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The Google Pixel 4a smartphones launched in mid-2020 and now in mid-2025 it looks like we might finally be close to seeing mainline kernel support for the Pixel 4a devices and other hardware making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon 730/730G/732G SoCs...

QEMU 10.0 was released today as the newest version of this emulator code that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

With the Linux 6.15 kernel settling down nicely, I've been testing out the current Linux Git state on more systems in looking for any performance changes. Unfortunately this week I ran into a large performance regression affecting the Nginx HTTP(S) web server. Here's a look at that problem currently affecting Linux Git.

The April 2025 ISO update is out today for CachyOS, the Arch based Linux distribution known for its aggressive out-of-the-box performance on modern hardware...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver had been Vulkan 1.4 conformant for Turing and newer GPUs, but now with Mesa 25.2-devel it's Vulkan 1.4 conformant going back to Maxwell GPUs. This change is exported to be back-ported to the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release as well for those interested in using this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver...

For those that have been wondering about the Linux support and more details around the Ryzen AI Max 300 "Strix Halo" APUs on Linux, here's a brief update...

Today's Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has evolved since its launch last October. Taking the launch-day benchmarks from October with the same hardware, we are revisiting the Intel Arrow Lake performance under Linux today using the newest system BIOS and the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 for seeing how the performance has evolved roughly over the past half-year.

One of the early features being merged for what will become the GCC 16 compiler following last week's GCC 15 code branching is CPU targeting support for the XuanTie RISC-V processors...

Eugen Hristev of Linaro sent out a "request for comments" patch series today proposing kmemdump for the Linux kernel as a new means to assist in debugging driver/system problems by making it easier to dump memory for specific areas/regions...

The Linux kernel has seen safeguards for select prior Intel CPU cores due to bugs around the MONITOR/MWAIT implementation with the processors. MWAIT/MONITOR bugs was found to be the cause of annoying issues at boot for Lunar Lake laptops and also previously plagued Goldmont Atom cores. It also turns out that Ice Lake servers can be subject to similar MWAIT/MONITOR behavior...

Merged yesterday to Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is an improvement for the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing code with an eye on next-gen Xe3 graphics hardware...

Last year a patch was raised for the Linux kernel that would report outdated CPU microcode versions as a security vulnerability. With Intel routinely issuing new CPU microcode updates for security vulnerabilities and addressing other functional issues, the Linux kernel would begin warning users when recognizing that outdated CPU microcode is deployed for a given processor. That patch has now been queued into a tip/tip.git branch and thus looking like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

With the recently released AMD ROCm 6.4 release for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware there are yet more indications around AMD's growing software ecosystem expansion. With ROCm 6.4 are additions to the HIP API for allowing linking of SPIR-V code objects, which is the intermediate representation used by Vulkan as well as with OpenCL and other Khronos APIs...

A 2021 era patch for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been revived and discussed in recent days around simplifying the memcpy and memset inlining strategies when compiling code with the "-mtune=generic" option. The patch takes the approach during that generic tuning to try to avoid branches. In doing so, some nice performance benefits are observed in some benchmarks...

Earlier this month was a look at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 using a Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 "Strix Point" SoC within a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. That was an interesting benchmark battle and providing a fresh look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack relative to Radeon Software on Windows. For those curious about the current Zen 5(C) performance, today's article are all of the CPU benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 performance under the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 and Windows 11 as pre-loaded by Lenovo.

Intel engineers have recently been working on the notion of cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for benefiting the likes of Intel and AMD processors sporting multiple caches. Posted today was the newest iteration of these patches that are still seeking to get more feedback and testing around this potential useful addition to the Linux kernel...

One year ago we covered Micron working on FamFS as a new file-system for fabric-attached memory with an emphasis on Compute Express Link (CXL) devices. That started off as a conventional kernel driver while now the newest patches posted this weekend are morphing it into a user-space driver via FUSE...

Merged last year in Linux 6.11 was getrandom() support in the vDSO for x86/x86_64 and then in Linux 6.12 was extended to LoongArch and ARM64. With the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle, this support for faster while still secure RNG for user-space is set to come to RISC-V...

After missing its bi-weekly development release regiment this past Friday, Wine 10.6 was tagged on Sunday as the newest routine update to this open-source software that enables Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other platforms...

Easter doesn't get in the way of Linus Torvalds' weekly kernel release regiment: Linux 6.15-rc3 is now available for testing the latest kernel fixes ahead of the stable Linux 6.15 kernel release coming around the end of May...