Sent out a few minutes ago was the latest batch of AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel driver feature patches for DRM-Next in getting ready for the Linux 6.16 merge window opening in a few weeks. This pull request contains a big new feature: the initial albeit currently experimental support for AMDGPU user mode queues.

Going back to last year an AMD engineer has been pursuing "Attack Vecotr Controls" to rethink CPU security mitigation handling. Attack Vector Controls aims to make it easier to manage CPU security mitigation settings by focusing on the class/scope of vulnerabilities rather than managing the mitigations at an individual level. It's looking like the initial attack vectors control code will be ready for mainlining in the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle but stopping short of the complete implementation.

For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I've been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. The performance implications of using full disk encryption have went down over time and in most real-world workloads you'll see minimal to any difference out of it. As it's been a while since running any reference benchmarks looking at no disk encryption to full disk encryption, here are some results on the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 paired with the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point".

The Debian developer community is pursuing a General Resolution for voting on their policy around AI models.

In the event of your AMD Ryzen or EPYC system being randomly reset or unexpectedly rebooted under Linux, the Linux kernel with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is gaining the ability to report the reason for that reset. This is making use of a technical capability found going back to the AMD Zen 1 processors that the Linux kernel is now tapping into for reporting the cause of any previous system reset.

This week's batch of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc5 test kernel due out on Sunday.

The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers.

OpenZFS 2.3.2 is out today with a number of bug fixes for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.3.2 also comes official support for the Linux 6.14 stable series.

Like clockwork with the start of the new month comes the updated Steam Survey results from Valve to reflect the latest Linux gaming hardware and software trends.

KDE Plasma open-source developers were meeting the past week in Graz, Austria to plot out fundamental changes and improvements moving forward for this great desktop. Among the changes decided on were ending their practice of Plasma LTS releases, enhancing the telemetry capabilities to be more useful, and more.

Last year Redis made the much criticized move to Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL) licensing. The move was widely panned by the open-source community and led to the Linux Foundation forking it as Valkey and also other forks like Redict coming about. In the months since many Linux distributions have switched from Redis to Valkey. Now Redis Labs announced today that with the Redis 8.0 release, they are adding AGPLv3 to the licensing mix.

Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now formally open for development.

With the recently released GCC 15 (GCC 15.1) compiler besides adding new language features, enhancements to help developers in debugging build failures, and other refinements, there is the never-ending quest of compiler performance optimizations. Since the recent GCC 15.1 release candidate I've been testing this annual compiler feature release on more hardware, including several AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" servers to great success compared to the prior GCC 14 stable series.

Mediatek engineers have proposed Kcompressd as a new addition to the Linux kernel to improve the efficiency of memory reclamation. Mediatek engineers testing these patches on their handheld Linux devices have found huge benefit in alleviating memory pressure and enhancing system responsiveness.

LibreOffice supports Zip compression for ODT and DOCX files, among other compression uses. There's now work beginning to be merged for supporting Zstandard (Zstd) compression moving forward.

As a follow-up to the Phoronix article a few days ago entitled A Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Hits Modern AMD CPUs, there continues to be activity to address this issue with the performance impact catching the upstream kernel developers off guard. I've tested a patch now that does address the issue while still carrying the KVM protections desired.

During the past month on Phoronix were 249 original news articles and another 23 featured Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting topics in April from the launch of the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Strix Point, an interesting and cheap RISC-V board coming about, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 proving to be an interesting low-power Linux laptop, Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing, and much more.

Sculpt OS 25.04 hasbeen released as the newest version of this general purpose OS built atop the Genode OS operating system framework.

For those that have spent any length of time in the open-source world have likely come across osuosl.org when downloading open-source projects that often are mirrored at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL). The OSU OSL over the past two decades has also provided VMs for various architectures from x86 and AArch64 to POWER for CI and testing purposes to open-source projects, among many other support roles. Unfortunately, the OSU OSL risks closure this year.

For fans of the DragonFlyBSD operating system, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 has been released after two and a half years to ship various bug fixes for this popular BSD.