Merged back in Linux 6.9 was AMD Preferred Core support for Linux for the concept of "preferred cores" with newer Zen processors that are communicated via ACPI CPPC for select cores able to reach a higher maximum frequency or should otherwise be preferred over other cores on the system in the name of maximizing performance. That was a nice step forward for better handling newer Ryzen processors on Linux and matching functionality that had already been working under Microsoft Windows. Of focus more recently has been working on enabling more dynamic Preferred Core support for where the priority of the preferred cores may change at run-time.

Yesterday brought the newest update to Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux. The Azure Linux 3.0.20250402 brought many package updates mostly in the name of shipping security fixes plus brought new instructions on making use of the AMD graphics driver stack under this Microsoft Linux distribution along with various other updates.

The release of the GNU C Library 2.41 at the end of January ended up inadvertently breaking some Steam games, Discord, Julia, MATLAB, and other select user-space software. A workaround was merged today for Glibc to workaround the problem.

The PostgreSQL open-source database server has been on an exciting spree of recent changes... IO_uring support was recently merged for PostgreSQL 18 along with AVX-512 acceleration of CRC32 computations for up to a 3x improvement. Merged today to PostgreSQL is initial support for NUMA awareness for helping with the PostgreSQL performance for multi-node/socket servers.

UALink as the open standard alternative to NVIDIA NVLink that is backed by Intel, AMD, and other vendors has published the UALink 200G 1.0 specification.

With the recent release of Blender 4.4 it brought many improvements to its Vulkan back-end but is still being treated as experimental. But they hope to make their Vulkan renderer production-ready this year and in order to do that they need more help from the community in testing it.

The Linux 6.15 merge window ended on Sunday with the release of Linux 6.15-rc1. There is a lot of exciting features and updates that were merged during the two-week merge window. Here is a look at all of the most prominent changes to be found with Linux 6.15.

OpenSSL 3.5 released today as the newest feature update to this widely-used library for SSL and TLS protocol handling.

Wayland Protocols 1.43 is out this morning with one new protocol: xdg_toplevel_tag_v1.

After the CUPS lead developer left Apple and OpenPrinting taking up CUPS developer after Apple ceased development, CUPS 2.4 eventually materialized. CUPS 2.4 released in 2021 as the culmination of that work to restore the open-source development around this print server while today brings CUPS 2.4.12 for ending out the series and looking toward a future with CUPS 2.5.

One of the patch series that unfortunately weren't finished up in time for the recent Linux v6.15 kernel merge window were the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers. These are the drivers for supporting some of the Lenovo gaming-oriented hardware under Linux and all the more interesting with the Lenovo Legion Go S handheld having an official Steam OS option.

Canonical announced today they have released Ubuntu developer images for the Orange Pi RV2, a new RISC-V single board computer that is low-cost with the SBC featuring 8GB of RAM costing just $64 USD.

It turns out the Hierarchical Z "HiZ" implementation with AMD RDNA4 GPUs with the GFX12 graphics engine for early rejection of fragments before hitting the rendering pipeline is slightly buggy. Driver workarounds are needed for the HiZ/HiS support with RDNA4 GPUs to avoid potential hangs.

Following IBM engineers doing a lot of open-source compiler work around a new "arch15" that we suspected to be IBM z17 with Telum II processors, this morning IBM officially announced their next-generation mainframe hardware.

In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project has published its March 2025 status report that outlines exciting progress made over the past month.

Via Mozilla's Mozilla Builders initiative for fostering open-source AI projects is LocalScore, an interesting local AI large language model (LLM) benchmark for Windows and Linux systems. LocalScore has a lot of potential and also builds off the Mozilla Ocho Llamafile project as an easy-to-distribute LLM framework. LocalScore is still in its early stages but is already working well and will also be used in future hardware reviews on Phoronix.

At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" servers is even more exhilarating. As the first of a lot more Ubuntu 25.04 server benchmarks to come, today is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance on AMD EPYC 9005 compared to Ubuntu 24.10 and the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS releases.

DXVK 2.6.1 was just released as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other softwarefor enjoying older Windows games on Linux.

For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor.