Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel last week was the big set of hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates with new hardware support as well as a few new sensor drivers.

As the last planned article of the quarter, here is a look back at the most popular Phoronix content from Q1'2025 with 822 original news articles and 40 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews written by your's truly. There were interesting hardware launches from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA this quarter along with a never-ending pace of new open-source software innovations and the unfortunate ongoing drama within the free software community.

While the first quarter is coming to an end, there has already been immense progress this year to the Wayland protocols and compositors along with associated Linux desktop software for embracing this alternative to legacy X11/X.Org. From HDR color management seeing much adoption this quarter to Wine Wayland becoming more viable and the large number of Wayland compositors maturing, it was a pretty incredible quarter.

The perf tools changes were merged today for the Linux 6.15 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the wonderful perf tooling is introducing the notion of latency profiling by leveraging kernel scheduler information. This latency data will be further useful for Linux software engineers working to optimize system latency/performance.

The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux.

The consulting firm 3mdeb's Dasharo open-source firmware distribution derived from Coreboot could soon feature improved integration under Linux thanks to a pending ACPI platform driver.

It's been just over one year since the Linux Foundation and partners announced Valkey as a fork of Redis. Following the release of Redis 8.0 in September for this in-memory key-value database, Valkey 8.1 is out today.

For those dealing with exFAT formatted storage devices under Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel has a big optimization for yielding much faster delete performance when making use of the "discard" mount option.

With Q1 drawing to an end, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source news and Linux hardware reviews around AMD during the quarter on Phoronix. With 109 AMD news articles so far this quarter around their Linux software/hardware efforts and another 20 AMD Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles, they continue firing on all cylinders for pushing both their client and server wares forward outside the confines of Windows.

Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025.

The Mozilla Firefox 137 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release set for Tuesday.

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Sunday submitted all of the "char/misc" patches for the Linux 6.15 merge window for this random catch-all area of the kernel with small drivers and other random/obscure hardware support.

Cloud Hypervisor began as an open-source Intel software project more than a half-decade ago with an emphasis on security and cloud deployments while leveraging the Rust programming language. With time its scope has broadened a lot as has its industry adoption. With time it added ARM64 support and recruited AMD, Ampere Computing, Microsoft, and others as its supporters while being folded into the Linux Foundation. The latest expansion for the project is introducing experimental RISC-V 64-bit support.

Last week PostgreSQL merged support for IO_uring that can provide for "considerably faster" performance of this popular open-source database server. Over the weekend some additional improvements were merged to the asynchronous I/O "AIO" code to PostgreSQL, including introducing a new batch mode that can also provide a performance win.

The in-development Linux 6.15 kernel is continuing to enhance its support for MIPI's SoundWire specification for small audio peripherals with this two-pin, low-complexity audio interface.

All of the Rust programming language infrastructure updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel have now been submitted. In addition to a lot of technical Rust improvements for the Linux kernel, this cycle also marks the first time Rust Linux maintainer Miguel Ojeda has taken a pull request directly from another contributor as they prepare to work out sub-trees for the Rust ecosystem.

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS is out with its March 2025 update that delivers a number of new features for this OS that is popular with open-source enthusiasts and power users for its out-of-the-box performance optimizations and extensive tuning.

Google's Ozone Wayland support continues to improve for benefiting the Chrome/Chromium web browser. The newest addition merged this past week is support for the xdg-session-management protocol.

The watchdog subsystem changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.15 merge window that is now at the mid-way point.

IO_uring continues maturing while being one of the greatest innovations within the Linux kernel in the past number of years. With Linux 6.15, IO_uring is getting even more interesting with introducing network zero-copy receive support. With this new code a 200G link could be saturated off a single CPU core in a recent demonstration.