During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics… Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your’s truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year.
Below is a look at the 20 most popular news articles on Phoronix for 2024, out of the 3,021 original news articles in total. A similar listing of the most popular Linux hardware reviews/benchmarks will come in a separate article on Phoronix. While it was very fun and exciting with all of the Linux software advancements made in 2024, from a web publisher perspective times remain very tiresome and challenging with the rampant ad-block use and the poor state of the ad industry. It’s only due to my unrelenting passion for Linux that this site continues now into its 21st year. So as a New Year’s resolution, perhaps try turning off your ad-blocker if you fall into the camp. Or you can join Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site without ads, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. Tips via Stripe and PayPal remain graciously accepted. Thanks and here’s to hopefully a more viable 2025.
Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
Following yesterday’s news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the matter.
Intel Spots A 3888.9% Performance Improvement In The Linux Kernel From One Line Of Code
Intel’s Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.
OpenWrt Affected By Security Issue That Could Have Led To Compromised Build Artifacts
A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.
HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD
One of the limitations of AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed.
One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down – Cites “Nontechnical Nonsense”
One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased “nontechnical nonsense” raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.
Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source
Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.
Linux 6.8 Network Optimizations Can Boost TCP Performance For Many Concurrent Connections By ~40%
Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections.
A 2024 Discussion Whether To Convert The Linux Kernel From C To Modern C++
A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code.
Linux 6.10 Honors One Last ReiserFS Request Made By Hans Reiser
While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.
Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Quietly merged into this week’s Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers.
Linus Torvalds Lands A 2.6% Performance Improvement With Minor Linux Kernel Patch
Linus Torvalds merged a patch on Wednesday that he authored that with reworking a few lines of code is able to score a 2.6% improvement within Intel’s well-exercise “will it scale” per-thread-ops benchmark test case.
KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Released With Wayland Explicit Sync, Input Capture Portal & More
The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.
KDE Plasma 6.1 Performing Much Better On Older Intel Integrated Graphics
With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.
KDE Plasma 6.1 Lands Dynamic Triple Buffering Support
The four month old KWin merge request by Xaver Hugl to allow for triple buffering has been merged and just in time for the Plasma 6.1 code branching!
KDE Receives New Human Interface Guidelines For 2024
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has been working with various KDE designers and developers to establish a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
Rust-Written Linux Scheduler Showing Promising Results For Gaming Performance
A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language. His early results are interesting and hopeful around the potential of a Rust-based scheduler that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time.
AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support For Ryzen AI On Linux
With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series “Ryzen AI” was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn’t been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI.
Fedora 41 Looks To Offer A KDE Plasma Mobile Spin
Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn’s Fedora 41 release.
KDE Making Good Progress On HDR, Better Gamescope Integration
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE’s KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve’s Gamescope compositor.
Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs
There’s been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list… Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.
