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Linux 6.18 IOMMU Changes For Intel, AMD, Apple & RISC-V

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:55 a.m. | Original

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems.

The Intel VT-d IOMMU driver has been updated against the latest upstream VT-d specification and brings several fixes and code clean-ups.

ISD 0.6 Released For Interactive Systemd Management

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:43 a.m. | Original

ISD is an independent interactive systemd management tool with a nice text user interface "TUI" for dealing with systemd units and other systemd functionality. Out today is isd 0.6 with many fixes and other refinements to this helper for administering systemd-backed Linux systems.

The isd 0.6 release is predominantly driven by accumulated bug fixes as well as some minor features. Today's release announcement proclaims, " If isd has been buggy for you this release should greatly improve your experience. "

SMB3 & KSMBD See Performance Improvements With Linux 6.18

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:31 a.m. | Original

For those making use of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol support on Linux, the SMB3 client code and KSMBD server code has landed some performance work and other fixes for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

On the SMB3 client side there are three performance improvements merged as part of the changes. There are some minor optimizations by Henrique Carvalho of SUSE for different conditions. There are also two important directory leases fixes. Plus the SMB3 client code is now using common arc4 library code

KDE Plasma 6.5 Sees More Fixes & More Early Feature Work For Plasma 6.6

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:17 a.m. | Original

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly feature recap for all things Plasma. Some of this week's KDE Plasma highlights include:

- Plasma 6.5 when set to a non-English language, the Emoji Selector will now let you search using the English names in addition to the names in

DM-PCACHE Merged For Linux 6.18 Along With Other DeviceMapper Changes

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:10 a.m. | Original

The DeviceMapper changes have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel that includes the new DM-PCACHE target.

DM-PCACHE is a high throughput, low-latency DAX read/write cache . This persistent memory cache can be used in front of slower block devices and according to its developer faster than the likes of BCache and DM-Writecache:

Notice: Brief Server Downtime Overnight

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 9 p.m. | Original

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array.

Starting around 3AM EST / 7:00 GMT on Saturday, Phoronix.com may be offline for about one hour. CloudFlare Always Online should kick in but the Phoronix Forums and similar will be unavailable for commenting.

One of the disks in the Phoronix.com web server's RAID array is being replaced in the data center by our friends at

Wine 10.16 Released With Fast Synchronization Support Using NTSYNC

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 8:16 p.m. | Original

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux.

Wine 10.16 is a very exciting update. Fast synchronization support is now working on modern versions of the Linux kernel using NTSYNC ! Building off the initial bits in Wine 10.15 , it appears the NTSYNC integration for Wine is now in good standing for the 10.16 release when using Linux 6.14 or newer

Linux 6.18 Will Be A Big Improvement For Servers Encountering DDoS Attacks

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 2:55 p.m. | Original

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.

Merged for Linux 6.18 as part of the networking changes is this patch series from Google engineer Eric Dumazet. Dumazet explains there:

"This series is

Linux 6.18 Lands Compress-Offload API For Opus Audio Codec

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 12:38 p.m. | Original

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers.

The notable API addition for Linux 6.18 in the sound subsystem is adding compress-offload API handling for the Opus audio codec. This contribution from Linaro is for raw Opus audio support for compress offloading from the CPUs. Besides adding the API support, for Linux 6.18 the Qualcomm qdsp6 driver

Rusticl Performance For AMD Strix Halo Against ROCm OpenCL

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 10:27 a.m. | Original

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

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