Arch Linux derived CachyOS is known for its aggressive performance optimizations and running well on modern hardware. It's also leading when it comes to adopting other new Linux/open-source features. With this weekend's May 2024 ISO update, CachyOS has rolled out initial support for installing to a root file-system based on Bcachefs...

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 1, this weekend brought the second beta candidate right on time...

Linux 6.9 is out! Linux 6.9 has been released on time as the newest stable kernel version for rolling-release Linux distributions and other summer releases/updates. Linux 6.9 has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version...

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, Linux 6.9 stable should release later today. In turn the Linux 6.10 merge window will then open for the next two weeks and already some early pull requests have been submitted for this next kernel version. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the Linux 6.10 kernel...

The recent AMD P-State Linux driver patches for heterogeneous core CPU topology, Fast CPPC, and Core Performance Boost haven't made it to the Linux power management's "-next" branch ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 cycle. Thus it looks like those features won't be ready to make it for v6.10 unless by chance being deemed ready in the coming days and then sent in as part of a secondary set of merge window changes. However, some other AMD P-State fixes/improvements are queued up...

With the new Intel "Xe" Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver that's been in development one of the touted benefits of the clean sheet driver design is that it would enable using Intel discrete GPUs on non-x86 CPU architectures. The long-used "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver has many x86'isms in the code-base built up over the many years of Intel integrated graphics that were only ever found within their x86/x86_64 processors. But now in the era of Intel discrete graphics, there's been issues in trying to run Intel Arc Graphics on say ARM, POWER9, and RISC-V, among others. The experimental Intel Xe driver was recently successfully demonstrated in running on ARM using an Ampere Altra workstation...

Following all of the GFX12 code and related IP landing within the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver as well as the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and other code in enabling the next-generation of AMD Radeon graphics, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for RDNA4 (GFX12) was merged this Sunday into Mesa...

Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window...

The Linux 6.9 kernel should debut as stable later today unless Linus Torvalds has second thoughts and decides to delay it by issuing a v6.9-rc8 kernel instead that would then push out the official release by an extra week. In any event, as a last-minute "x86/urgent" pull request is another Zen 5 PCI ID being added...

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair...

For those interested in some insightful Linux kernel mailing list reading this weekend, there's been a vibrant discussion on the ability for the Linux kernel to mitigate unexpected arithmetic overflows/underflows/wraparounds...

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor...

Two years ago Cloudflare outlined how they began replacing Nginx with their own in-house creation, Pingora. Back in February of this year Cloudflare open-sourced Pingora and in April issued the maiden release of Pingora. Out today is Pingora 0.2 as the second release of this Rust framework that is already used in production by Cloudflare...

Rustls is the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with a large emphasis on memory safety and security. Rustls is backed by Google, AWS, and others as well as being a recipient of Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. The latest exciting milestone for the open-source project is that Rustls can now work with Nginx...

Wasmer 4.3 is out as the newest version of this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX, WASI, and EmScript execution. This cross-platform WASM runtime continues to be focused on driving lightweight containers that can run anywhere in a very secure manner...

KDE developers had another busy week as more features were merged ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 release...

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer...

AMD last week sent out a set of patches to enhance the open-source FFmpeg multimedia library with integration around the AMD Advanced Media Framework (AMF). The AMF SDK allows for "optimal" access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing but this patch series questioned the need in an era of Vulkan Video APIs beginning to see adoption...

Linux 6.10 is introducing support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) encryption and integrity protections to prevent active/passive interposers from compromising them. This follows a recent security demonstration of TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker being demonstrated. TPM sniffing attacks have also been demonstrated against Linux systems too, thus the additional protections be made with Linux 6.10 to better secure TPM2 modules...

While Intel can be praised for their dozens (or likely by now, hundreds) of open-source projects they maintain and countless other existing open-source software projects they actively contribute to and are covered by Phoronix on a near-daily basis, not everything there is open-source. Intel is a wonderful and leading open-source promoter but occasionally there are closed-source blobs or questionable moves such as today: Intel is taking their Hyperscan library development from BSD-licensed open-source software to now the Intel Proprietary License moving forward...

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.9 kernel should be released as stable on Sunday. It's been a fairly quiet week so Linux 6.9 stable will likely happen as opposed to going through an extra week with a 6.9-rc8 candidate. With this spring 2024 kernel there are many great features and improvements, especially for modern Intel and AMD platforms...

The Vulkan API 1.3.285 spec revision is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications and another new extension developed by Valve engineering...

Building off last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (RHEL 9.4) has been AlmaLinux 9.4 and now the other notable community-focused downstream: Rocky Linux 9.4...

Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support...

Intel has released their Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.3 to succeed their earlier v2.1 derived extension. With this updated extension targeting PyTorch 2.3, Intel is rolling out more optimizations around Large Language Models (LLMs)...

Valve tonight released a SteamOS 3.6 Preview as the latest version of their Arch Linux derived operating system that powers the Steam Deck and can be installed on other devices as well...

One of the interesting innovations out of Mozilla Ocho as the browser company's innovation and experiments group is Llamafile, a easy way to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file. Out this evening is Llamafile 0.8.2 is the newest release with an updated Llama.cpp and most excitingly are some AVX2 performance optimizations...

Recently there was an LLVM bug report of "Worse runtime performance on Zen CPU when optimizing for Zen." Well, that's not good... Fortunately, that bug is now fixed with the latest LLVM Clang compiler code but other deficiencies in the AMD CPU optimization targeting remain...

If all goes well the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will be released on Sunday and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window. In hoping for an on-time release, some Linux kernel subsystem maintainers have been already submitting early pull requests of their feature material for v6.10. Among those early pulls are the SLAB (SLUB) updates...

A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express...

While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.

Recently I've been testing out the Scaleway's Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks.