Open-source News

With Linux 6.14-rc1 released I have begun trying out the new development kernel on a few systems locally. At least for high core count hardware tested thus far, Linux 6.14 at the moment during this early testing phase is sporting some performance regressions within some multi-threaded workloads.

An Early Performance Regression Hitting Highly Threaded Workloads On Linux 6.14-rc1  Phoronix

An Early Performance Regression Hitting Highly Threaded Workloads On Linux 6.14-rc1  Phoronix

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux...

Firefox 136 Beta Finally Enables Hardware Video Decoding For AMD GPUs On Linux By Default  Phoronix

Firefox 136 Promises Hardware Video Decoding for AMD GPUs on Linux, Vertical Tabs  9to5Linux

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg...

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled...

Optimizing The Linux Kernel With PGO Can Yield ~3% Benefit For HPC Workloads  Phoronix

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with a new status report to highlight the progress their developers made over the course of January...

Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting  Hackaday

Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting  Hackaday

Merged this week to FFmpeg Git for this widely-used open-source multimedia library are a number of NVIDIA video encoding "NVENC" improvements for benefiting the new GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics processors...

Is a kernel developer blocking the success of Rust for Linux? Yes and no!  heise online

Linux containers in 2025 and beyond  Network World

The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for years has been a great feature for Ubuntu users to be able to easily fetch and run the newest upstream kernel whether it's the latest stable kernel version, one of the weekly release candidates, or even the very leading-edge daily Git kernel builds. Sadly for months now this service has been out of order...

Ubuntu Infrastructure Woe Continues Making It A Hassle To Run The Latest Upstream Kernel  Phoronix

The latest Valve Steam Console rumour with AMD RDNA4 can be safely ignored - here's why  GamingOnLinux

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel...

Linux 6.15 Looks Like It May Try Again With EXECMEM_ROX Support  Phoronix