Phoronix

Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026...

The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing...

Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough...

The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs...

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository...

Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series...

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake...

Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support...

For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices...

KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code...

Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware...

Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow...

Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel...

AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack...

With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.

Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization "vGPU" support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag...

Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18...

One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512...

In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers...

Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality...

This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire...

In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away...

The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language...

For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel's open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel's difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel's open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel's open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.

Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light... Especially as for what's known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.

In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.

Intel Tech Tour 2025 in Arizona was primarily focused on disclosures around Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake / Xe3 but during the opening keynote was also teasing a yet-to-be-announced inference-optimized GPU...

At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel's IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved...

A few months back it was brought up on the Intel driver mailing list around SR-IOV support for Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics. This goes along with Intel open-source Linux driver developers being quite busy on SR-IOV support for Battlemage dGPUs as part of their Project Battlematrix. Unfortunately, I wasn't provided any answer at Intel Tech Tour in Arizona whether SR-IOV support will be found with all Panther Lake SKUs or reserved for select offerings...

Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry...

Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree...

PoCL 7.1 is now available for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc...

FEX 2510 is out as the newest release of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Making FEX all the more popular is its continued ability for running Wine/Proton for handling Windows games on ARM64 Linux...

Canonical just officially announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10 as the newest non-LTS release of Ubuntu Linux...

So far the upstream GCC compiler hasn't seen any target enablement for Intel's future Nova Lake processors (a.k.a. -march=novalake support) but merged yesterday for the GNU C Library was initial targeting for Nova Lake as well as Wildcat Lake...

Last month the Alliance for Open Media "AOMedia" began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year. They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1...

Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to...

In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements...

Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.

Following last week's RISC-V pull request that brought support for the MIPS Vendor Extensions and other changes plus separately the SoC pull that added mainline ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support and the HiFive Premier P550, a secondary round of RISC-V architecture updates was submitted for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November...

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel...

The GNU Compiler Collection will be shifting to its "stage three" development in November as focusing more on bug fixing now and new ports and less on existing compiler functionality/features...

In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack...

In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle...

Meta already has Zstd (Zstandard) compression while this week they announced the release of OpenZL as a new open-source, format-aware compression framework...

In addition to a lot of rust code merged last week for Linux 6.18, more Rust code has since landed by way of the char/misc pull request...

Python 3.14 is now available as the newest annual major feature release for the Python programming language...

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 9000 series for industrial computing and automation platforms...

The many memory management "MM" changes were recently merged into the Linux 6.18 kernel, consisting of a number of interesting patch series...