KDE developers remain very busy this summer working toward the Plasma 6.2 release with exciting new features.

Last week I wrote about a tiny Linux patch yielding up to 32% faster performance and up to 18% less energy for Emerald Rapids CPUs. That patch is an adjustment to the Intel P-State driver's Energy Performance Preference (EPP) value for that Intel Xeon Scalable family. Today that patch was merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel.

A number of Phoronix readers have been requesting a fresh re-test of the experimental Bcachefs file-system against other Linux file-systems on the newest kernel code. Your wish has been granted today with a fresh round of benchmarking across Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS using the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel. This round of testing was carried out on the newly-released Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs that offer very speedy performance for modern Linux desktops and servers.

Submitted for DRM-Next last week with intentions of getting it into the Linux 6.12 kernel was a new DRM "power saving policy" property. The intent was for this new monitor/display connector property to indicate whether power saving features should be used that could compromise the experience intended by the desktop compositor. But one week later this property is now set to be removed as it's been deemed immature.

A Qualcomm engineer has posted the Linux kernel patches for adding the DeviceTree to support the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 devices powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 SoCs. This allows Linux to run on these new Snapdragon X1-powered Microsoft laptops but as with the other devices there are a number of support caveats that for most end-users will be a showstopper.

For those making use of the EROFS read-only file-system designed with mobile/embedded devices and containers in mind, EROFS-UTILS 1.8 is now available as an important update for these user-space utilities.

The Linux kernel itself can already boot quite fast but with a simple one-line patch another ~0.035 seconds will be able to be shaved off the boot time.

For those still running an AMD Ryzen 3000 series "Zen 2" desktop it really ought to be time to upgrade soon for better performance and power efficiency given the Zen 5 performance benchmarks thus far, but for those still planning to use the Ryzen 3000 series for some time, a quirk/workaround is on the way for enabling more of those older platforms to work with the AMD P-State Linux driver.

Following decisions like exploring -O3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux, another newly-announced change by Canonical I must applaud is their decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream kernel code at release time.

OpenBLAS 0.3.28 made it out today as the open-source optimized BLAS library that caters to a wide range of processors spanning various architectures. With this OpenBLAS 0.3.28 release are yet more optimizations and new CPU optimized paths.

With the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors the AGESA supports up to DDR5-8000 memory. With yesterday's testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X review all of the tests were done at DDR5-6000 in matching with the Ryzen 7000 series and Intel Core 13th/14th Gen configurations. In this article today is an initial look at the DDR5-8000 performance with the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X while using Corsair Vengeance 2 x 16GB DDR5-8000 DIMMs (Corsair CMH32GX5M2X8000C36).

System76 today is releasing an alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 that is built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and making it very interesting is that it includes the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment. I've been playing around with this Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha in advance of today's embargo lift and it's been working out quite well.

Red Hat's performance team has been working on the Tuned profile delivery software as an alternative to power-profiles-daemon on Linux systems. Fedora will be switching over to Tuned to replace power-profiles-daemon and the newest Tuned 2.24 release is now available.

With upcoming Intel Arrow Lake H processors it's just not P cores and E cores but for the E cores will be a mix of both Skymont and Crestmont core types.

For those making use of Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the user-space programs within exfatprogs have been updated that also include more robust "fsck.exfat" capabilities for checking and repairing exFAT file-systems.

GNOME's libspelling library is seeing up to eight times faster spell checking performance thanks to threading and other optimizations.

Hyprland 0.42 has been released as the newest feature release to this dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that remains "100% independent" and "doesn't sacrifice on its looks." Hyprland had been doing some heavy lifting via the Wlroots library but now in version 0.42 that dependency is eliminated.

Valve has just released a SteamOS 3.6.9 beta as the newest update to their Arch Linux derived operating system powering the Steam Deck and other gaming devices.

Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor.

Following the recent Mutter 47 beta release that also marks the feature freze point for GNOME 47, there still are some High Dynamic Range (HDR) display preparations being merged ahead of this next stable desktop release due out in September.