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Sandisk earlier this month announced the WD_BLACK SN8100 as what they claim is the current world's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD for consumers. Given how well the WD_BLACK SN850X performs under Linux as a PCIe Gen 4.0 drive, I decided to buy a WD_BLACK SN8100 for some Linux testing at Phoronix to compare to various other drives in the lab. Here is a preliminary look at the WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB performance under Ubuntu Linux.

The latest upstream Linux kernel improvement for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization "SEV" is the introduction of a virtual TPM driver...

With how well the open-source and upstream AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack is these days between the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver releases are not usually notable these days on Phoronix... The packaged Radeon Software for Linux drivers haven't been popular with gamers/enthusiasts in years given how good the upstream support is and those packaged bits mostly useful for those just running enterprise Linux distributions with older versions of Linux and Mesa. But the next Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release is set to introduce a big change...

For making use of AMDGPU user queue functionality, the latest Mesa user-space side work has been merged for Mesa 25.2 to enable support for high priority graphics user queues...

Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) updates for the in-development Linux 6.16 contain a fix so SGX is now less likely to cause a fatal machine check...

As an alternative to Coredumps dumping to a file or a pipe connected to a user-mode helper process, Linux 6.16 is introducing the ability to send Coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket...

Overnight Intel upstreamed their IPU7 firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository where Linux distributions will then be able to pick them up for easy consumption. IPU7 is for their latest Image Processing Unit for some web cameras on their latest-generation Lunar Lake platform...

Following the exciting EXT4 performance work, XFS atomic writes, and other exciting file-system pull requests submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have been submitted and merged for this next kernel version...

OBS Studio 31.1 Beta 1 is out today as the newest version of this popular cross-platform and open-source solution for gaming live streaming, desktop screencasting, and similar screencasting/live-streaming uses...

The MMC subsystem feature changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel. Interestingly and surprisingly, it's not until now that the Linux kernel has properly supported the graceful host removal for eMMC and SD cards...

NVIDIA just released their v575.57.08 driver as the first stable Linux driver in their R575 release branch...

There is a lot of exciting networking changes to find with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel both for wired and wireless devices as well as some exciting core networking improvements/optimizations...

One of the many advantages with the newly announced EPYC 4005 series for entry-level servers is support for DDR5-5600 ECC memory compared to the current Xeon 6300 series being limited to DDR5-4800 memory. With the launch-day EPYC 4005 "Grado" benchmarks earlier this month of the AMD EPYC 4585PX and EPYC 4565P I was running with DDR5-5600 ECC memory modules. But for those wondering about the performance when using DDR5-4800 comparable to the Xeon 6300 / Xeon E-2400 series, here are some comparison benchmarks for reference.

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

The cryptography subsystem updates have been merged for the start of the Linux 6.16 cycle. Notable with the crypto updates this round are more performance optimizations for Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX-512 and also enabling next-generation Intel QAT accelerators...

While OpenH264 support coming to Fedora was widely celebrated as part of offering a better codec experience on Fedora Linux, an increasing number of Fedora users have grown frustrated with the OpenH264 packaging in that it's been out-of-date for several months with a high severity security vulnerability...

There is a lot of exciting file-system changes landing for the Linux 6.16 kernel... EXT4 brings a "really stupendous performance" change, Btrfs also brings some performance improvements, XFS landed atomic writes, and Bcachefs continues stabilizing. For the EROFS read-only file-system its changes have been merged and includes support for Intel QAT acceleration...

Canonical is sticking to Ubuntu Linux releases every six months and a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years, but a new change to their development process is that they are now working to release monthly Ubuntu snapshots of their testing stream...

Intel engineers have added yet more PCI graphics device IDs for Battlemage to their open-source driver code within Mesa for Iris OpenGL and ANV Vulkan driver support...

With the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates sent out this week for the Linux 6.16 kernel there is support for a number of newer Intel hardware platforms...