Phoronix

The Steam Survey results are out for November 2025 and continue to be very positive for the growing adoption of Linux gaming thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame...

FreeBSD 15.0 is officially released as the newest major update to this leading BSD operating system...

SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted the Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.19 on Friday, ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release that took place on Sunday. This copy-on-write file-system continues seeing some enticing feature work and other improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it's likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release...

When it comes to AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compiler support much of the emphasis is on the LLVM/Clang compiler stack with their official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as well as having the AOMP downstream compiler fork and the like. But the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" does continue allow targeting AMD GPU targeting with its "AMDGCN" back-end and using the likes of the OpenMP API. It's not too often seeing new AMD GPU activity there for GCC but merged today is now support for managed memory...

While some Linux distributions have begun establishing AI policies, we haven't seen any communicated from the Ubuntu camp yet but will apparently be permitted at least for project infrastructure. AI is being used currently in an effort to help modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker...

Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the core Rust programming language infrastructure updates intended for the Linux 6.19 merge window. In the pull request he also notes that moving forward the minimum supported Rust version for compiling the Linux kernel will likely follow whatever the minimum Rust version currently in use by the latest Debian stable release...

Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected and withdrawn from being v6.19 material...

Among the big flow of pull requests today for this first day of the Linux 6.19 merge window are some core kernel bug handling improvements...

Fresh off Framework Computer becoming a new corporate sponsor of the LVFS / Fwupd, there is a new Fwpd 2.0.18 update for this solution that enables convenient and easy system and device/peripheral firmware updating under Linux...

Following yesterday's Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers...

The media subsystem updates were sent out this morning for the now-open Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some new Rockchip drivers and other media drivers that are new for Linux 6.19...

Due to the ongoing RAM shortages in the industry amid ongoing massive demand for AI servers,Raspberry Pi announced today they are having to raise prices on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers. They have also launched a 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 version too for those not needing much memory and wanting to keep pricing to a minimum...

It was just earlier this year that Linux developers considered dropping the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the mainline Linux kernel for being unmaintained. But then some new developers stepped up to maintain the drivers and there has been new HFS/HFS+ file-system patches each kernel cycle since. With the now in-development Linux 6.19 kernel there are some nice year-end clean-ups to these file-system drivers...

It was an eventful past month with Valve announcing the new Steam Machine, a lot of new Linux kernel activity, the continued increase of Rust programming language adoption by open-source projects, a lot of fun hardware benchmarks, and more. There were 283 original news articles on Phoronix the past month about Linux/open-source software and hardware plus another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most popular content over the past month...

The good news is that Intel tonight posted a pull request for open-source Gaudi 3 accelerator support for the mainline Linux kernel! The bad news is that it's coming quite late in the product cycle, much later than the former excellent Habana Labs open-source track record, and their hopes of squeezing this code into the Linux 6.19 kernel may be dashed...

Linux 6.18 stable is now available! Linux 6.18 ushers in many new features and changes while also is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel version...

It's been an exciting weekend for Linux distribution released with new versions of Endeavour OS, CachyOS, Solus and now a new NixOS release...

With the Linux 6.18 kernel likely being released later today, here is a look at some of the features on the table for the next kernel cycle, Linux 6.19. The list is based on changes queued in various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window. There's always the possibility of last minute change of plans or objections raised by Linus Torvalds, but this should provide an early look at some of the features more than likely to be merged for Linux 6.19...

Ahead of the FreeBSD 15.0 stable release expected to be announced next week, the FreeBSD project today published their Q3-2025 status report to outline their various development accomplishments from July through September...

With the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle there are yet more Rust kernel bindings being introduced and other additions to make it possible to write more Linux kernel drivers within the Rust programming language. Among the new Rust additions expected for Linux 6.19 are making it possible to write Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus drivers in Rust...

Queued up via the Linux kernel's RDMA development Git tree is "BNG_RE" as the next-generation RoCE driver from Broadcom...

A new SoC vendor and in turn new SoC/platform support is set to premiere in the Linux 6.19 kernel with the initial Black Sesame Technologies C1200 support...

The Genode OS Framework 25.11 release was issued this weekend as the newest update to this original open-source operating system effort built around a micro-kernel design and various novel design approaches...

Making for an exciting holiday weekend night is the Algol 68 programming language front-end "ga68" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase. After COBOL language support landed in GCC 15 earlier this year, next year's GCC 16 release is adding support for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language...

In addition to the releases today of updated Endeavour OS and CachyOS, Solus 4.8 is out as the latest version of another desktop Linux distribution popular with enthusiasts...

In addition to the release today of a big refresh to Endeavour OS, CachyOS is out with their latest ISO refresh for this additional Arch Linux powered desktop OS. CachyOS for its November 2025 refresh brings installer improvements, now installs additional packages for media acceleration when capable Intel graphics are detected, handling for Bcachefs with its DKMS module, and other improvements...

With the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release expected to take place tomorrow on 30 November, here is a reminder about some of the new hardware support and other interesting features coming in this next stable version of the Linux kernel...

For those looking to improve their clipboard management experience on the GNOME desktop, Copyous is a new GNOME Shell extension serving as a new clipboard manager...

Endeavour OS is one of the popular desktop Linux distributions built around Arch Linux providing a nice out-of-the-box experience. Since their last ISO refresh back in March there hadn't been much news from the project nor any new ISO releases for this rolling-release distro. But thankfully today they are back in the saddle with a new ISO release, Endeavour OS 2025.11.24 "Ganymede"...

With the Linux Vendor Firmware Service serving more than 135 million downloads for Linux users updating their system and device firmware, LVFS has been working to get more hardware vendors to contribute either engineering resources or directly contributing annual dues as sponsors. Framework Computer is now the first one to have executed an agreement under these new sponsorship efforts...

While there have been a number of Intel Linux engineers laid off over roughly the past year, other Linux kernel engineers opting to pursue employment opportunities elsewhere amid the ongoing challenges and restructuring at the company, and shifts in their open-source strategy, there's some good news as we work toward the 2025 holidays. Intel is currently hiring for two more experienced Linux kernel software engineers...

KDE developers have been busy ending out the month of November with a number of new features and fixes queued up for next year's Plasma 6.6 desktop release...

Niri 25.11 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust-written, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor...

As the one and last friendly reminder, if you enjoy the daily and original content found on Phoronix.com but not liking ads and wanting to view multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and more: the 2025 Black Friday / Cyber Week deal is ending Monday to help support the site while enjoying a discounted rate...

Wine 10.20 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software enabling Windows applications and games to run on Linux. This is also with Wine 11.0 stable quickly approaching...

As some additional enticing Linux kernel patches posted this week for review, an updated patch series is working to optimize code generation during context switching...

This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rather than maintaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This fully open-source and latest NVIDIA Linux driver support was compared to NVIDIA's official 580 series Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards were tested for this thorough GPU driver comparison.

In addition to the proposed Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlocks for better performance, another interesting performance-enhancing patch series posted in the past 24 hours for the Linux kernel is for improving the performance of single-threaded tasks running on high core count CPU desktops / workstations / servers...

We eagerly await to see if the AMD ISP4 driver will be ready for mainlining in the imminent Linux v6.19 merge window but it's getting down to the wire and thus looking less likely it will make it unless action is taken in the coming days. Today though a sixth version of this AMD ISP4 image signal processor driver was posted for this last piece of the puzzle in enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop as well as future Ryzen high-end laptops...

The NTFSPLUS Linux kernel driver as a modern NTFS file-system driver implementation continues quickly taking shape as it aims to become the most performant and feature-rich NTFS read/write driver for Linux systems...

A Huawei engineer has sent out patches proposing HQspinlock as a Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlock for the Linux kernel. HQspinlock aims to addresss inefficiencies within the Linux kernel's spinlock on modern NUMA-systems due to frequent and costly cross-NUMA cache-line transfers...

Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it's on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it's a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged...

It's been two months since there were any notable Intel Linux engineering departures to note following various layoffs and voluntary departures this year that have unfortunately impacted their Linux/open-source talent. Sadly this US Thanksgiving is a new departure to note: one of Intel's maintainers for the Xe open-source Linux kernel graphics driver is leaving the company. This is for the modern Xe driver used by default since Lunar Lake and playing a pivotal role for Intel Linux graphics moving forward...

Following up on the discussion from earlier this month among GCC developers over switching to C++20 by default for the GCC compiler as the default C++ standard when not otherwise set, that change has indeed happened. Merged now is the change defaulting to C++20 (well, the GNU++20 dialect) rather than C++17/GNU++17 when not otherwise specified when compiling C++ code...

In addition to Intel Arrow Lake desktop performance evolving nicely on Linux over the course of 2025, the Intel Arc B-Series graphics that launched last December with the Arc B580 have evolved quite nicely too with their open-source driver stack. With it coming up on one year since the Arc B580 launch, here is a look at how the GPU compute performance has evolved since that point. Similar Intel Arc B580 Linux graphics comparisons are also coming up in a follow-up comparison on Phoronix.

Zlib-ng 2.3.1 is out today as the first stable release in the v2.3 series for this Zlib replacement that carries a variety of performance optimizations for speedier compression/decompression...

For those Linux desktop users in the US needing another reason to be thankful this Thanksgiving, a huge and long-awaited accomplishment is ready for merging to the kernel: the Color Pipeline API that is important for HDR is ready for merging! As of last night the code is queued in DRM-Misc-Next for this years-in-the-making effort...

Just a few days ago I wrote about the Glibc math code seeing a 4x improvement on AMD Zen by changing the used FMA implementation. Merged overnight was a new generic FMA implementation for the GNU C Library and now yielding up to a 12.9x throughput improvement on AMD Zen 3...

Canonical announced today the Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" Snapshot 1 images as their first monthly ISO snapshots of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...