Phoronix

In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations...

One of the early pull requests for Linux 6.15 that I've been meaning to highlight are the VFS iomap updates sent in by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner. In particular, the VFS iomap pull brings preparations for large atomic writes and its upcoming usage by the XFS and EXT4 file-systems...

Merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.15 kernel were all of the performance events updates for which there are a few notable patches on the AMD and Intel side this cycle...

Among the pull requests coming in at the tail end of the Linux 6.15 merge window with 6.15-rc1 expected tonight are all of the Kbuild updates as the infrastructure for building out the kernel...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 merge window are quite exciting with some optimizations for modern x86_64 Intel/AMD processors enticing us the most...

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release...

APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years...

In addition to all the KDE Plasma activity this week, GNOME developers have also been quiet busy working on a variety of improvements to the open-source desktop on their side of the pond...

LACT 0.7.3 is out this weekend as the newest feature update to this Linux GPU configuration and monitoring tool. LACT helps make up for the lack of any official GUI-based GPU configuration tool on Linux provided by AMD or Intel. It also works on NVIDIA GPUs too for providing a nice unified app for GPU configuration from all three major GPU vendors...

FEX 2504 is out with its newest monthly feature update for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts. This alternative to QEMU and Box64 continues focusing on new performance optimizations to further enhance the appeal and speedy potential of this x86_64-on-ARM64 emulator...

Intel's Open Image Denoise library that is part of their oneAPI Rendering Toolkit as a set of open-source, high performance denoising filters for ray-traced images is out with a new release. Open Image Denoise is used by applications like Blender and with this version 2.3.3 release is expanded GPU support...

It's been a busy start to April for KDE Plasma developers as they continue working toward the Plasma 6.4 feature release. There have been yet more crash fixes along with other polishing and stability enhancements to kick off the new month...

Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve's Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere...

Vulkan 1.4.312 is out today as the newest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual mundane clarifications and fixes, this update brings two new extensions from Qualcomm and NVIDIA...

Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel...

With Rust turning ten years old this year, they are reflecting and working to draft plans for the next decade. They have started the Rust Vision Survey where they are looking for feedback from all Rust skill-sets as they look toward the future...

With having a new Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop in the lab, a lot of Linux benchmarks are forthcoming from this ThinkPad laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. This AMD Zen 5 SoC with Radeon 880M RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics had me curious how the Windows 11 vs. Linux iGPU performance is looking now more than a half-year after launch. Prior to blowing out the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation that shipped on the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and loaded with the latest AMD drivers and Windows 11 updates, I ran some graphics benchmarks for seeing how they stack up against the open-source AMD graphics drivers found on the brand new Ubuntu 25.04 release.

The ZLUDA open-source project for "CUDA on non-NVIDIA GPUs" continues being developed for enabling CUDA like GeekBench and AI workloads on AMD GPUs and other hardware vendors. The ZLUDA project hopes to have PyTorch up and running on it this year along with eyeing 32-bit PhysX support since NVIDIA has dropped support upstream for the 32-bit PhysX libraries with the recent RTX 50 Blackwell launch...

Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code...

Sven Peter who remains one of the very active Asahi Linux developers and working on upstreaming various elements of Apple Silicon support for the Linux kernel has sent up warning flares around the eventual Apple M4 support...