Phoronix

The latest in our ongoing testing of AMD Strix Halo performance using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is analyzing the Vulkan API performance between Mesa's RADV driver and the AMDVLK official open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems. More than one hundred benchmarks were run looking at the performance from Steam Play games to Vulkan compute workloads.

Similar to the Ubuntu 24.10 concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, Canonical has begun publishing new "concept" images of Ubuntu 25.04 ISOs optimized for use on the growing number of Qualcomm Snpadragon X Elite laptops. This week marks the release of the new ISOs for enhancing Ubuntu Linux on various ARM laptops...

Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source...

Merged for the current Linux 6.16 cycle was initial NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support with the Nouveau open-source driver. NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support was tacked onto the existing Nouveau kernel driver rather than having to wait for the new "NOVA" driver and like prior generations continuing to leverage the GSP firmware. For going along with that Nouveau support, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver support for Blackwell continues being put together too...

Last week was a Bcachefs pull request consisting of fixes and a new "journal_rewind" feature to aide as a disaster recovery tool for the file-system. But with that code being submitted as part of the ongoing Linux 6.16 release candidates, it drew criticism from Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers. However, one week later and that discussion having subsided a few days ago, Linus Torvalds ended up merging all of the code. But there is a concerning warning for the future of Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel...

The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France...

In addition to releasing Oracle Linux 10 today, Oracle also released the second beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 cross-platform virtualization software...

A decade ago Canonical did around $81 million in revenue (2014) with a head count of around 337 at the company behind Ubuntu Linux while their Linux desktop efforts were still gaining a footing with OEMs/ODMs pre-loads, within enterprise desktop environments, and the lucrative server/cloud space. Canonical recently filed their 2024 annual report and they are now up to almost $300 million USD in revenue and a headcount of more than 1,100...

Last month saw the release of Rust 1.87 that celebrated ten years of the Rust programming language while out today is Rust 1.88 that continues iterating the language with new features...

Published last November as part of Vulkan 1.3.302 was the VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension for adding AV1 video encoding to the Vulkan Video API. Ahead of next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its AV1 encode support...

Mir 2.21 is out today for this Ubuntu/Canonical project to serve as a set of libraries used to simplify the development of Wayland-based shells/environments...

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10.0) just over one month ago, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 10.0...

Following this week's release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month's Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I've been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.

Last month Canonical announced plans for releasing monthly Ubuntu Linux development snapshots and was followed by the Questing Snapshot 1 release in the road toward Ubuntu 25.10. Out today is the Questing Snapshot 2 release for incorporating the latest Ubuntu 25.10 development changes...

As a follow-up to the article a few weeks ago about AMD enabling User CPUID Faulting support for Linux, that code looks like it's ready to go for being introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel...

Maxime Ripard at Red Hat sent out the latest weekly pull of "drm-misc-next" changes to DRM-Next for queuing of these kernel graphics/display driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator...

The NOVA-Core driver as the basis for a modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for the upstream Linux kernel and eventual successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau DRM driver has a new co-maintainer...

The controversial proposal to replace the upstream X.Org X11 server packages on Fedora Linux with XLibre is not going to happen... At least not for now. The change proposal has been withdrawn prior to being voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...

One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project...