Phoronix

Earlier this month I looked at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics with Strix Point between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 Linux. The testing showed the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics on the open-source Linux driver up to around 96% the performance of Radeon Software on Windows. The most frequent question that came up from that most recent round of benchmarking was wondering how the Intel Xe2 graphics on Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" now compares between Windows 11 and Linux given that both drivers have been maturing the past several months. Here's the story of the Xe2 graphics between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 while using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop.

Being worked on for a while now by engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google has been Kexec HandOver "KHO" as a means of allowing some kernel state to be retained when Kexec'ing into a new kernel such as for maintenance/security updates. The KHO patches in recent days were queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" staging area leading to hope that this work is ready for mainlining with the Linux 6.16 kernel cycle this summer...

A decade after Intel acquired FPGA maker Altera for $16.7 billion and recently working to make Altera an independent company, Intel announced today it has sold 51% of its Altera business in a deal that values that business at $8.75 billion...

The first Linux patch was posted today by an Intel engineer that explicitly mentions "Bartlett Lake" in opening the door for any other Linux kernel patches explicitly catering to Bartlett Lake processors...

After various commits to Mesa 25.1 in recent days in preparing for a new paired context registers feature of AMD RDNA4 (GFX12 graphics), the feature today is wired up for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release. This feature has the possibility of helping performance for new AMD RDNA4 hardware but the performance benefits at this time aren't clear...

Sent out as a request for comments today is a patch series implementing PCACHE, a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of code originally designed for the CXL block device driver but ultimately is useful outside the context of Compute Express Link as well...

While LLVM LLD and Mold are two popular linkers on Linux systems with the latter being known for its impressive speed and much faster than GNU LD and Gold, this past week Qualcomm open-sourced a new linker: ELD...

One week after the Linux 6.15 merge window was capped off, the Linux 6.15-rc2 release is now available in rolling up all of the early fixes that were collected over the past week...

Last year work on KDE's Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support...

While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a "next" branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined...

One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita...

It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption...

Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support...

An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve's Linux graphics efforts...

The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel...

A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines...

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma space with the start of a big new feature landing for the Plasma 6.4 desktop...

In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration...

One of many Linux kernel patch series that NVIDIA has been working on recently to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel are the adjustments needed for Linux running on their newest Smart Switch networking products for the data center...

GNOME 48 made Decibels the desktop's official audio player and in doing so also became the first GNOME core application written in the TypeScript porting language. There's now a second core app for GNOME written in TypeScript...