Phoronix

The first beta release of the Godot 4.5 open-source game engine is now available for testing. Notable for Linux users is the continued quest toward Wayland support at parity to X11...

Going on for several months now has been an effort to wire up cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for the Linux kernel for helping out task placement for processors with multiple cache domains such as modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC and Intel Xeon platforms. This cache-aware scheduling has shown much potential for Linux with further enhancing performance on today's interesting CPUs. Out today is the third iteration of cache-aware scheduling with an important rework...

The Zed Editor remains a popular code editor written in the Rust programming language and providing modern features for this project started by former Atom developers. One of the long sought features for Zed has been having built-in debugger capabilities and that work has finally been merged to the project's codebase...

Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday...

Back in February the Framework Laptop 12 was announced as the company's first 2-in-1 convertible laptop while still being well-built and upgrade-friendly/modular as we have come to enjoy out of their various Linux-friendly laptops. Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework Laptop 12 and thus can share our initial impressions on this Intel-powered 12-inch laptop.

The Servo browser engine project born out of Mozilla as an early Rust project and now advanced by open-source developers from various firms continues moving forward. Servo has finally scratched animated GIF support off its TODO list among other features...

AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future...

Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family...

The Arch Linux project announced this week they are working to transition their Wine and Wine-Staging packages over to pure WoW64 builds. This "Windows on Windows 64-bit" allows for 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux platforms without needing 32-bit software libraries/prefixes present and overall a big architectural win...

Alienware G-Mode / Game Shift is a feature designed to "enhance gaming performance" on select Dell/Alienware laptops with the press of a key. But at least under Linux with select laptop models it can actually regress performance compared to just running the laptop in the "performance" platform profile...

The Qt Creator 17 integrated development environment released today with a variety of improvements for this primarily C++/Qt focused developer IDE...

Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver has supported various elements of 2D image handling while the latest addition in enhancing this open-source driver's support is for sRGB images...

For those interested in Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) for power and performance telemetry data among other metrics on Intel hardware, the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel has squeezed in support for existing Lunar Lake and next-gen Panther Lake SoCs into the PMC SSRAM telemetry driver...

Version 25.05 of the Open 3D Engine "O3DE" was released today for this open-source project born out of Amazon's Lumberyard engine nearly four years ago. With O3DE 25.05, this open-source game/simulation engine continues to be advanced by Amazon/AWS, Meta, Huawei, and other organizations...

The X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 point releases were issued today to fix the latest batch of security issues...

NVIDIA today released a new version of their R575 series stable Linux driver to provide a few additional fixes for customers...

AMD's Advancing AI 2025 event last week was very busy with announcing the Instinct MI350X and MI355X, the ROCm 7.0 preview, and debuting the AMD Developer Cloud. In addition, they held pre-briefs around the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and buried in as part of that was another new disclosure: Radeon Test Drive. Radeon Test Drive was brought up as something that's coming later this summer from AMD partnering with different hardware vendors to make it easier for developers/customers to try out ROCm on Radeon GPUs...

Prior to the AMD Advancing AI 2025 event last week, AMD shared additional details on their forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series processors.

Qt 6.10 Beta 1 released today as the next stepping stone for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit. Qt 6.10 isn't bringing any new modules but is deprecating the Qt Charts and Qt Data Visualization code...

KDE Plasma 6.4 is out today with many fantastic improvements for this open-source desktop...

Merged recently for the Linux 6.16 kernel was initial support for Intel QAT Gen6 hardware. A new qat_6xxx driver was added for supporting the next-gen QuickAssist Technology accelerator IP being found with upcoming Intel Xeon processors. Patches being prepared now for the Linux 6.17 kernel are building out a new decompression service for that next-generation hardware...

Merged for Linux 6.14 at the beginning of the year were the Intel THC drivers for supporting the Touch Host Controller IP found in modern Intel Core Ultra laptops for dealing with the touchpad, touchscreen, and related touch-control functionality. This open-source driver is still being built-out ahead of next-generation Core Ultra laptops hitting the market...

The Dbus-Broker project from the BUS1/systemd developers is out with its first update in more than one year for this D-Bus implementation that aims to be more reliable and higher performing than D-Bus itself...

Posted by Intel engineers a few days ago were a Mesa patch to begin recognizing some Intel Battlemage graphics cards as being the larger "BMG G31" variant. This evening those patches were merged for Mesa 25.2 for what's rumored to be potentially the Arc B770 graphics cards to launch later in the year...

Last week alongside announcing the AMD Instinct MI350X/MI355X and the ROCm 7.0 software preview, AMD also introduced the AMD Developer Cloud as a new means for developers to easy try out Instinct accelerators with their own software and with the ROCm compute stack already setup. Having tried out prior AMD cloud compute environments, as soon as my email invite for the AMD Developer Cloud arrived I decided to give it a try.

Rust developers acknowledge lengthy compiler times can be a significant issue that limits the productivity of developers working with this programming language. For helping in determining different combinations of issues around compiler performance, the Rust team has started a survey to collect more information on the issues...

For those interested in a high-end motherboard for AMD Ryzen 9000 / 8000 / 7000 series processors that is marketed for creators and equipped with high-end features, the ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard that retails for $500+ USD will soon see hardware monitoring support under Linux...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project providing an operating system with binary compatibility for Windows software and drivers can finally properly handle full-screen games/apps...

For those with a laptop from Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer Uniwill, two new drivers are being proposed to enhance the mainline Linux kernel support for Uniwill laptops by enabling additional functionality to work under Linux...

FreeRDP 3.16 is out today as the newest update to this open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) library and client implementation. This Apache-licensed project continues to be one of the leading implementations of the Microsoft RDP protocol for use outside the confines of Windows...

The Intel Observation Architecture "OA" performance counters support has been upstreamed to Mesa for upcoming Xe3 Panther Lake integrated graphics...

Following the release of Linux 6.16-rc1 last Sunday that capped off the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linux 6.16-rc2 is now available with an initial week's worth of bug/regression fixes. Linux 6.16 development continues in aiming toward a stable release around the end of July...

Back in May a big patch series was published for reworking the Linux kernel to make the SMP support unconditional. Right now those that happen to be running Linux in a uniprocessor (1 CPU core) configuration can build with "CONFIG_SMP" disabled but the proposed patches would make symmetric multi-processing support always present. Those patches took a step forward this week and could be merged for the Linux 6.17 cycle later in the summer...

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code...

While the Linux 6.16 merge window just passed one week ago, already there are new feature changes beginning to queue for the Linux 6.17 kernel later in the summer...

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver...

Linux 6.15 mistakenly shipped with a nasty power regression for some systems, such as those relying on the "nosmt" option to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading / Hyper Threading. That idle power regression was fixed for Linux 6.15.2 and Linux 6.16 Git by reverting the troubled patch that introduced the regression. Now merged ahead of Linux 6.16-rc2 is a proper fix for that problematic patch so it could be re-merged without the power fallout...

Sasha Levin just sent out an initial "request for comments" patch series for the Linux kernel in aiming to establish a Kernel API Specification Framework...

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland...

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue and there being a number of recent controversial changes to the desktop platform...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS published their latest monthly report to outline progress made over the past month...

While KDE Plasma 6.4 is set for release next week, there are already exciting feature improvements brewing for Plasma 6.5...

Wine 10.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle, including the ability to auto-fix more file-system check "fsck" errors...

In addition to Intel recently upstreaming Linux support for new QAT "Gen 6" hardware as their next-generation QuickAssist Technology IP, Intel today began posting Linux kernel driver patches for a new version of their Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA). It looks like upcoming Xeon processors will be rolling out a lot of new accelerator IP...

LibreOffice 25.8 beta is now available for this popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice 25.8 has been baking many improvements for this popular Microsoft Office alternative and leading office suite option for the Linux desktop...

Back in April at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of the new C4D family of VMs powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Back on launch day I looked at the C3D vs. C4D performance at some of the smaller, more common VM sizes. In today's article is a look at the top-end performance of the C4D family with 384 vCPUs. For those wondering about the compute potential of the c4d-standard-384, here are some benchmarks of this 192-core / 384-thread EPYC Turin configuration compared to the prior C3D AMD EPYC Genoa based instance that topped out at 360 vCPUs.

Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions...

Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out...

Introduced last week with Vulkan 1.4.317 was Vulkan Video support for VP9 video decoding. Following that the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver landed its VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 support and now similarly the open-source Intel Vulkan driver has too...