An ongoing area of work for AMD's Linux client team is on enhancing the power management and overall power savings/efficiency support for Ryzen platforms on Linux. An updated patch series was posted on Monday for making the system S5 power state handling more ideal when powering off the system.

Last year there was some ideas raised around potentially making use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring functionality for graphics drivers to help with better performance and synchronization. It turns out Qualcomm engineers have recently been exploring IO_uring use for the DRM accelerator drivers with very promising results on their Cloud AI hardware in seeing around 50% speed-ups in ioctl execution time.

Following the release of Vulkan 1.4.317 back on Friday that brought the long-awaited VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 extension for VP9 codec support for Vulkan Video, the Mesa RADV driver is now the first prominent open-source Vulkan driver merging support for VP9 decode.

Going on since last year has been an effort to improve FreeBSD laptop support with backing by Dell, AMD, Framework Computer, Netflix, and others. This has focused on better WiFi driver support, enhancing power management, and other improvements for modern laptops. That work has been continuing on all fronts for improving the FreeBSD laptop user experience.

As a nice stepping stone until FreeBSD 15 is ready to ship later in the calendar year, FreeBSD 14.3 stable is out today as the newest point release for this leading BSD operating system.

While Intel has supported CPUID Faulting on processors going back to Ivy Bridge and supported this feature in the Linux kernel since early 2017, only now the AMD support is being wired up and making use of the existing Intel code paths.

Last month with the launch of the AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" series for entry-level Zen 5 servers we ran benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-tier 16-core CPUs. They delivered an excellent combination of performance, power efficiency, and most of all value for those looking to assemble an AM5-based budget-oriented server in 2025 and beyond. Those processors destroyed the Intel Xeon 6300 series competition's flagship, the Xeon 6369P that is simply 8 cores / 16 threads in 2025... Being curious about the core-for-core performance between the AMD EPYC 4005 series and Intel Xeon 6300 series, I got my hands on an AMD EPYC 4345P as the Grado 8-core processor to see how it performs against that Xeon E-2400 series replacement as well as how the performance compares to the prior generation 8-core EPYC 4344P.

Now that the Linux 6.16 kernel merge window closed this weekend, here is a convenient recap of all the interesting features coming in this next kernel release due out as stable around the end of July.

When it comes to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux it's been primarily focused on the Snapdragon X Elite support with the X Plus SoC support not being as well off yet. But recently there has been more patches surfacing around the Snapdragon X Plus support, including the Adreno X1-45 GPU used by that lower-tier SoC.

While a point release, Mold 2.40.1 is another notable step forward for this high-speed linker alternative to GNU LD/Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold 2.40.1 brings yet more performance improvements.

The open-source, unofficial VA-API driver implementation for NVIDIA GPUs is out with a new release. The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver project continues to build VA-API support atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack to work with VA-API-only applications like the Mozilla Firefox web browser on Linux.

The turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other CPU information saw some last minute updates during the Linux 6.16 merge window.

Simon Ser announced the release of Sway 1.11 on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor from which the wlroots library was originally born.

Linux 6.16-rc1 was just released by Linus Torvalds. This first release candidate of Linux 6.16 marks the close of the two-week merge window where many new features and other changes were introduced.

AMD in cooperation with ASUS and Microsoft used the Xbox Games Showcase for announcing their new Ryzen AI Z2 series processors for gaming handhelds. The new Ryzen AI Z2 series is launching with the new ASUS ROG Xbox Ally / ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds running Microsoft Windows.

Notable with the staging area updates for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel is word that the GPIB driver code may be ready to leave the staging area in the next kernel cycle (Linux v6.17) in then being promoted to the main driver area in signifying the maturity of the code and being cleaned up to meet kernel coding standards. The GPIB drivers are for the General Purpose Interface Bus that was introduced back in 1972.

This week in marking Phoronix.com turning 21 years old there was a Phoronix Premium special for those wanting to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. That special deal is ending at end of day Monday (9 June) as your last chance to hop on this special.

The GNOME 49 Alpha release isn't expected until the end of June but for facilitating additional testing and a number of prominent changes this cycle, a number of GNOME packages have begun releasing "GNOME 49 Alpha 0" tags as part of plans to issue multiple alpha releases this cycle. Notable for GNOME 49 are plans moving forward for disabling X11 session support by default with that code then likely to be removed entirely with GNOME 50 for a Wayland-only desktop.

All of the LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel with the merge window set to wrap up later today.

The Linux Mint project published its newest monthly status report to outline various interesting development activities around this Linux desktop distribution project building off Ubuntu and Debian bases.