Linux 6.15 & Early Linux 6.16 Delivering Some Additional Gains For AMD Strix Halo
As some extra benchmarks to put out today for the Phoronix.com 21st birthday, there is some additional data points to share on AMD Strix Halo when using Linux 6.15 stable and the early development state of Linux 6.16 Git ahead of its v6.16-rc1 tagging this weekend. The Linux kernel performance is moving in the right direction at least with this round of testing using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO SoC… ⌘ Read more

Proposed Persistent Cache For Block Devices “PCACHE” Ported To DM Framework
An initial patch series sent back out in April proposed PCACHE as a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of the CXL block device driver and brings some benefits over the likes of BCache and dm-writecache… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Developers Deciding What To Do For WiFi With FreeBSD 15: Stable Or Unstable
FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for improving their operating system support for laptops. While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it’s still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will like … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 Performance - 12-Core Strix Halo
For some very fun Linux benchmarking on this 21st anniversary of starting Phoronix is looking at the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 Linux performance, the 12-core Strix Halo SoC with Radeon 8050S Graphics. While there have been various benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ (PRO) 395 in recent weeks on Phoronix and other publications, the other Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” SoCs haven’t been as widely seen in the industry yet. The 12-core Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 was tested within … ⌘ Read more

AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance
Last month I began the much anticipated AMD Strix Halo Linux benchmarking at Phoronix by testing the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 that features 16 cores / 32 threads and the very impressive Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. Coming in one step below that flagship Strix Halo SoC is the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 with Radeon 8050S graphics. Coming out today on Phoronix - coincidentally timed for the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com - is the first benchmarks of th … ⌘ Read more

Marking 21 Years Of Covering Linux Hardware
Phoronix has made it another year. Today marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com with a focus on providing Linux hardware reviews. Linux hardware support is a night and day difference then to today as is the overall ecosystem with all the major hardware vendors these days having some – often significant – levels of interest in Linux support. No longer is it typically a worry of whether your mouse, 56K modem, WiFi adapter, or other basic peripherals working but most often … ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Lands More Improvements For Linux 6.16 After Data Loss Bug Hit v6.15
Last week many Bcachefs performance optimizations, recovery work, and enhanced error messages were merged at the start of the Linux 6.16 merge window. Now ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc1 release coming on Sunday to cap off the merge window, a second round of Bcachefs enhancements and fixes were merged… ⌘ Read more

Marking 21 Years Of Covering Linux Hardware
Phoronix has made it another year. Today marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com with a focus on providing Linux hardware reviews. Linux hardware support is a night and day difference then to today as is the overall ecosystem with all the major hardware vendors these days having some – often significant – levels of interest in Linux support. No longer is it typically a worry of whether your mouse, 56K modem, WiFi adapter, or other basic peripherals working but most often … ⌘ Read more

FEX 2506 Makes Big Improvements To Its JIT For x86_64 Binaries On ARM64 Linux
FEX 2506 released today as the newest version of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Based Redox OS Begins Implements X11 Support, GTK3 Port
For those not liking the direction of the Linux desktop with its Wayland-first focus, the Rust-written Redox OS has begun rolling out X11 support within its Orbital display server… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.1.2 Released With More Intel Battlemage & Panther Lake IDs Added
Mesa 25.1.2 is out today as the newest stable bi-weekly point release to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan/video drivers widely relied upon by Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Exposes Statistics For NUMA Task Migration & Swapping
In addition to the memory management “MM” changes merged last week that included features like Kernel HandOver “KHO” support, a second batch of MM changes were submitted and merged this week for Linux 6.16… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15.1 Ships With Fix To Prevent Snapdragon X1 GPUs From Severely Overheating
Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 6.15.1 as the first stable point release to the Linux 6.15 kernel that first shipped a week and a half ago. Linux 6.15.1 brings an initial batch of fixes, which are particularly noteworthy if trying to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptop on Linux… ⌘ Read more

AMD Makes Another Software Acquisition To Bolster Their AI & Compiler Talent
In addition to the excitement this morning of the Radeon RX 9060 XT review embargo lift, today also serves as another special day at AMD as they announced they have acquired software firm Brium… ⌘ Read more

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Linux Performance
Ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card hitting retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on this latest addition to the RDNA4 family. Here are the initial Linux graphics performance benchmarks for this new $349 graphics card compared to other AMD Radeon graphics cards as well as the NVIDIA GeForce and Intel Arc competition. ⌘ Read more

WHIP Muxer Merged To FFmpeg For Sub-Second Latency Streaming
A big project was merged into FFmpeg overnight in providing a WHIP muxer for sub-second latency streaming… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Developers Discuss The Difficult Issue Of Splitting Up Firmware Packages
Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the “linux-firmware” package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It’s nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the … ⌘ Read more

New CXL RAS Features Upstreamed For Linux 6.16
Linux kernel developers continue building out the support around the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification for benefiting modern high performance servers. With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there are more CXL features now in place… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Developers Discuss The Difficult Issue Of Splitting Up Firmware Packages
Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the “linux-firmware” package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It’s nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the … ⌘ Read more

Sched_Ext Boasts CPU Selection Improvements In Linux 6.16
One of the niftiest kernel innovations to be upstreamed into Linux over the past year was sched_ext for extensible scheduler behavior in allowing kernel schedulers to be implemented via BPG programs. Sched_ext can allow for interesting scheduler improvements with a variety of use-cases and showed much potential even before being upstreamed. The work on sched_ext isn’t yet over though and yet more improvements landed for Linux 6.16… ⌘ Read more

Hardware Monitoring For More ASUS Motherboards & Additional Zen 5 CPUs In Linux 6.16
The numerous hardware monitoring “HWMON” subsystem updates were merged to Linux 6.16 on Tuesday for further enhancing the desktop hardware reporting capabilities and more with this next kernel release… ⌘ Read more

SquashFS Tools 4.7 Released: “20% To More Than Ten Times Faster”
SquashFS-Tools 4.7 is out today as a big feature update to the user-space utilities for creating/modifying/extracting SquashFS read-only file-system images. SquashFS 4.7 delivers some big performance improvements and other nice enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Merges Support For The Apple Magic Mouse 2 USB-C
While Linux 5.13 back in 2021 added support for the Apple Magic Mouse 2, only now with the Linux 6.16 kernel is there support arriving for the USB-C version of the Apple Magic Mouse 2 that debuted last year… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Brings Many Laptop Driver Improvements, New Dasharo ACPI Driver
The wide assortment of x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel due out as stable in July. As is usually the case, there are a number of Intel and AMD platform updates along with a wide assortment of driver improvements primarily for laptops from the major OEMs/ODMs… ⌘ Read more

SMT Proves Very Advantageous For AMD Ryzen AI MAX Strix Halo Performance
While Intel opted against implementing Hyper Threading for their latest Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors, Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) still proves very effective on the AMD side. Even though the top-end AMD Ryzen AI MAX “Strix Halo” SoCs provide 16 Zen 5 cores, the presence of SMT for 32 threads still proves worthwhile from both a performance and power efficiency perspective. Here is an on/off comparison for SMT with the flagship AMD … ⌘ Read more

AMD Upstreams Efficient Malloc Support On GPUs For LLVM libc
AMD compiler engineer Joseph Huber is the one who ported DOOM to run on GPUs atop ROCm + LLVM libc as part of taking standard C/C++ code to run on GPUs and more recently has also been pursuing Flang/Fortran support atop GPUs. The latest in this ongoing quest is implementing efficient malloc support for memory allocation support on GPUs via the LLVM libc library… ⌘ Read more

ByoWave Modular Proteus Controller Kit Support Lands In Linux 6.16
Valve engineer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais contributed ByoWave Proteus controller support to the Linux kernel. ByoWave Proteus are some modular controller designs that can be adapted based upon the needs of the gamer and even what title you may be playing at the moment. The triggers and buttons are all repositionable for a very customized controller experience. The only downside is the modular gaming controller kit retails for $299 USD, but at least now works … ⌘ Read more

NVMe FDP Block Write Streams, IO_uring DMA-BUF Zero Copy Recieve Land In Linux 6.16
Merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel coming later this summer were the many block subsystem updates as well as the IO_uring feature updates… ⌘ Read more

FUSE Improvements Merged For Linux 6.16 To Enhance File-Systems In User-Space
The FUSE improvements have been merged for the Linux 6.16 in enhancing the capabilities for file-systems implemented in user-space… ⌘ Read more

New Rust Abstractions Added In Linux 6.16 For More Core Areas
More Rust programming language abstractions for core code of the Linux kernel continues to land for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Updated Steam Client Beta For Linux Fixes Slow Install Speeds For Updates
One day after Steam on Linux set a recent high with the Steam Survey, a new Steam client beta is out today to fix an excruciating annoyance affecting some Linux gamers… ⌘ Read more

More Intel Panther Lake Graphics Device IDs Surface In Open-Source Linux Driver
Intel’s Linux graphics driver engineers continue working on enabling support for the Xe3 integrated graphics premiering with next-gen Core Ultra “Panther Lake” SoCs. Today a number of additional PCI device IDs have been merged to the Mesa 25.2 code to reflect the growing family… ⌘ Read more

Kexec HandOver “KHO” Merged For Linux 6.16
Kexec HandOver “KHO” was merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel as part of all the memory management “MM” changes. Kexec HandOver is providing the basis for some nifty low-level features moving forward… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source TPDE Can Compile Code 10-20x Faster Than LLVM
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have announced TPDE as a fast and adaptable compiler back-end framework. The code is now open-source and they are talking up some very wild compile time improvements… Compiling code for x86_64 and AArch64 with TPDE can be ten to twenty times faster than using the LLVM Clang compiler… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Will Now Conveniently Report Hard/Soft Lockups & RCU Stall Counts
A very convenient addition to Linux 6.16 for system administrators is reporting to user-space via sysfs counters for the number of hard and soft lock-ups as well as RCU stalls… ⌘ Read more

Power & Performance Tuning For The Framework 13 With AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series
In April we looked at the Framework 13 updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and its great out-of-the-box performance and nice power efficiency of Strix Point. Via ACPI platform profiles the power/performance mode can be tuned if desiring a longer battery life or preferring even greater performance. Today’s article is looking at that power/performance impact of the different ACPI platform profiles available on the Framework 13 mot … ⌘ Read more

NFS Server Supporting Larger I/O Block Size With Linux 6.16
For those running an Network File System “NFS” server, the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel will allow optionally enabling a larger payload size that may yield better performance. Eventually the default payload size may be increased if all goes well from user feedback and testing… ⌘ Read more

Phoronix Turns 21 This Week - Show Your Support For Linux Hardware Reviews
This week on 5 June marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com for providing Linux hardware reviews and open-source news. In marking the 21st birthday of Phoronix is a special Phoronix Premium offering if you wish to show your support and hopefully provide for a successful year… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.2 Lands RADV VCN5 Video Encode/Decode Support For RDNA4 GPUs
Posted for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver in early 2024 was the initial Video Core Next 5.0 IP enablement that was part of their bring-up for the Radeon RX 9000 “RDNA4” graphics processors. It’s taken until now though for enabling the VCN5 video encode/decode support within the user-space code for the RADV driver with Mesa 25.2… ⌘ Read more

Intel TDX Host Support Merged For KVM With Linux 6.16
While Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) has been around since Sapphire Rapids with select SKUs and with widespread availability since Emerald Rapids in late 2023, only now with the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting in H2’2025 is there going to be mainline kernel support for TDX on the host-side with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Use Hit A Recent High Of 2.69% During May
Valve just published the Steam Survey results for May 2025 with a nice increase for the Linux gaming marketshare… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.9 Released With EGL Support For All Graphics Drivers
Wine 10.9 fell slightly off its bi-weekly Friday release rhythm with only debuting today, but in any event it’s now available for testing with the latest features for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Intel Overclocking Watchdog Driver Merged For Linux 6.16
Merged today for the Linux 6.16 kernel were all of the Watchdog subsystem updates for monitoring system health and taking action such as rebooting if the system state goes bad. With the Linux 6.16 is the introduction of the Intel Overclocking Watchdog “OC WDT” driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Shipped With A Nasty Power Regression For Some Systems
The Linux 6.15 kernel that shipped as stable last week mistakenly shipped with a nasty CPU power regression for some systems. The issue is now fixed in Linux 6.16 Git and will be fixed shortly in the Linux 6.15 point releases… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Enables Support For Arm Scalable Matrix Extension “SME”
The Linux kernel had not enabled support for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) due to bugs, but with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel those issues have been resolved and so SME can now be enabled for the rare SoCs having said hardware support… ⌘ Read more

Apparent Git Scripting Issue Raised Concerns Of Possible Malicious Linux Kernel Activity
The Linux 6.16 merge window this weekend suffered an unexpected twist this weekend when Linus Torvalds noticed some unusual Git activity by a longtime Linux kernel developer. The issue is still being sorted through but it would appear that the possible malicious activity came down to some scripting issues around Git… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.3 RC1 Brings OCI Images To Docker & GitHub
The release candidate of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official operating system release this month… ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon X Elite & AMD’s Grado + Strix Halo CPUs Captured Phoronix Reader Interest In May
May was another busy month when it comes to Linux hardware and software milestones albeit depressing when looking at the ongoing state of the web/ad industry. In any event there were 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles and another 268 original Linux-related news articles all written by your’s truly for the month. Here is a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most during May… ⌘ Read more

OpenBMC 2.18 Released With Many More Motherboard Ports Upstreamed
OpenBMC 2.18 released on Friday as the newest version of this Linux Foundation project providing an open-source baseboard management controller (BMC) firmware stack implementation. In recent years OpenBMC has been enjoying increasing success in deploying to server platforms from the mega hyperscalers to the more prominent OEM/ODM vendors seeing increasing customer demand for open-source BMC as part of broader open-source firmware interest from the ind … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Now Enforces A Minimum Compiler Version Of GCC 8
To compile the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel has already enforced a minimum compiler version of GCC 8 while now with Linux 6.16 this requirement is in place for all other architectures. The GCC 8 and GNU Binutils 2.30 baseline for all Linux kernel architectures now allows removing a number of old workarounds from the codebase… ⌘ Read more