Phoronix

The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements...

Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software...

Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today's world...

The openSUSE project is currently contemplating if it's time to end support for 32-bit ARM devices...

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop...

Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more...

A big merge today to Mesa Git ahead of next week's Mesa 25.2 code branching is removing the pre-DMA-BUF winsys support and as part of that clearing out all of the old DRI2 driver support...

ZLUDA Version 5-preview.43 was released today as this open-source CUDA implementation for use on non-NVIDIA GPUs, with one of the current focuses being on enabling CUDA on AMD Radeon GPUs with ROCm...

Last week I published fresh benchmarks showing how AMD's EPYC 4005 series for budget servers can outperform the original EPYC 7601 flagship processor when EPYC first launched during the Zen 1 period. Even with lower core counts and fewer memory channels, the modern EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors were able to outpace that original EPYC "Naples" flagship processor from 2017. With carrying out the fresh re-testing of the AMD EPYC 7601 on a modern 2025 Linux software stack, in today's article is a look at how the EPYC 7601 Zen 1 performance compares to the EPYC 9005 "Turin" series with today's flagship EPYC 9755 and EPYC 9965 processors.

Red Hat this morning went public with RHEL for Business Developers, an expansion of their RHEL Developer Program to make it easier for business developers to make use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no-cost for their development efforts...

Miracle-WM 0.6 is out today as a mega release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor by Canonical/Ubuntu developer Matthew Kosarek. Miracle-WM provides tiling window manager support inspired by i3 and Sway while being one of the most pronounced users of the Mir code...

Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state...

The Mesa 25.2 code is expected to be branched next week to kick off the release process for this quarter's iteration of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. As such, there's going to be a mad dash over the next week to land lingering features and other improvements for Mesa 25.2. Making it into Mesa Git today was a big set of 42 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver...

Google yesterday lifted the lid on their work around Skia "Graphite" as a new rasterization back-end designed for modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and supporting multi-threading by default. Skia Graphite aims to deliver much better performance within the Chrome/Chromium web browser...

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 on Tuesday as the newest monthly update to this in-house Linux distribution used throughout the company and by external parties...

The first alpha release of PHP 8.5 was issued last week in kicking off the release cycle in working toward the official PHP 8.5.0 release later in the year...

Just over one year after the Amarok 3.0 release after a six year hiatus that brought it to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Amarok 3.3 is out today as the first version taking it to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6...

Here's an unexpected company match... GlobalFoundries announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS. Yes, the company formerly part of Wave Computing and before that Imagination and Silicon Graphics during its long history. MIPS in recent years hasn't been focused on its namesake CPU architecture but rather RISC-V core designs...

Made public minutes ago is Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) as a new class of class of speculative side channel attacks affecting AMD processors...

Last month the Framework Laptop 12 began shipping as an upgrade-friendly, convertible 2-in-1 laptop that is friendly with Linux as we've come to expect out of Framework Computer devices. The launch-day Linux testing at Phoronix of the Framework 12 was done out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux with the defaults on it and the other comparison laptops tested. But as we've shown with recent Intel and AMD laptops, ACPI Platform Profile adjustments can make a significant impact on bettering the performance or extending battery life with more power efficient operation. For those wondering about the impact of the platform profiles on Framework Laptop 12, here are some power and performance benchmarks.