queued into the PCI subsystem's "next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window will uniformally expose the PCI device serial number of devices via sysfs for easy programmatic parsing...

Developers behind the Git distributed revision control system are debating whether to make Rust programming language support mandatory...

While years ago it was a annual ritual and closest thing to a vacation around here (even though the daily original content persisted), the Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich sadly remains on hiatus. Web publishing operations remain difficult given the state of the industry and rampant ad-block use make even daily operations tight. But for those wishing to show their support for Phoronix during this autumn/fest period, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to help the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...

Rather than needing to parse package/history log files manually and akin to functionality provided by Red Hat's DNF, a merge request is pending to add a built-in history command for APT...

When it comes to AMD's incredible Strix Halo platform, the leading laptop option is the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. The HP ZBook Ultra G1a works great overall on Linux with the main caveat being the web camera due to making use of AMD's latest SoC capabilities for offloaded image processing. The AMD ISP4 open-source driver fixes that for the ZBook Ultra G1a and is also important for future laptop models employing AMD's ISP IP...

With Bcachefs now being "externally maintained" with the upstream kernel not accepting any further feature changes for now to this copy-on-write file-system, Bcachefs is pursuing a nice DKMS experience for distributing updated file-system kernel driver support out-of-tree. Convenient DKMS Debian packages of Bcachefs are now available on Ubuntu and Debian Linux platforms...

While KDE Plasma 6.5 beta released this week, KDE developers have been busy landing last-minute minor features and fixes into this next desktop release...

Linux 6.17 is an interesting time to carry out fresh file-system benchmarks given that EXT4 has seen some scalability improvements while Bcachefs in the mainline kernel is now in a frozen state. Linux 6.17 is also what's powering Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box to make such a comparison even more interesting. Today's article is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, Bcachefs and then OpenZFS too.

Merged to Mesa Git are new contributor guidelines added to the documentation. This can help new users in submitting patches to Mesa. It also lays out a policy of allowing AI-generated/assisted code but the author submitting the code must be able to understand the code in question and take responsibility for it...

Announced last month was the Ubuntu "Dangerous" Desktop Images as a new form of the Ubuntu Linux desktop images that would ship with leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu development images... Basically, pulling in the very latest Snaps to go along with the latest Ubuntu development Debian packages...

In addition to working on optimizing the performance of Zink for workstation graphics, Mike Blumenkrantz has also been tackling support for OpenGL mesh shaders with this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan open-source driver...