Open-source News

Page Cache Sharing Looks To Be Very Beneficial For EROFS Containers

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 18:45
One of the features being worked on for a while with the read-only EROFS file-system is page cache sharing. Besides EROFS being popular on some mobile/embedded devices, this open-source read-only file-system has been quite popular for container usage and there this page cache sharing functionality can provide some significant reductions in RAM usage...

KVM Guest VMs Using Intel AMX Can Cause The Linux Host To Kernel Panic

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 09:35
An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers... It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic...

Linux's sched_ext Has Plans For GPU Awareness, Energy-Aware Abstractions

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 09:16
Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026...

Open-Source Linux Driver Christmas Surprise For 20~23 Year Old Radeon GPUs

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 04:24
If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn't nostalgic enough for you, here's something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors...

LibreOffice 26.2 Gets Rid Of The "Community" Edition Branding

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 03:15
With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the "Community Edition" branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite...

Micro QuickJS Engine Compiles & Runs JavaScript With As Little As 10kB Of RAM

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 01:51
Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM...

Intel NPU Firmware Published For Panther Lake - Completing The Linux Driver Support

Phoronix - Wed, 12/24/2025 - 01:35
Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository...

AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months

Phoronix - Tue, 12/23/2025 - 23:30
As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.

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