Phoronix

The Rust Hypervisor Firmware is a project out of the Cloud Hypervisor umbrella for developing open-source, Rust-based firmware that can be launched from any environment able to load ELF binaries and run them via the PVH booting standard. Rust Hypervisor Firmware v0.5 is out this weekend with the newest capabilities...

KDE developers have wrapped up a busy November with many fixes and other refinements landing this last week of the month...

Making for an even more exciting Black Friday is the Kbuild pull request submitted today for the near-over Linux 6.13 merge window... And it includes Clang Auto Feedback Directed Optimization (AutoFDO) support for kernel builds as well as Clang's Propeller...

For those with some extra time over the US holiday weekend, LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha 1 has been published as the newest feature version of this open-source, cross-platform office suite that is a great alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office...

Following the release last month of the EPYC 9005 series processors, AMD published a BIOS and Workload Tuning Guide of straight-forward settings recommendations for those running new EPYC Turin servers to optimize the performance of different workloads like databases and Java to HPC and AI/ML software. Recently I started running some benchmarks to look at the impact of AMD's recommended BIOS tuning and beginning this comparison by looking at the performance (and power) impact across a range of AI / machine learning workloads on a 5th Gen AMD EPYC server.

Along with the staging changes, Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes for the nearly-over Linux 6.13 merge window...

Greg Kroah-Hartman is out today with all of the pull requests for Linux 6.13 of the areas of the kernel he oversees. Most notable with the updates on the staging side are clearing out several drivers seeing no real code activity and no apparent users of the mainline Linux kernel... As such the staging pull lightens the kernel by around 107k lines of code...

A number of Vulkan Video enhancements landed this week in FFmpeg Git thanks to open-source developer Lynne that has been advancing the Vulkan Video encode/decode capabilities in this widely-used multimedia library...

Just a quick reminder this "Black Friday" if you would like to help show your support...

The UBports community today released Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 as the latest version of the smartphone/tablet Linux platform currently running off an Ubuntu 20.04 base...

In mid-October was the release of a developer preview for Ubuntu 24.10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops. Yesterday an updated Ubuntu 24.10 release was made available catering to these popular, current-generation ARM-powered laptops that typically ship with Windows 11 for ARM...

There are a few Network File System (NFS) enhancements worth pointing out with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel...

Open-source developer Rui Ueyama who is the lead developer of the Mold high performance linker and previously on the LLVM lld linker has written a detailed mailing list post that highlights some observed performance bottlenecks within the Linux kernel...

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL GPU compute support as well as being depended upon by the Windows 3D driver stack has now removed platform support up to and including Ice Lake...

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience...

Adding to the interesting code building up for next spring's release of the LLVM 20 compiler stack is having the Tenstorrent TT-Ascalon D8 as the newest RISC-V processor target...

Merged last week back toward the start of the Linux 6.13 merge window were a number of interesting IO_uring enhancements for this first major kernel version of 2025...

Systemd 257 is nearing release as the next major feature release for this widely-used init system and software suite on Linux systems...

For those making use of the Microsoft exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel brings an optimization that will help some operations by reducing the FAT chain traversal...

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support...