During the month of September on Phoronix were 271 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles, all written by your’s truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts the most on Phoronix during September.
Below is a look at the most popular reviews/featured articles as well as the most popular news on Phoronix for the past month. As a friendly reminder, if you enjoy all of this original content created single-handedly by myself, please consider showing your support by becoming a Phoronix Premium member, especially during these very difficult times for the web publishing industry.
The most popular September 2025 featured articles/reviews included:
Linux 6.17 File-System Benchmarks, Including OpenZFS & Bcachefs
Linux 6.17 is an interesting time to carry out fresh file-system benchmarks given that EXT4 has seen some scalability improvements while Bcachefs in the mainline kernel is now in a frozen state. Linux 6.17 is also what’s powering Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box to make such a comparison even more interesting. Today’s article is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, Bcachefs and then OpenZFS too.
First Benchmarks Of Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu 25.10 On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Microsoft is preparing to ship Windows 11 25H2 as their newest incremental update to their operating system. Windows 11 25H2 is currently available via their preview channel in advance of the formal public release in October. With Canonical also putting the finishing touches on their Ubuntu 25.10 release also due for a stable release in October, here are some benchmarks looking at how those competing operating systems are fairing in various CPU benchmarks on the same hardware.
Intel Arc Pro B50 Linux Performance Benchmarks
Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux Performance Improving But Short Of AMD Ryzen & Intel Core Ultra
Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E “Concept” ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.
Raspberry Pi 500+ Benchmarks: Mechanical Keyboard Computer, 16GB RAM & NVMe SSD
Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.
The Performance Cost To Ubuntu WSL2 On Windows 11 25H2
It’s been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” Performance With ROCm 7.0
With last week’s official release of ROCm 7.0 failing to mention the AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” SoCs on the supported GPU list, a number of Phoronix readers and from elsewhere were inquiring whether or not Strix Halo works with the new ROCm release. Various AMD folks have mentioned Strix Halo with ROCm, so I decided to run some benchmarks for myself of ROCm 7.0 on Ubuntu Linux with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics on the Framework Desktop.
The Massive AI Performance Benefit With AMX On Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids”
Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids” processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.
Linux 6.17 With EXT4 Showing Some Nice Performance Improvements
With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it’s looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.
A First Look At Ubuntu 25.10 Performance On AMD Strix Halo / Framework Desktop
It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.
And the most viewed news for the month:
Linus Torvalds Grows Frustrated Seeing “Garbage” With “Link: ” Tags In Git Commits
Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing “Link: ” tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he’s had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he’s going to be more strict over “useless” link tags in Git commit messages.
Linus Torvalds Removes The Bcachefs Code From The Linux Kernel
With Linux 6.17 was the decision by Linus Torvalds to mark Bcachefs as “externally maintained” and not accept any new Bcachefs code into the mainline kernel but keeping the existing code within the tree. That was useful for those relying on Bcachefs to still boot a mainline kernel at least. Now for Linux 6.18, the Bcachefs code was removed from the mainline kernel.
A Major Trading Firm Has Open-Sourced The Latest Linux File-System: TernFS
XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives.
Multi-Kernel Architecture Proposed For The Linux Kernel
Code was open-sourced this week and posted to the Linux kernel mailing list as a “request for comments” (RFC) for a multi-kernel architecture. This proposal could allow for multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel could run on dedicated CPU Cores while sharing underlying hardware resources. This could also allow for some complex use-cases such as real-time (RT) kernels running on select CPU cores.
Raspberry Pi Launches A 1TB SSD For $70 USD
The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is… a 1TB SSD.
Git Developers Debate Making Rust Mandatory
Developers behind the Git distributed revision control system are debating whether to make Rust programming language support mandatory.
Ubuntu 25.10’s Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings
Ubuntu 25.10’s transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.
Ubuntu 25.10’s Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files… I quickly realized it’s due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.
Linux 6.18 Will Further Complicate Non-GPL Out-Of-Tree File-Systems
Out-of-tree file-system drivers not licensed/compatible with the GPL will have a new obstacle to deal with come time for Linux 6.18 later this year.
KDE Linux Enters Alpha As Reference Linux Distribution For The KDE Desktop
As an exciting announcement out of the KDE Akademy 2025 conference kicking off in Berlin, Germany… The KDE Linux distribution is now in alpha! This is their in-house reference Linux distribution for the KDE Plasma desktop.
AMD Officially Confirms The End Of The AMDVLK Driver
To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.
Firefox Finally Introducing Matroska / MKV Playback Support
Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska “MKV” content.
sudo-rs Is Now The Default sudo Of Ubuntu 25.10
Earlier this year Canonical announced plans for using sudo-rs as the Rust-written sudo implementation by default for Ubuntu 25.10 along with Rust Coreutils and other Rust system components. The sudo-rs goal has been achieved with the newest Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs now using this sudo implementation by default.
AMD ROCm 7.0 Officially Released With Many Significant Improvements
Overnight the AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags began appearing within the public Git repositories. Now AMD ROCm 7.0 is officially released as a very significant step forward for AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack for better competing against NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.
Bytedance Proposes “Parker” For Linux: Multiple Kernels Running Simultaneously
It was just a few days ago that a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel. Separate from that proposal from Multikernel Technologies, it turns out Bytedance has been working on their own similar solution called Parker. Today Bytedance lifted the lid on Parker as their solution for running multiple kernels simultaneously on the same hardware/system.
Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta Along With COSMIC Desktop Beta In Late September
The long-awaited beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 Linux distribution and the closely-aligned COSMIC desktop environment will be happening in late September.
Apache Software Foundation Unveils Its Branding Overhaul With New Logo & “The ASF” Name
The Apache Software Foundation announced last year that they would be changing its corporate logo and overhaul its branding after being criticized by American Indian activists. Today they announced the brand new Apache Software Foundation branding.
Rust Coreutils 0.2 Released With “Massive” Performance Gains, Production-Ready Ubuntu Support
The uutils project today released version 0.2 of the Rust Coreutils as their alternative to GNU Coreutils written in the Rust programming language. This release comes as Ubuntu 25.10 prepares to it by default.
Linux Ready To Upstream Support For Google’s PSP Encryption For TCP Connections
Not to be confused with AMD’s Platform Security Processor (PSP), but Google’s PSP Security Protocol (PSP) for encryption in-transit for TCP network connections is now ready for the mainline kernel. This initial PSP encryption support for network connections is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel.
GCC Rust Compiler Continues Quest To Compile The Linux Kernel Crate
The GCC Rust compiler “gccrs” compiler developers have been keeping at it toward their goal of being able to compile the Linux kernel’s Rust kernel crate and as part of that the Rust core library.
