While there was the year-end holidays, daily activity on Phoronix doesn't let up and over the course of December there were 256 original news articles around Linux/open-source on the site along with 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most as we closed out 2024.

For enjoying the most popular content on Phoronix from last month in case you missed any due to the holidays or other year-end festivities and scheduling constraints, below is a look at the news that excited readers the most followed by the most popular Linux hardware reviews for the month. Linux kernel developments and LKML drama, the Raspberry Pi 500 launch, and the much anticipated Intel Battlemage B580 graphics card launch were among the most popular topics. As always if you enjoy all of my original Linux/open-source related content each and every day, consider [1]joining Phoronix Premium for the New Year and as Phoronix.com enters its 21st year of providing Linux hardware reviews.

Here's the most popular Phoronix news from December:

[2]OpenWrt Affected By Security Issue That Could Have Led To Compromised Build Artifacts

A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.

[3]Linus Torvalds Comes Out Against "Completely Broken" x86_64 Feature Levels

With the new Linux kernel patches posted yesterday for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernels on x86_64 CPUs as part of that patch series was introducing new Kconfig build options around the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. It turns out though that Torvalds is completely against how the x86_64 feature levels are handled by the compiler toolchain folks and doesn't want to see it invading the kernel.

[4]How AMD Is Taking Standard C/C++ Code To Run Directly On GPUs

Back at the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting was an interesting presentation by AMD engineer Joseph Huber for how they have been exploring running common, standard C/C++ code directly on GPUs without having to be adapted for any GPU language / programming dialects or other adaptations.

[5]Linux EFI Zboot Abandoning "Compression Library Museum", Focusing On Gzip & Zstd

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.

[6]Ptyxis Becomes Ubuntu's Recommended Replacement To GNOME Terminal

While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.

[7]Linux Fixing A "Hilarious/Revolting Performance Regression" Around Intel KVM Virtualization

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today.

[8]Linux 6.13 Is A Great Holiday Gift For AMD Systems With Many New Features

Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025.

[9]NTSYNC Linux Patches Revived To Help Boost Steam Play Gaming Performance

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.

[10]COSMIC Alpha 4 Released For System76's Rust-Based Desktop

System76 today released the newest development/testing version of their Rust-based desktop environment designed for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

[11]KDE Starts December By Landing A Number Of New Features

While the winter holidays are quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy working on new feature code for the Plasma 6.3 desktop. A number of new features were merged this week for the KDE desktop.

[12]Linux Kernel Patches To Use AMD INVLPGB Instruction Show Huge Speed-Up

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits.

[13]KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivers Much Better Fractional Scaling, Clipboard Using SQLite

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release.

[14]Vulkan Video Now Enabled By Default For Radeon VCN2/VCN3 Hardware On Linux

An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.

[15]Linux 6.6.66 LTS Kernel Released With New Hardware Support & Many Fixes

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions.

[16]GNU Shepherd 1.0 Service Manager Released As "Solid Tool" Alternative To systemd

GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.

[17]Curl Drops Support For Hyper Rust HTTP Backend Citing Little Demand

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code.

[18]Rustls Multi-Threaded Performance Is Battering OpenSSL

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

[19]System76 Releases Updated AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop.

[20]Rust Drama, Russian Kernel Maintainers & Other Top Linux Kernel Happenings Of 2024

With 2024 drawing quickly toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux kernel news of the year ranging from exciting performance optimizations and new features such as QR code error messages over to kernel drama around Russian kernel developers, Bcachefs disturbances, and the contentious growing Rust programming language use within the kernel.

[21]Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Proposed For Fedora 42

A new "Fedora COSMIC" spin of Fedora Linux has been proposed that would feature the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment currently being developed by Linux PC vendor System76.

And the most popular featured articles/reviews:

[22]Intel Arc B580 Graphics Open-Source Driver Linux Gaming Performance

Last week Intel announced the Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards as their first Xe2 discrete GPUs. Ahead of the Arc B580 graphics card hitting Internet retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on the Intel Arc B580. Here is what to expect from the Linux driver support at launch for the Intel Battlemage graphics cards and how the Arc B580 is performing for Linux gaming/graphics workloads.

[23]Intel Announces Arc B-Series "Battlemage" Discrete Graphics With Linux Support

Succeeding the Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards that launched two years ago as the DG2/Alchemist series, the next-gen Battlemage graphics cards are being announced today. The embargo lifts today on the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards with initial availability next week. Like the prior generation Intel graphics and as discussed already in many Phoronix articles, Battlemage is still treated to fully open-source graphics driver support on Linux.

[24]Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks For Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" Shows Strengths & Weaknesses

Last week with the availability of the Intel Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards I ran benchmarks looking at the GPU compute performance, Linux gaming benchmarks, and also the workstation graphics capabilities. The Intel Arc B580 graphics showed some nice generational uplift under Linux for most workloads but there were some anomalies where clearly the Intel Linux graphics driver had room to better optimize the new Xe2/Battlemage graphics support. Windows benchmarks of the Intel Arc B580 also showed it performing more competitively to the likes of the GeForce RTX 4060 compared to what I was seeing under Linux. Thus I spent the past few days working on some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics benchmarks for both Intel Arc Graphics of Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs to see how the performance compares.

[25]The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS

Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.

[26]Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

One of the areas for benchmarking exploration that I had been meaning to dive into since the launch of the Intel Arrow Lake processors back in October was checking out the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for the new Core Ultra 9 285K flagship processor. Particularly with the mix of P and E cores I was curious for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux performance capabilities. With recently carrying out a Windows 11 install on Arrow Lake for running the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, following that I carried out some fresh CPU benchmarks for seeing how Arrow Lake processor performance is looking on these competing operating systems.

[27]Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential For Battlemage

Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential... Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux.

[28]Arch Linux Based CachyOS Takes The Lead On Intel Arrow Lake

Following the recent Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I wanted to expand the testing to look at how well other Linux distributions as well were performing on this new 24-core Arrow Lake desktop processor. To much surprise Intel's own Clear Linux distribution didn't take the top spot this round but as a surprising upset the Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution outperformed Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora Workstation on this flagship Arrow Lake processor.

[29]NVIDIA R565 vs. Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0 Git AMD / Intel Graphics For Linux Gaming

It's been a few months since running any fresh Linux graphics driver comparison benchmarks. But given the imminent availability of the first Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards, I have been carrying out some fresh Linux GPU driver testing. Given the recently-stabilized NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series and then also the newest upstream code in Linux 6.13 Git and Mesa 25.0-devel for the AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics hardware on their open-source drivers, here is a fresh look at where Intel / AMD / NVIDIA mid-range graphics stand today on Ubuntu Linux with the leading-edge drivers.

[30]Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade To The Raspberry Pi 400

Four years ago already the Raspberry Pi 400 was announced as a Raspberry Pi keyboard computer built around the Raspberry Pi 4, passively-cooled, and all packaged up nicely in a keyboard form factor. Announced earlier this month was the Raspberry Pi 500 as the successor and now built around the Raspberry Pi 5. For $90 USD this keyboard computer is a very versatile and convenient compact Linux PC.

[31]BIOS Optimizations For AMD 5th Gen EPYC Yield Greater HPC Performance & Power Efficiency

Using the 5th Gen EPYC BIOS tuning guide published by AMD, I recently looked at the impact of AI and machine learning optimized performance by adjusting some simple BIOS knobs as well as the Java throughput, latency and power efficiency for the EPYC 9005 class processors. In this article is following the AMD BIOS tuning guide to see what performance difference there is for high performance computing (HPC) workloads following the BIOS tuning recommendations compared to the defaults with an AMD EPYC 9575F server.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenWrt-Compromised-ASU-Builds

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Torvalds-Mind-Fart-x86_64-Level

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Standard-C-Code-GPUs

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-EFI-Zboot-Gzip-Zstd

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Ptyxis-Recommended

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Intel-KVM-Cache-CPUID

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-AMD-Features

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTSYNC-Linux-v6-Patches

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-4-Released

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-New-Features-December-2024

[12] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-INVLPGB-Linux-Benefits

[13] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.3-Better-Frac-Scaling

[14] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Video-VCN2-VCN3-Default

[15] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.6.66-LTS-Released

[16] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Shepherd-1.0

[17] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Curl-Drops-Rust-Hyper-Backend

[18] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rustls-Multi-Threading-Perf

[19] https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Pangolin-15-AMD-Linux

[20] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Top-Linux-Kernel-News-2024

[21] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-42-COSMIC-Spin-Proposed

[22] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linux

[23] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-battlemage

[24] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-windows-linux

[25] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-66-612-lts

[26] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arrowlake-windows-linux

[27] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute

[28] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arrowlake-cachyos

[29] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-565-linux-613-mesa25

[30] https://www.phoronix.com/review/raspberry-pi-500

[31] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9005-hpc-tuning