With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.

With Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical is planning to make use of more Rust-written system components and so far most of that talk has been about transitioning to Rust Coreutils "uutils" in place of GNU Coreutils. It's also been firmed up today that Canonical is planning on using sudo-rs by default as a replacement to sudo.

PoCL 7.0 is on approach as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that began as a CPU-based OpenCL driver implementation but with time has added support for other back-ends from Intel Level Zero to NVIDIA PTX and AMD HSA.

The Btrfs file-system looks like its new "CLEAR_FREE" feature will be ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle.

Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat was at the PremDay on-premise computing conference in Paris to talk up this open-source firmware updating solution and being what customers want. The presentation video and slides are now available for those needing additional material in helping sell your organization on the benefits of LVFS/Fwupd.

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel was AMD INVLPGB support for broadcast TLB invalidation on recent Zen cores. AMD INVLPGB use by the Linux kernel can provide for some nice performance gains while now similar support for Intel processors is coming via a kernel patch series working on Intel RAR TLB invalidation support.

Last month IBM announced the z17 mainframe powered by Telum II processors and today they announced the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 servers.

FEX 2505 is out today as the newest version of this user-space software that enables running x86_64 binaries on ARM64/AArch64 Linux hosts with great speed that a number of games and applications are enjoying much success with this emulator.

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their April 2025 status report to outline interesting changes made over the past several weeks to this innovative project.

As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks. I ended up taking things a bit further after those reviews and have now extended it to a 21-way laptop comparison of AMD Ryzen and Intel Core SoCs from the past few generations in looking at their performance on Ubuntu 25.04 across more than 200 benchmarks.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar sent out a patch series this morning to enable additional kernel features by default for the Linux default configuration "defconfig" on x86-based kernels. The defconfig improvements aim to reflect modern Linux x86 kernel use with various features commonly being enabled by distribution vendor kernels and related improvements.

Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year.

Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers.

Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64).

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing.

For those that happen to have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA or are shopping for a higher-end Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake desktop motherboard for Linux use, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA is the latest motherboard seeing hardware sensor monitoring support under Linux with the next version of the kernel.

The EXT2 file-system's direct access "DAX" mode is being deprecated and expected for removal at the end of 2025, after this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

In addition to Bcachefs working on better self-healing / automatic repair capabilities, this modern copy-on-write file-system is also working on faster snapshot deletion performance. A patch series was posted this week to speed-up the deletion of snapshots though it comes with another bump to the on-disk format of the file-system.

As another alternative to the likes of the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V developer board, the Andes Voyager is in the process of seeing patches reviewed for mainline Linux kernel support.