There were 281 original news articles on Phoronix during the month of March along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length articles and benchmarks. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux and open-source content over the past month, in case you missed any of the interesting hardware launches, open-source software milestones, kernel changes, and other milestones.
Below is a look back at the most popular news and reviews on Phoronix during March. As always if you enjoy the content please consider
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The most popular articles/reviews over the past month included:
AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance
Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delivers Excellent Performance For Linux Developers, Creators & Technical Computing
Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPUs in retail channels, today the embargo lifts on being able to deliver Ryzen 9 9950X3D reviews and performance benchmarks. Simply put, for Linux creators, developers, enthusiasts, and others running technical computing workloads and other similar tasks on their desktop, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads and 144MB total cache makes for an excellent desktop CPU. In this review are around 400 Linux benchmarks looking at the captivating performance and competitive power efficiency of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
Ubuntu 25.04 Beta Delivering Some Nice Performance Improvements Over Ubuntu 24.10
Ubuntu 25.04 beta is set to be released today and thus this week I've begun testing out the latest Ubuntu 25.04 builds on different systems for seeing how this six-month Ubuntu Linux update is looking compared to the prior Ubuntu 24.10 release. In this first Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarking article is a look at the performance using an AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics.
SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Linux Performance
SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance
In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today's embargo lift, I've also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.
Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Performance For The AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series
With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company's official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.
AMD's 3D V-Cache Optimizer Driver For Squeezing More Ryzen 9 9950X3D Performance
Merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel was the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for being able to influence the kernel's scheduling decisions on AMD processors where only a subset of CCDs have the larger 3D V-Cache. With this new driver users can communicate their cache vs. frequency preference for influencing where new tasks are first placed if on the CCD with the larger L3 cache or with the higher frequency potential. Here is a look at the impact of using the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver with the new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
How The Ubuntu Linux Performance Has Evolved For SiFive RISC-V Over The Last Four Years
SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.
GNOME 48 & KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivering Great Wayland Desktop Experience On Ubuntu 25.04 For Linux Gaming
While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.
AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D Linux Performance
Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.
And then for the most popular news during the month:
Asahi Lina Pausing Work On Apple GPU Linux Driver Development
Following Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project that he founded for bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, Asahi Lina announced today that she is pausing work on all of the Apple GPU driver development she had been pursuing for Asahi Linux with the open-source DRM kernel driver as well as Mesa contributions.
Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Hyperlight Wasm" Project
Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party.
Torvalds Frustrated Over "Disgusting" Testing "Turd" DRM Code Landing In Linux 6.15
The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he's unhappy with some new "hdrtest" testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the "turds" it leaves behind and this code "needs to die" at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers.
Raspberry Pi RP2350 Now Available For Purchase, Stacked Memory Variant Coming Soon
Raspberry Pi last year announced the RP2350 second-generation micro-controller that debuted within their $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single board computer. Today they announced the RP2350 micro-controller is now available to purchase for your own micro-controller needs.
Wine Releases Framework Mono 6.14 In Taking Over The Mono Project
Last year Microsoft donated the Mono Project to Wine for its stewardship under the WineHQ umbrella. Today marks the Framework Mono 6.14 release as the first major Mono release in five years and the first under the WineHQ organization.
AMD Announces "Instella" Fully Open-Source 3B Language Models
Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.
The New Rust-Written NVIDIA "NOVA" Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15
For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn't too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau's extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.
Ubuntu Provides More Insight Into Their Decision Not To "-O3" Optimize All Packages
Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages.
Linux 6.14 Sees Last Minute Fix For A Two Year Old Regression Causing A 30% Performance Drop
Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit.
Microsoft Proposes "Hornet" Security Module For The Linux Kernel
Microsoft's newest open-source contribution to the Linux kernel being proposed is... Hornet, a Linux security module (LSM) for providing signature verification of eBPF programs.
NVIDIA Is Finding Great Success With Vulkan Machine Learning - Competitive With CUDA
It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA.
Intel Core 2 CPUs Have Been Affected By An Annoying Linux Kernel Bug For 5+ Years
A fix was merged to the Linux 6.14 kernel on Friday -- and also for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels over the coming days -- for fixing an annoying problem with Intel Core 2 processors. The problem, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2019, could lead to system stalls and boot delays for those still using Intel Core 2 CPUs with modern distributions.
ReactOS 0.4.15 Released For This "Open-Source Windows" OS With Tons Of Enhancements
It's been over three years since the last ReactOS open-source operating system release for this platform working on API/ABI compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Today ReactOS 0.4.15 was finally published.
KDE's KWin Wayland & X11 Code Are Now Split, KWin_X11 To Be Maintained Until Plasma 7
Yesterday marked the milestone of KWin's kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland code being split up. The Wayland and X11 code for the KWin compositor is now separate from each other but can be co-installable for systems wanting to support both X11 and Wayland environments.
Git 2.49 Released With Faster Packing, Rust Foreign Language Interface
Git 2.49 is out today as the latest feature update for this widely-used distributed version control system.
PostgreSQL Database Lands Initial Support For IO_uring: "Can Be Considerably Faster"
As a very exciting improvement for the open-source PostgreSQL database server, it has merged initial support for making use of IO_uring on Linux servers for asynchronous I/O and can provide for some nice performance improvements.
GNOME 48 Released With New Default Font, HDR Support, New Audio Player & More
GNOME 48 is officially out as the newest stable release for this open-source desktop that will be powering the likes of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04.
Nginx Rejects Dark Mode Support For Error Pages
A pull request was opened last week for adding web browser dark mode support for Nginx error pages. Unfortunate for those who prefer browsing in dark mode and then shocked when hitting Nginx-served 404 error pages or similar, the change has been rejected.
Intel AVX10 Drops Optional 512-bit: No AVX10 256-bit Only E-Cores In The Future
Intel updated their AVX10 whitepaper and associated open-source compiler patches around this next Advanced Vector Extensions standard... While AVX10 had intended to allow either 256-bit or 512-bit modes depending upon processor capabilities, Intel has dropped the 256-bit-only approach and going for 512-bit everywhere. Thus it would seem to indicate that Intel E cores of the future will properly support AVX 512-bit operation!
GIMP 3.0 Stable Being Released As Long-Awaited Update To Adobe Photoshop Alternative
After some 13 years of writing about GIMP 3.0 development, today is finally the day: GIMP 3.0 has been tagged and is in the process of being released.
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