ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Direct I/O For DMA-BUF Can Yield A Big Performance Win

([Hardware] 16 May 10:41 AM EDT Direct I/O DMA-BUF)

Smart device manufacturer HONOR has posted a patch series adding direct I/O support to DMA-BUF with the "DMA_BUF_IOCTL_RW_FILE" flag. In turn this direct I/O use can yield significant throughput improvements and lower latency to help with AI model loading, real-time data streaming, and other uses.



AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Delivers Best Performance On Linux Over Windows 11 - Even With Gaming

([Operating Systems] 16 May 06:40 AM EDT 44 Comments)

Now having shown the very strong AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux performance for this "Strix Halo" SoC with Radeon 8060S iGPU for its integrated graphics, you may be wondering on the same hardware how this compares to Microsoft Windows 11. Today's article is looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance as shipped by HP on their ZBook Ultra 14 G1a laptop compared to Ubuntu 25.04 with a clean install.



Asahi Linux Highlights Recent Upstream Efforts In Linux 6.15, Other Ongoing Efforts

([Apple] 16 May 05:00 AM EDT Asahi Linux)

With the Linux 6.15 kernel soon to debut as stable, the Asahi Linux project issued a new blog post outlining some of the new code they managed to get upstream for this next mainline kernel version as well as some of their other efforts for enabling Linux on modern Apple Silicon hardware.



Ubuntu 25.10 Planning For Good NVIDIA On Wayland Experience, VRR & RISC-V Desktop

([Ubuntu] 16 May 02:00 AM EDT Ubuntu 25.10 Desktop)

A public Ubuntu 25.10 desktop road-map was published today to outline some of the plans that Canonical engineers are beginning to work on ahead of the next Ubuntu Linux release in October.



AMD Is Hiring Again To Help Enhance Ryzen On Linux

([AMD] 16 May 01:00 AM EDT Ryzen Systems On Linux)

AMD is once again hiring more Linux engineer(s) to work on their Ryzen client efforts under Linux with next-gen hardware enablement, enhancing features/support for existing Ryzen systems, and related efforts.



Google Posts New Version Of Live Update Orchestrator For Speedy Kernel Updates In Production Environments

([Google] 16 May 12:00 AM EDT Live Update Orchestrator - LUO)

Back in March Google unveiled the Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" as a new means of live kernel updates for running production systems with a particular emphasis on servers running cloud workloads. A second iteration of the Live Update Orchestrator patches were posted for review today.



Lenovo Thinkbook 16 X1 Plus Laptop Sees Linux Patches But Not Yet Ready For Daily Use

([Hardware] 16 May 12:00 AM EDT Thinkbook 16 X1 Plus)

Device Tree patches have been posted for enabling Linux support on the Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 QOY powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC.



Intel Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" Linux Performance In Mid-2025 vs. Launch Day

([Software] 15 May 02:30 PM EDT 10 Comments)

Given the significant gains to the Intel Arrow Lake performance on Linux since launch that I showcased last month on Phoronix, I was also eager to see how the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since its debut last year. In this article is a look at those relatively weak launch-day Linux performance numbers for the Core Ultra 7 256V compared to where they are performing now on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how far the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since last September.



Rust Language Celebrates Ten Years By Releasing Rust 1.87

([Programming] 15 May 01:40 PM EDT Rust 1.87)

Rust 1.87 is now available as the newest version of this popular programming language. With the Rust 1.87 release it also marks ten years already of this system programming language focused on memory safety and modern features.



Mutter SDK Merged For GNOME 49

([GNOME] 15 May 01:29 PM EDT GNOME 49 + Mutter SDK)

Adding to the excitement for this September's GNOME 49 release is introducing the Mutter SDK.



KDE Plasma 6.4 Beta Released With Aurorae & KWin-X11

([KDE] 15 May 11:37 AM EDT KDE Plasma 6.4)

The beta release of the KDE Plasma 6.4 beta desktop is now available for testing ahead of its official release in June.



CachyOS, Clear Linux & Debian 13 Deliver The Best Performance On Framework Laptop 13 With AMD Strix Point

([Operating Systems] 15 May 07:04 AM EDT 32 Comments)

For those that may be upgrading to the new Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" SoCs and curious about hitting the best possible Linux performance, this article is for you. Here is a look at the performance of the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 across CachyOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora Workstation 42, Manjaro Linux 25.0, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu 25.04.



Linux Patches Updated For Dropping Support For Very Old x86 CPUs

([Intel] 15 May 06:44 AM EDT Linux x86)

Posted last month were Linux patches for removing support for very old i486 and early i586 CPUs. While not yet mainlined to the Linux kernel contrary to some of the reporting elsewhere, this work for removing TSC-less and CX8-less x86 CPUs remains ongoing and out today is the second iteration of the patches.



Arch Linux Installer Adds Labwc & Niri Wayland Compositor Options

([Arch Linux] 15 May 04:36 AM EDT Archinstall 3.0.5)

Archinstall 3.0.5 is now available as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux OS installer.



Linux Swap Table Code Shows The Potential For Huge Performance Gains

([Linux Kernel] 15 May 04:00 AM EDT Swap Tables)

Following recent discussions by Linux kernel developers around integrating swap cache and swap maps functionality with the swap allocator, Swap Table was born. With Swap Tables the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel.



Vulkan 1.4.315 With VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory For VKD3D-Proton & More

([Vulkan] 15 May 02:00 AM EDT Vulkan 1.4.315)

Released last week was the Vulkan 1.4.315 spec update and with it comes the new VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory extension for allowing device memory allocations to be zero-initialized.



Intel ANV Driver Lands Fixes For AV1 Decoding With Vulkan Video

([Intel] 15 May 12:30 AM EDT AV1 Vulkan Video On Intel)

For those interested in making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding with Intel graphics hardware using the Vulkan Video API, some important fixes were merged to Mesa 25.2-devel and will presumably be backported soon to existing Mesa releases.



Llamafile 0.9.3 Brings Support For Qwen3 & Phi4

([Free Software] 15 May 12:00 AM EDT Llamafile 0.9.3)

Llamafile continues pushing forward as the interesting Mozilla project to allow easily distributing and running AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file and in a cross-platform and cross-vendor hardware manner. Llamafile 0.9.3 is out today with more enhancements to this Mozilla Ocho project.



Mediatek DRM Driver Prepares For HDMI 2.0 With MT8195/MT8188

([Hardware] 15 May 12:00 AM EDT Mediatek DRM)

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted for the Mediatek driver in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window.



AMD Ryzen 9 9900 Series Linux Performance Since Launch

([Processors] 14 May 11:30 AM EDT 10 Comments)

After recently looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Linux performance has evolved since launch, many Phoronix readers were curious how a similar launch-day vs. now comparison would look on the AMD Zen 5 side. The article today is looking at how the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux performance has evolved since their launch last year. These numbers are put alongside the prior Intel Arrow Lake results for additional context.



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