Since the 2022 release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used RAM testing utility, this open-source software has continued advancing nicely after a decade hiatus. Released on Sunday night was memtest86+ 8.0 as the latest iteration of this popular RAM tester for enthusiasts.

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.

While TUXEDO Computers recently ended their efforts for a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop, their Linux Intel/AMD laptop efforts continue going well and recently they have been posting patches working to enhance the upstream kernel support for those x86_64 devices.

Following approval of the /nix top-level directory with Fedora Linux, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has additionally signed off on allowing the Nix package tool to appear in the Fedora 44 repository.

A Huawei engineer sent out a proposed driver for the Linux kernel to enable "cache lockdwon" behavior for HiSilicon ARM64 processors for greater control over the processor's L3 cache usage.

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, a new point release is now available in the 21.1 series. While most often X.Org Server stable releases these days are driven by shipping new security fixes, the X.Org Server 21.1.21 release is to fix several regressions introduced for various functional issues.

Intel software engineers continue to be hard at work on LLM-Scaler as their solution for running vLLM on Intel GPUs in a Docker containerized environment. A new beta release of LLM-Scaler built around vLLM was released overnight with support for running more large language models.

Red Hat's leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer released libinput 1.30 today as the newest update to this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland desktops.

With Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on upcoming Intel processors doubling the number of general purpose registers (GPRs) among other advantages, Intel engineers are beginning to think of possible kernel uses for the extra registers.

Alex Gaynor recently announced he is formally stepping down as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux kernel code with the removal patch now queued for merging in Linux 6.19.

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 from two weeks ago, AlmaLinux 10.1 is now available in GA form for this community-oriented RHEL10 downstream. Making AlmaLinux 10.1 all the more interesting is the project's decision to promote Btrfs file-system support.

A year and a half after the Linux kernel patches were first posted, SDCIAE that is found with AMD Zen 5 server processors is set to finally be supported by the mainline kernel come Linux 6.19.

The most exciting hardware to arrive this month in the Phoronix lab is Dell having sent over two of their new Dell Pro Max with GB10 systems. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is their build-out around NVIDIA's GB10 superchip with ten Cortex-X925 CPU cores and ten Cortex-A725 cores plus the GB10 Blackwell GPU. With 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and 2TB or 4TB SSD by default all within the small chassis, this is an interesting workstation for AI developers.

A set of patches implementing async I/O IOCB_NOWAIT support for the loop block device is heading to the Linux 6.19 kernel with some performance improvements that will make loop block device users "wow".

In addition to debuting the Raspberry Pi OS Imager 2.0 app, Raspberry Pi today announced the latest version of their operating system.

The Raspberry Pi Imager application that makes it easy to generate install media / OS image flashing for different Raspberry Pi devices is out with a big feature update.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial support for Xe3P graphics to be found initially with Nova Lake processors. While that initial support is landing for Linux 6.19, other extra Xe3P features are still to be added to the open-source kernel driver over coming release cycles. One of those extra features being currently tackled is a new element with Xe3P_LPD: the ability to use the system cache for FBC.

Canonical and AMI announced a partnership today so that there will be an Ubuntu Netboot option added within AMI's UEFI firmware to allow booting to the Ubuntu installer without the need for even having any install media.

The end of 2025 is quickly approaching and while there are the various end of year holidays, you can still expect to find new and original content on Phoronix each and every single day of the year just as it's been for more than a decade of the now 21-year-old Phoronix.com. The last day without any new content on Phoronix was all the way back in May of 2012. That's due to my passion for Linux hardware and open-source, paired in more recent years with the more grueling environment to make ends meet with the ever increasing state of the web advertising industry, rampant ad-block use, and related challenges for web publishers. If you would like to show your support for Phoronix's Linux hardware content over the past two decades, this week is the "Cyber Week" / "Black Friday" sale to go ad-free, multi-page-articles on a single page, and other benefits at a reduced rate.