Phoronix

Sent out today was another week's worth of features and other code changes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver. We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material for next month's Linux 7.3 kernel but there is some nice feature work in store for this week...

Today's Steam client beta update brings some new game streaming enhancements for Linux gamers...

Intel today sent out their latest batch of kernel graphics driver updates that are ready for staging ahead of next month's Linux 7.3 merge window...

Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to Microsoft Windows...

A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest...

A few weeks ago there was excitement in the FreeBSD camp with FreeBSD 16 set to retire the last of its GPL code from the base system. While the retiring of the dialog code proclaimed that it was the last remaining piece of GPL software in the base system for FreeBSD, it turns out now that there is some GPL code within the FreeBSD kernel...

The GCC Steering Committee announced today that they have accepted the recommended policy of the GCC AI Policy Working Group, which means no "legally significant" code contributions made via AI/LLM agents will be accepted into this open-source compiler...

In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller... ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC...

There's yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients...

A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into the benchmarking mix.

A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck...

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop...

In addition to the deprecation and stripping down of AF_ALG, another piece of the Linux kernel crypto code steaming ahead toward removal is the crypto_rng abstraction layer...

ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux...

Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points...

Last October on Phoronix we were first to point out there being some mysterious intrigue around a new x86 implementation from a "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" with the developer involved not elaborating on the matter. Now that same developer has posted another semi-cryptic message to the Linux kernel mailing list to talk about 16-tile and 32-tile Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) implementations. To date Intel only has 8-tile AMX...

Fwupd 2.1.7 is out today as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering a nice firmware upgrade story on Linux systems...

Back in April, Framework Computer announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up re-design of their modular/upgradeable laptop. This new Framework Laptop 13 Pro features a much larger battery (74Wh), LPCAMM2 memory support, a full CNC aluminum chassis, haptic touchpad, and a new power-optimized touch display. Paired with the very efficient Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs, the Framework Laptop 13 Pro ends up being an incredible offering from the hardware perspective.

Ubuntu has long provided hardware enablement "HWE" stacks for Ubuntu LTS releases to provide a newer kernel and Mesa drivers and more for better supporting new/modern hardware on the long-term support Ubuntu Linux releases. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical will also now be providing a virtualization HWE stack for shipping newer virtualization / confidential computing features...

Last month I wrote bout new AMD Linux patches introducing a new "low power" CPU core type as an alternative to their standard performance cores and dense efficiency cores. That work now is poised to land with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel...

The Wayfire modular and extensible Wayland compositor formerly used by default on Raspberry Pi SBCs is nearing its v1.0 release. Wayfire 0.11 was released on Sunday for this Compiz-inspired, wlroots-powered compositor with that being their hopeful last planned version before Wayfire 1.0 releases...

The FreeBSD project published today their Q2-2026 status report that highlights all of their interesting open-source development initiatives for the past quarter. A lot is happening including FreeBSD seeing an AMD ROCm port and also their own NTSYNC driver being created...

NVIDIA and more than two dozen other companies have started the Open Secure AI Alliance for helping to keep open-source AI models secure. The other founding members range from Microsoft to Adobe, IBM, Red Hat, SpaceX, OpenClaw, Palantir, and others...

In working toward releasing the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in less than one month's time, out today is Linux 7.2-rc5 to ship this week's latest bug/regression fixes and help facilitate more testing of this in-development kernel version...

Along with this weekend's release of GNU C Library 2.44, the GNU Binutils 2.47 release is also now available for this important set of binary utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms with the GNU toolchain...

A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure"...

Besides the FreeBSD graphics and WiFi drivers lagging behind Linux and other operating systems, the FreeBSD audio driver support and handling of audio streams with FreeBSD on the desktop can be problematic depending upon the hardware/system. One of the most active mailing list threads this week in the FreeBSD camp was over the "tragic state" of FreeBSD audio/sound support...

Auto-CPUFreq is one of the open-source projects striving to be a CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux systems to improve battery life without making any real compromises to the user experience. Out today is v3.1 as the newest feature release of Auto-CPUFreq...

Since 2017 in Linux 4.12 has been the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver where it was introduced into the staging area and remains there nearly a decade later. The rtl8723bs driver for this Realtek 802.11n WiFi SDIO driver has seen a lot of code cleaning over the years and all these years later still is needing lots of code clean-ups from unnecessary code abstractions to dealing with malicious WiFi APs for what Greg Kroah-Hartman has called a "beast of a driver". The latest twist is there now being patches for adding Realtek RTL8723BS and RTL8723B onto the existing RTW88 driver...

Firewire still isn't dead yet on Linux. Current plans call for maintaining IEEE-1394 Firewire on Linux at least through 2029 and with today's Linux 7.2-rc5 kernel release is a fix for those wanting to leverage IPv4 networking over Firewire...

Following last month's beta release, Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS derived mobile operating system for select smartphones and tablets...

Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project...

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME...

GNU developers today released GNU C Library "glibc" 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms...

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too...

Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project...

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward...

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as "broken" and "harmful" due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine "QCE" driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it's even worse than anticipated...

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window...

Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file...

Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition...

At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in "open" mentions and a ramp that's been building each year at the AMD events...

At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under Linux now and against the AMD/Intel competition. Unfortunately, it's regressed even further than the last round of testing.

After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development...

In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers...

While AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 "Venice" for taking their server offerings to the next level in the agentic AI era.

Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack...

The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things...

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images...