Phoronix

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise...

Continuing on with the AmpereOne performance benchmarking while having the AmpereOne A192-32X in the lab within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server, the next set of benchmarks is looking at the performance when using the near-final Linux 6.11 kernel. Additionally, quantifying the performance impact of using the ARM64 64K page size kernel as an alternative to the default 4K page size.

Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year...

Ah the memories of old AGP graphics cards... But it's largely just that these days: distant memories. For anyone by chance still running an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) graphics card in production, FreeBSD is looking at deprecating its generic AGP driver and then potentially removing it in FreeBSD 15.0...

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit...

With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware...

Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support...

Succeeding OpenZFS 2.2.5 from early August is now OpenZFS 2.2.6 that brings various fixes plus newer Linux kernel compatibility...

QEMU 9.1 is out in stable form today as the newest feature release to this open-source processor emulator that plays a vital role within the free software Linux virtualization stack...

Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux...

Following yesterday's initial tuning of the "znver5" target for the AMD Zen 5 CPUs with the GCC 15 compiler, several more rounds of compiler tuning/optimizations were merged for benefiting the Ryzen AI 300 series, Ryzen 9000 series desktops, and upcoming EPYC Turin processors...

While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel...

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox...

Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code...

There are six accepted blocker bugs so far for the Fedora 41 Beta and three of them all pertain to Raspberry Pi issues...

Weston 14.0 was released today as the newest feature release for this reference Wayland compositor...

When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS...

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP)...

While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive...