During the month of January on Phoronix were 292 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 13 featured-length Linux hardware reviews and other multi-page benchmark specials. Here’s a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source news and content over the past month.
It was an exciting start to 2025 with the Intel Arc B570 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards launching plus a lot of other announcements out of CES. Plus with the Linux 6.13 kernel being released and the Linux 6.14 merge window happening, a lot of excitement over in kernel space. Plus Mesa 25.0 feature development was wrapped up and a lot of other notable open-source achievements — including more open-source code from Microsoft.
Below is a look at that most exciting news from January 2025 on Phoronix. If you enjoy all of the original content on Phoronix each and every day, please consider showing your support this year by joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. Tips via PayPal and Stripe also continue to be graciously accepted during these difficult times in the web publisher space. Thanks.
The most popular Linux news for January included:
Linux’s Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down
Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement.
Microsoft Announces Open-Source DocumentDB NoSQL Database
In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database… Where it gets weirder is that it’s named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary.
Steam On Linux Ends 2024 With A Nice Boost To Its Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use At 74%
Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times.
KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta Released With A Ton Of Improvements
Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.
The Most Exciting Kernel Optimizations, New Hardware Support & Other Linux 6.13 Features
With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here’s a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025.
NTSYNC Driver Ready For Enhancing Windows Gaming With Linux 6.14
Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant “-next” branch ahead of Linux 6.14.
A Microsoft-Contributed Change To Linux 6.13 Is Causing A Last Minute Ruckus
A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.
KDE Internet of Things “Kiot” Started To Provide Nice Home Assistant Integration
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he’s been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things “Kiot” and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls.
ISD: A New Interactive Way For systemd Management
ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more “Interactive SystemD” for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd.
X.Org Server Development Hit A Decade High For The Number Of Commits In 2024
To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014… While there were many more commits than in years prior, it’s not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop.
Linux 6.14 With Rust: “We Are Almost At The ‘Write A Real Driver In Rust’ Stage Now”
Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent out the pull request of all the driver core updates for Linux 6.14, which ends up being a big deal for those interested in the prospects of Rust drivers for the Linux kernel.
Fedora 42 Looks To Ship Optimized Executables For Different x86_64 Capabilities
Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.
Completed NTSYNC Driver Merged For Linux 6.14: “Should Make Many SteamOS Users Happy”
The “char/misc” pull request was submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window and already merged to the Linux Git tree… As expected, the completed code around the NTSYNC driver has landed for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives as a big win to Wine / Steam Play (Proton) Windows gaming on Linux.
Much Faster Suspend & Resume For Some Systems With Linux 6.14
Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel.
LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 Brings Many Open-Source Office Suite Improvements
LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 is out for testing today ahead of the stable release of this free software office suite around the start of February.
New Linux Patches Enhance AMD Radeon Video Encode/Decode For Older GPUs
Since Raven/Picasso APUs and Navi GPUs there is Video Core Next (VCN) as the modern unified video encode/decode block for Radeon graphics. But for those with older Radeon GPUs where there are the Unified Video Decode (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) blocks, a set of Mesa patches is looking to enhance the video acceleration support on Linux systems.
AMD Announces The AMDGPU Composition Stack “ACS” For Advanced Linux Desktop Features
An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers… The AMDGPU Composition Stack “ACS” is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.
Arch Linux User Repository Requires Packages To Support x86_64: No ARM-Only Software
It turns out the Arch Linux User Repository “AUR” has a strict mandate that packages must be able to be built for the x86_64 CPU architecture. Software not supporting x86_64 like ARM-only software is not permitted for the common Arch Linux AUR repository.
Cloudflare Talks Up Multi-Path TCP But Dings Linux’s Less Than Ideal Support
The folks at Cloudflare have published another great engineering blog post with this time covering Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) as a very interesting addition to the TCP spec. But there they acknowledge the less than ideal Linux support especially on the client side.
Several Linux DRM Drivers Orphaned Due To Developer Health
Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer.
And the most popular Linux hardware reviews:
Intel Arc B570 Graphics Performance On Linux
Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we’ve been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Linux GPU Compute Performance Benchmarks
While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.
AMD Radeon On Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0-devel vs. NVIDIA R565 Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance
Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics “Blackwell” and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series “RDNA4” later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.
AMD Announces Ryzen 9 9950X3D & Ryzen AI Max, Previews AMD RDNA 4 Graphics
AMD’s CES 2025 keynote was used to announce a slew of new products. They are just announcements today without any immediate availability or any hardware reviews to publish, but a look ahead for what is on the horizon for AMD in the consumer space in 2025.
Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack
Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers… Today it’s a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 / RTX 5090 Linux Gaming Benchmarks
Over the past week I have published a number of GeForce RTX 5090 Linux compute benchmarks as well as the GeForce RTX 5080 on Linux. With that early NVIDIA R570 Linux driver build as part of the CUDA 12.8 package I was asked to wait on Linux gaming benchmarks until the proper RTX 50 Linux driver is released. Well, it was released this morning with the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux beta availability and have in turn been pushing the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 through a number of Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Linux GPU Compute Performance
Last week was the review embargo lift on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card while today the review embargo lifts on the GeForce RTX 5080, both of which graphics cards are officially available in the retail channel tomorrow (30 January). Due to waiting on the official NVIDIA R570 Linux driver release that is recommended for the RTX 50 series Linux gaming, today’s tests at Phoronix are looking at the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU compute performance.
Llama.cpp AI Performance With The GeForce RTX 5090
In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmarks delivered last week a number of readers asked about AI performance and in particular the Llama.cpp performance with the RTX 5090 flagship graphics card. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the GeForce RTX 5090 performance in Llama.cpp compared to prior RTX 40 and RTX 30 graphics cards.
Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Running Well For Larger Workloads, More Multi-Tasking
Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it’s been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.
The Compelling AVX-512 Performance Advantage On AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin”
Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5’s full 512-bit data path support compared to the “double pumped” approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.
