Phoronix

Valve just published their Steam Survey results for October and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use on a relative basis...

Even with Linus Torvalds having been on holiday, Linux 7.4-rc1 is out today on-schedule for capping off the Linux 7.4 merge window...

A new KDE terminal emulator is in development as a modern alternative to Konsole. Kwi is this new terminal app being built atop the Ghostty library...

After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel's source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity...

Merged this weekend for Linux 7.4 and also marked for back-porting to current stable kernel versions are a number of fixes to the OverlayFS union mount file-system...

October brought the releases of Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 26.10, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop, and a wealth of other open-source software releases. The expanding use of AI/LLMs within Linux kernel development also made for interesting discussions in October. Microsoft bringing their Defender software to the Linux desktop was perhaps the biggest surprise out of October. Here is a look back at the past month...

Merged this weekend to Linux 7.4 Git were all of the perf subsystem tooling updates. Most notable to these tooling updates for dealing with performance counters and more on Linux is an overhaul to the Python code...

Linux 7.3 started out just under 41 million lines in total in the kernel source tree. In the end the Linux v7.3 tag came in at 41,019,555 lines as measured by cloc while now with Linux 7.4 we are inching ever closer to 42 million lines. On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record...

Just a friendly heads up that Phoronix.com and associated sites will be down briefly at around midnight PST / 3AM EST on 1 November for a failed drive in the NVMe SSD RAID array...

OpenShot is closing out the month of October by releasing OpenShot 4.1 as the latest major feature release for this useful open-source video editing solution...

Enlightenment 0.27 released at the beginning of 2025 and since then there's been no major feature update, falling off their roughly 12 month release cadence. But out this Halloween is Enlightenment 0.28 now with the better part of two years worth of changes...

Linux Mint is out with their October 2026 status report to outline various initiatives they have underway in their lead-up to the Linux Mint 27 stable release happening on/around Christmas...

A new feature merged last week for Linux 7.4 to help reduce AI/LLM generated noise from invalid/irrelevant testing configurations is now reverted due to a "crazy beast" in the VFIO subsystem...

I love a good performance optimization and there are several this week in the KDE space with Plasma 6.9 development heating up...

The Ceph kernel client changes have been submitted for Linux 7.4 ahead of its merge window expected to wrap up on Sunday...

In recent weeks GNOME developers have been discussing a formal Request For Comments "RFC" process for solving major technical questions and changes to GNOME. This formalized process for succeeding their ad-hoc processes up to now has reached consensus...

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.3 is out this weekend as a new feature update to this NVIDIA NVAPI implementation used by Valve as part of Steam Play with Proton for nicely integrating NVIDIA technologies into various Windows games running on Linux...

NVIDIA software engineers released CUDA Oxide 0.3 for closing out October. CUDA Oxide as a reminder is their experimental Rust to CUDA compiler that has been seeing a lot of activity in recent months...

Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system project born out of the Genode initiative is now using the project's own microkernel rather than a third-party microkernel...

Wine 11.21 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and as we near Wine 12.0 stable release happenings getting underway in about one month with the official v12.0 release expected early in the new year...

The PostgreSQL database server typically sees its annual feature release every September~October, but it's not coming until at least November if not longer this year. Due to the increased developer burden due to increased bug reporting and patches via AI/LLM activity, the PostgreSQL developers have been overwhelmed...

Following this month's release of Ubuntu 26.10, Ubuntu 27.04 development formally got underway today...

The x86 platform driver changes were merged this week to the Linux 7.4 kernel ahead of the merge window closing this weekend...

With today's AI/LLM capabilities, there is almost a new operating system heard about each week "coded from scratch" predominantly via AI agents. This week was no exception with another project hitting our email inbox. Though most of them are open-source, this one is closed-source in the name of security...

As anticipated, the AMD PerfOpt feature was picked up for the Linux 7.4 kernel. As shown already in multiple Phoronix benchmarks, AMD PerfOpt makes for a nice performance boost for AMD integrated graphics, especially for AI workloads...

The Linux kernel's "macsmc" driver was developed for supporting the system management controller (SMC) on Apple Silicon Macs for supporting the light sensor, fan control, and other sensors. That macsmc driver now is seeing work to extend it for better supporting older Intel-powered Macs...

Vulkan 1.4.367 is out this morning as the newest spec revision for this high performance graphics and compute API...

Fedora 45 is ready to ship! It will be formally released on Tuesday, 3 November...

The F2FS (Flash Friendly File-System) improvements have been merged for Linux 7.4 to further enhance this flash-optimized solution...

For those curious how NVIDIA Vera is scaling between single and dual socket deployments, here are some benchmarks I carried out a while back exploring the power and performance from one to two Vera CPUs.

The many Linux wired and wireless networking driver improvements were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window....

At this year's AMD Advancing AI event Hyperloom was announced among the ROCm improvements to expect. Hyperloom aims for agentic workload optimizations and more with quote powerful abilities if everything works out right. As part of the latest round of ROCm advancements, the Loom SDK v0.1 release was released today...

A change merged for Linux 7.4 is showing some mighty big speed-ups for the FAT32 file-system...

Since last week drm-misc-next pull requests have already been sent out to DRM-Next to begin staging new feature code for what's intended for the Linux 7.5 kernel cycle kicking off at the end of the year...

A number of improvements to KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 file server, were merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel...

The open-source D7VK project that implements the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5 / 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for faster, modern performance is out with a new release. This new D7VK 2.4 release came as a bit of a surprise since it was just last month D7VK announced its maturity status and more or less in maintenance mode. But brought up in today's D7VK 2.4 announcement is an even bigger surprise: there's now an implementation of the 3Dfx Glide API atop Vulkan...

Merged to the kernel all the way back in Linux 2.6.26 in 2008 was KGDB for improving the kernel debugging experience. KGDB works in conjunction with the GNU Debugger (GDB) to debug the kernel in a similar fashion to user-space debugging. KGDB requires the use of a second computer connected via serial or network cable. KGDB isn't widely used in recent years and a patch was floated today to remove it from the Linux kernel...

System76 began teasing today the new Thelio Prime Desktop as an AMD-powered Linux mini PC that will begin shipping in November...

Canonical engineers back in 2023 outlined plans for Ubuntu Core Desktop as their immutable Linux desktop. They made some good initial progress but since 2024 it went rather silent. Now they are reviving Ubuntu Core Desktop as their immutable desktop OS offering and with grand plans for the future...

With the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 and the nearly-released Fedora Workstation 45, Phoronix readers have begun inquiring about fresh benchmarks looking at how they stack up against the performance-optimized, Arch Linux based CachyOS. Up today are our first CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D2 desktop system.

NetBSD-current has added a new command line text editor to its base set of packages for helping out new users as an alternative to their vi and xedit editors currently included...

Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design...

While the Linux kernel and various file-system drivers already support the notion of the birth time for tracking a file/directory's birth/creation time, a slightly different provenance time "ptime" is now being proposed for the Linux kernel...

For those that want to reminisce over the days long ago of Compiz and Beryl on the Linux desktop, the Hyprland 0.57 Wayland compositor released today and has added Compiz-inspired wobbly windows support...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team just tagged the VKD3D-Proton 3.1 release. This version comes with a number of new features and performance optimizations while being the stable point ahead of VKD3D-Proton beginning to see a lot of new feature code for what will then become VKD3D-Proton 3.2...

GhostBSD 26.2 is out as the latest feature release of this FreeBSD-powered desktop operating system...

Paragon Software's Konstantin Komarov sent out the latest NTFS3 driver updates for this in-kernel NTFS read/write driver. With Linux 7.4, the NTFS3 driver is focused on being hardened against corrupted or maliciously-crafted NTFS volumes...

A patch has been proposed to remove the BSD-Compress support from the Linux kernel for the Linux networking point-to-point protocol (PPP) due to being unmaintained and having fundamental issues with the code that can lead to a fatal error...

An initiative led by CodeWeavers this year has come to fruition for improving OpenGL support with WoW64 for bettering Windows 32-bit application/game support while using 64-bit system libraries...

Merged today for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window is the infrastructure for enabling DMA-BUF support in the kernel's I/O path with the wonderful IO_uring framework...