Phoronix

A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14...

AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware...

OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving...

The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year...

Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms...

Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix...

The KDE desktop progress made over the course of 2024 was particularly stand-out thanks to the Plasma 6.0 debut near the beginning of the year and then Plasma 6.1 and 6.2 further stabilizing and polishing this open-source desktop. It was a very fine year for the KDE desktop...

Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.

In addition to the exciting hardware launches this year particularly around Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake processors, and the new low-cost Battlemage graphics cards, what remains particularly exciting and consistent are all of Intel's great investments around open-source and Linux. Over 2024 there were many exciting performance optimizations, new Linux kernel features, GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain improvements, and countless other enhancements made throughout the open-source ecosystem by Intel engineers...

AMD Ryzen systems with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel may see increased power savings out-of-the-box due to an AMD P-State driver change queued up as part of the new power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel...

It was on New Year's Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn't been touched in quite a while...

Queued up by way of linux-fs.git's "for_next" Git branch is the fanotify HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) implementation via the pre-content fanotify patch series...

An interesting request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted on Christmas for introducing hash-based integrity checking to help with the reproducible builds initiative around the Linux kernel...

There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic...

Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more...

A patch series six months in the making and consisting of 24 patches by longtime Intel Linux graphics engineer Ian Romanick was merged on Christmas Eve for Mesa 25.0...

Ruby 3.4 is out today as yet another annual major feature release for this programming language known for its major updates on Christmas Day...

While there has been Vulkan Video support within Intel's open-source "ANV" driver since early 2023 and extended over time to handle H.265/HEVC decode, H.264 and H.265 encode, and more, the AV1 decode support has lagged behind until now...

The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS...

With 2024 drawing quickly toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux kernel news of the year ranging from exciting performance optimizations and new features such as QR code error messages over to kernel drama around Russian kernel developers, Bcachefs disturbances, and the contentious growing Rust programming language use within the kernel...