Phoronix

With the Linux 6.19 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow (8 February), here is a reminder about the top features to expect from this next version of the Linux kernel...

The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing...

Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler's codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target...

Following the September release of the KDE LInux reference distribution for the KDE desktop in alpha form, KDE Linux developers have been working toward the beta release with more improvements to this open-source desktop distro...

A Linux kernel engineer at Microsoft is working on a useful Linux desktop improvement. Hamza Mahfooz who previously worked for AMD on their AMDGPU Linux display driver code has been spearheading work on a KMS recovery mechanism to help kernel mode-setting display drivers recover in case of problems...

GNOME's Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default...

Ahead of the planned Linux 6.19 stable kernel release tomorrow, there have been some last-minute fixes submitted for the scheduler code, including for performance regressions...

While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release...

There is less than two weeks to go until the official KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release. Plasma 6.6 is still seeing bug fixes in this final stretch of development while KDE developers are also busy already on Plasma 6.7 feature work...

Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January...

Sent out today as a request for comments (RFC) by a Linux kernel engineer employed by IBM is a machine learning library for the Linux kernel. The intent is on plugging in running ML models to the Linux kernel that could be used for system performance optimizations and various other purposes...

Well, here's an unexpected combination... Toyota's Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite...

While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month's GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support...

Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel's much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today's article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in looking at the performance potential when pushing the Core Ultra X7 358H with a higher power budget.

In addition to their ongoing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end work for upcoming GFX1250 and recently the GFX13 target for their graphics IP, today AMD compiler engineers introduced a new "GFX1170" target to the LLVM codebase that is also called RDNA 4m...

A nice, overdue usability improvement is on the way for those using Apple Macs under Linux. Finally there will be the ability to preserve the same backlight brightness across reboots under Linux...

Sent out today as a request for comments is a new patch series for Dynamic Housekeeping and Enhanced Isolation (DHEI). DHEI aims to provide run-time adjustments to kernel behavior around CPU isolation for helping with latency-sensitive tasks. The expressed goal is for helping cloud-native orchestrators and high frequency trading platforms dynamically re-partition CPU resources without downtime...

As of this week Oracle's latest VirtualBox development code begins to work with Linux's native KVM back-end. Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality...

GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week...

One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren't upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git...

Engineers Micha ygowski and Piotr Krol of open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM in Brussels on open-source for confidential compute infrastructure. With Intel not making strides to fully open-up their FSP package, the talk was centered around the modern AMD open-source firmware efforts led by their openSIL initiative for open-source CPU silicon initialization to replace AGESA in the Zen 6 timeframe...

The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard...

Ardour 9.0 is out today as the latest major feature release to this leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for musicians, recording engineers, and other audio editing needs...

Merged a year ago to the Linux kernel's Xe graphics driver was a change to disable D3Cold across all Battlemage GPUs. This was done due instability issues around the D3cold to D0 power state transition. Finally with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle that restriction is being loosened with restoring D3cold support with Battlemage GPUs aside from a specific NUC...

LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers...

Yesterday was our first look at the Intel Panther Lake Linux performance with the Core Ultra X7 358H and focused on the CPU performance. In today's benchmarking is a look at the very exciting Xe3 graphics found with the top-tier Panther Lake models: the Arc B390 Graphics with 12 Xe cores.

Following the release of TrueNAS 25.10 for this Linux-based, OpenZFS-running operating system focused on network appliances / storage devices, iX systems has shared some of their plans for TrueNAS 26 this year...

Canonical and SpacemiT announced today that Ubuntu Linux will be officially supported on SpacemiT's new K3 RISC-V SoC. What makes the K3 interesting is being one of the first available RISC-V RVA23 designs...

The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5...

For those not fond of the increasing use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel or FreeBSD's considerations for Rust in its kernel, you can perhaps find refuge within NetBSD. One of the NetBSD developers has explained why you likely won't be finding Rust code within the NetBSD kernel anytime soon...

Intel ISPC 1.30 is now available as the latest feature update to their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a variant of the C programming language to easily target their array of CPUs and GPUs...

The Linux 6.19 merge window had introduced support for larger pages and compression with the Nouveau kernel driver, which ultimately should help provide a performance win to this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Mesa NVK driver was ready to make use of that new kernel driver functionality but then it ended up being disabled due to bugs. Fortunately, for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel those issues should be resolved so then the Mesa NVK usage of the larger pages / compression support could be restored...

Following December's release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates...

Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their "50.beta" releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March...

Microsoft engineers and other stakeholders have been developing LiteBox as a security-focused library OS written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux Virtualization Based Security "LVBS". The design is for LiteBox to operate as a secure kernel protecting the normal guest kernel via virtualization hardware...

You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian's data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian's all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don't properly communicate it to the Debian project...

Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week's worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week...

In recent months Intel Linux engineers have been quite active in preparing for next-gen Nova Lake processors. That work has included initial Xe3P graphics support and enabling display support and related display/graphics functionality. The newest now is enabling Nova Lake P including the Xe3P_LPG graphics support...

While link-time optimizations "LTO" can deliver some nice performance benefits out of this compiler optimization technique, it can make debugging said binaries more challenging. Due to various bugs in Mesa being attributed to the use of compiler link-time optimizations when compiling Mesa, the builds are being blocked on using LTO...

With GIMP 3.2 releasing soon, GIMP developer Ondej Michal presented at FOSDEM 2026 this past weekend on some of the feature work being eyed for post-3.2 developments...

While Vulkan Video is a cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode and decode API that is beginning to gain traction by multimedia applications and frameworks, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has for now taken a step-back on its encode support with newer hardware. Newer Intel graphics hardware is seeing Vulkan Video encode support disabled due to insufficient testing...

Earlier this week Rust Coreutils 0.6 released while out today is GNU Coreutils 9.10 as the de facto standard for this set of core utilities on Linux systems and other platforms...

LibreOffice 26.2 is now officially released as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source and cross-platform free software office suite...

A one-line patch to the HP WMI x86 platform driver for Linux was posted for allowing the HP OMEN Transcend Gaming Laptop 14-fb1xxx to correctly hit its rated TDP limit for allowing better performance outside of the Microsoft Windows confines...

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments...

AMD announced today an expansion of their FPGA prodict line-up with the Kintex UltraScale+ Gen 2 for "intelligent, high performance systems" for medical, industrial, and other fields...

While there is the Linuxulator as a kernel-level solution on FreeBSD for running unmodified Linux binaries that can even work for gaming on FreeBSD, running BSD applications on Linux isn't talked about as much. But developers have found that for those wanting to run BSD applications in Linux environments, the urunc lightweight container runtime can work out rather well for efficiently handling BSD apps on Linux...

A few months ago at SIGGRAPH was a demo of Blender with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) integration. The pull request is now open for landing NVIDIA DLSS support into Blender for better quality upscaling/denoising and performance but concerns persist over the licensing due to NVIDIA DLSS binaries...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on the latest batch of Fedora 44 change proposals as they work toward nearing the end of feature work for this spring update to Fedora Linux. Plus some early changes for Fedora 45 have also been granted...

In time for next month's GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit...