GStreamer 1.27.1 released this week as the first development version toward the GStreamer 1.28 release coming later in the year. GStreamer 1.27/1.28 is bringing a lot of modern feature enhancements for this widely-used multimedia library...
It's been a while since there have been any new patches in the Wine-Staging experimental area to note. More patches though have continued working their way from Wine-Staging to upstream/mainline Wine while this weekend Wine-Staging 10.12 is out at 292 patches atop upstream Wine and containing two new patches...
In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel...
NVIDIA software engineers ended out the week by releasing a new beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) SDK. The RTXNTC software is NVIDIA's interesting solution for compressing material texture sets with very promising results for helping to reduce game data sizes moving forward...
Wine 10.12 has been uncorked as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...
The AMD engineering led work on Attack Vector Controls for the Linux kernel could be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel with the remaining patches now being queued within a TIP branch...
With the feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 25.2 expected to take place next week and kick off the release process for this quarterly Mesa 3D version to debut as stable in August, I've begun running more benchmarks of this latest code on popular GPUs. As it pertains to the newest AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics processors, the most exciting area with Mesa 25.2 are the Vulkan ray-tracing improvements. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the upcoming Mesa 25.2 performance for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card on Linux.
Going back several months have been patches out of Google to optimize AMD cache flushing for KVM-based Linux guest virtual machines when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). As anticipated, that AMD SEV cache flushing optimization work looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle...
Sent out on Thursday along with Intel's huge Xe driver pull request with new features was the drm-misc-next material for the week. Notable with the drm-misc-next code were actually a set of AMDGPU driver patches to enhance the debugging with the information exposed via the DebugFS interface...
OpenGL doesn't receive nearly as much love these days as the Vulkan API, but over the past several months there's been at least one notable new extension in the works: cross-vendor mesh shader support with the pending GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension. Beginning today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D upstreaming process has begun for introducing mesh shader support for this Radeon OpenGL driver...
QuestDB 9.0 debuted today as the latest major update to this high performance, time-series database that is open-source under an Apache 2.0 license. QuestDB continues to be built using a combination of Java, C++, and Rust for being an interesting time-series database...
For those who seldom update to new compiler versions, GCC 12.5 was released today as the newest and final update to the GCC 12 compiler that debuted back in 2022...
Intel has some terrific improvements lined up for their modern "Xe" kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. New hardware support, SR-IOV preparations for Battlemage, other Intel Battlemage work, and also preparations for the upcoming multi-device support...
For those interested in a small form factor PC running on the open-source Coreboot firmware, Netherlands-based vendor NovaCustom is launching an Intel Meteor Lake powered NUC box running on the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot...
Merged today to the open-source NVIDIA "NAK" compiler code within Mesa 25.2 is Kepler instruction scheduling. This real instruction scheduling support for GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors can provide some significant performance benefits in select workloads...
Greg Kroah-Hartman just released the Linux 6.15.6 point release as well as the Linux 6.12.37 LTS kernel and new point releases in prior-year Long Term Support kernel versions. The main headline of today's stable kernel releases are picking up the mitigations for the Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) mitigations that were disclosed this week for AMD processors...
The release candidate of the Blender 4.5 3D modeling software is now available for testing. There are many great improvements to find with Blender 4.5 and this new version is all the more important in being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release for this popular cross-platform 3D modeling software...
The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements...
Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software...
Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today's world...
Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop...
Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more...
A big merge today to Mesa Git ahead of next week's Mesa 25.2 code branching is removing the pre-DMA-BUF winsys support and as part of that clearing out all of the old DRI2 driver support...
ZLUDA Version 5-preview.43 was released today as this open-source CUDA implementation for use on non-NVIDIA GPUs, with one of the current focuses being on enabling CUDA on AMD Radeon GPUs with ROCm...
Last week I published fresh benchmarks showing how AMD's EPYC 4005 series for budget servers can outperform the original EPYC 7601 flagship processor when EPYC first launched during the Zen 1 period. Even with lower core counts and fewer memory channels, the modern EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors were able to outpace that original EPYC "Naples" flagship processor from 2017. With carrying out the fresh re-testing of the AMD EPYC 7601 on a modern 2025 Linux software stack, in today's article is a look at how the EPYC 7601 Zen 1 performance compares to the EPYC 9005 "Turin" series with today's flagship EPYC 9755 and EPYC 9965 processors.
Red Hat this morning went public with RHEL for Business Developers, an expansion of their RHEL Developer Program to make it easier for business developers to make use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no-cost for their development efforts...
Miracle-WM 0.6 is out today as a mega release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor by Canonical/Ubuntu developer Matthew Kosarek. Miracle-WM provides tiling window manager support inspired by i3 and Sway while being one of the most pronounced users of the Mir code...
Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state...
The Mesa 25.2 code is expected to be branched next week to kick off the release process for this quarter's iteration of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. As such, there's going to be a mad dash over the next week to land lingering features and other improvements for Mesa 25.2. Making it into Mesa Git today was a big set of 42 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver...
Google yesterday lifted the lid on their work around Skia "Graphite" as a new rasterization back-end designed for modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and supporting multi-threading by default. Skia Graphite aims to deliver much better performance within the Chrome/Chromium web browser...
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 on Tuesday as the newest monthly update to this in-house Linux distribution used throughout the company and by external parties...
The first alpha release of PHP 8.5 was issued last week in kicking off the release cycle in working toward the official PHP 8.5.0 release later in the year...
Just over one year after the Amarok 3.0 release after a six year hiatus that brought it to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Amarok 3.3 is out today as the first version taking it to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6...
Here's an unexpected company match... GlobalFoundries announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS. Yes, the company formerly part of Wave Computing and before that Imagination and Silicon Graphics during its long history. MIPS in recent years hasn't been focused on its namesake CPU architecture but rather RISC-V core designs...
Last month the Framework Laptop 12 began shipping as an upgrade-friendly, convertible 2-in-1 laptop that is friendly with Linux as we've come to expect out of Framework Computer devices. The launch-day Linux testing at Phoronix of the Framework 12 was done out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux with the defaults on it and the other comparison laptops tested. But as we've shown with recent Intel and AMD laptops, ACPI Platform Profile adjustments can make a significant impact on bettering the performance or extending battery life with more power efficient operation. For those wondering about the impact of the platform profiles on Framework Laptop 12, here are some power and performance benchmarks.
Following all of the Linux and broader open-source software enablement around Power11 the past three or so years, IBM today formally announced their new Power11 hardware...
The AMD Hardware Feedback Driver has been queued up via a TIP branch for expected merging during the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. This new open-source AMD driver is designed to help make the kernel's scheduler make better decisions around task placement for heterogeneous processor designs with a mix of the "classic" and "dense" cores...
In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts...
The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon "YTK" as its own localized fork of this toolkit...
Interestingly a batch of new AMD GPU firmware files were upstreamed to linux-firmware.git yesterday in preparing for the next AMD product launch of hardware featuring RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics...
FEX 2507 is now available for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 games and applications atop 64-bit ARM Linux devices whether they be AArch64 servers or ARM64 single board computers and other devices...
OBS Studio 31.1 is now available for those using this cross-platform free software for screencasting and other screen recording purposes. OBS Studio 31.1 is another great step forward for this open-source software that has a devoted following and user-base across Windows, macOS, and Linux...
U-Boot 2025.07 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source boot loader that is widely-used among embedded devices across different CPU architectures...
The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook...
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