Phoronix

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet...

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut...

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset...

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers...

Kicking off November for Arch Linux users happen to be the releases of Pacman 7.1 as well as Archinstall 3.0.12...

Restructuring to the Linux kernel's PCI Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support is set to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most...

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming...

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6...

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December...

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option...

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation...

Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers...

Last week there was a fix for a "serious performance regression" in the Linux kernel's power management code that affected some Intel-powered Chromebooks. This week the power management fixes ahead of Linux 6.18-rc4 is addressing another performance regression...

AerynOS 2025.10 ISOs were released today for closing out the month of October. AerynOS as a reminder is the Linux distribution that was started by Ikey Doherty and originally known as Serpent OS that has since evolved into an open-source team effort...

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting application is the latest creative app now supporting high dynamic range (HDR) on Linux when using Wayland...

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.330 brought five new extensions, Vulkan 1.4.331 is now available with another two new extensions for this high performance graphics and compute API...

The Genode operating system framework continues innovating over a decade and a half later on this original open-source OS creation and with that Sculpt OS as its general purpose OS. Out today is Sculpt OS 25.10 to incorporate the latest enhancements to the platform...

The Rust project announced today the release of Rust 1.91 as the latest update to this popular programming language priding itself on memory safety capabilities...

As expected after noting this morning that ROCm 7.1 release preparations were underway, ROCm 7.1 is now officially released as the newest step-forward for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware...

This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that goes hand-in-hand with the Fwupd open-source firmware updating utility celebrated the milestone on Wednesday of crossing 135 million firmware updates...

AMD Linux engineers continue to be quite busy working on enabling next-generation Zen 6 processors that will begin shipping next year. The newest patch working its way to the Linux kernel is expanding the range of Zen 6 CPU models detected by the kernel...

Qt Creator 18 is now available as the latest version of this Qt/C++-focused integrated development environment...

Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware...

AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1...

Following last week's initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.19, another round of new AMDGPU / Radeon / AMDKFD material was sent out today to DRM-Next. Notable with this pull is the Display Core "DC" work for analog video connectors as the initiative from one of Valve's contractors for improving the Radeon GCN 1.0 era GPU support with the AMDGPU driver...

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used on Linux systems for 3D support...

Following last month's Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS beta and COSMIC desktop beta, System76 has now shared their stable release plans for this long-awaited LInux distribution release with their Rust-written custom desktop...

Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olak just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads...

On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have since sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

In addition to talking up the openSFI firmware collaboration between AMD and Intel at the OCP Global Summit 2025, AMD engineer Raj Kapoor provided a status update on the company's much anticipated openSIL effort for working to ultimately replace AGESA with a new open-source CPU silicon initialization codebase...

Intel Compute Runtime 25.40.35563.4 is out today as the newest update to their open-source GPU compute stack for Level Zero and OpenCL on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware...

Yesterday the GitHub-hosted AMD XDNA driver code saw a new tagged release as version 202610.2.21.17. That itself wasn't too interesting but while diving into there is new yet-to-be-merged code for a new "NPU3A" revision to their NPU3 IP in Ryzen AI...

An engineer on Apple's static security tools team announced publicly that they have prototyped a tool to apply security hardening across entire C++ codebases. Ultimately their plan is to open-source and upstream this static analysis based tool into LLVM...

AMD this week uploaded new Family 19h CPU microcode for Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors to the linux-firmware.git repoository that in turn is pulled by the Linux distributions for offering the latest firmware/microcode to users...

SUSE today formally announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16. Given we are in the year 2025, SUSE is heavy on hyping up AI capabilities with SLES 16...

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is now expected to introduce the new "ethosu" accelerator driver for supporting the Arm Ethos U65/U85 neural processing unit IP...

Following Canonical announcing plans to better support NVIDIA CUDA on Ubuntu Linux and make it easier to install as well as SUSE better supporting CUDA along similar lines, Red Hat today affirmed their plans to do the same. Red Hat will be making it easier to use the NVIDIA CUDA stack across RHEL, Red Hat AI, and OpenShift products...

TrueNAS 25.10 was released by iX systems today as the newest feature release of this Linux-based platform for network attached storage (NAS) devices and other storage appliances...

Microsoft today released Azure Linux 3.0.20251021 as the latest update to their in-house Linux distribution...

The Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative has uncovered three more security vulnerabilities affecting the X.Org Server and the derived XWayland source code...

An improvement to Intel SGX slated for Linux 6.18 is supporting the EUPDATESVN found on Intel CPUs since the Ice Lake generation. EUPDATESVN allows for updating the security SVN version after run-time patching for addressing any Intel SGX vulnerabilities to avoid having to carry out a platform reboot...

Earlier this month Intel announced Crescent Island as a Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM optimized for AI inferencing at the enterprise scale. Crescent Island isn't expected to begin sampling until H2'2026, but already for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel initial Crescent Island support is being submitted for the Xe kernel graphics driver...

It's Fedora 43 release day! This latest installment of Fedora Linux is now available for download with Fedora Workstation 43 using the GNOME 49 desktop, the modern Linux 6.17 kernel powering this distribution release, and many exciting improvements and other leading-edge software updates powering this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is expected to land initial support for USB3 with Apple Silicon devices...

For those making use of Device Mapper's DM-VERITY target for transparent integrity checking of block devices, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel has an enticing performance optimization en route that for some processors can lead to nearly doubling the hashing performance...

Linaro engineer Adhemerval Zanella recently sent out a set of 59 patches to allow building the GNU C Library "glibc" with the LLVM Clang compiler as an alternative to GCC...

Stride 4.2.1.2485 is now available as the latest feature release for this open-source and cross-platform game engine written in C# while still having first-rate Linux support. Stride is formerly known as Xenko and offers realistic rendering and virtual reality (VR) support...