Phoronix

Sent out today was the x86/mm pull request of the x86/x86_64 memory management changes destined for this next version of the Linux kernel. This pull has just one new patch but is worth mentioning...

Made public and mitigated within the mainline Linux kernel last month was the VMSCAPE vulnerability affecting both AMD and Intel CPUs. Now merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is adding VMSCAPE to the recently-introduced Attack Vector Controls functionality...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been sent out for the Linux 6.18 kernel with some notable additions...

During the month of September on Phoronix were 271 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts the most on Phoronix during September...

In addition to XFS enabling online fsck by default, Bcachefs being stripped from the mainline Linux kernel, and Btrfs improvements making for a notable first few days of the Linux 6.18 window, there's more. The EXT4, EROFS, and NTFS3 drivers are bringing the latest batch of file-system changes for Linux 6.18...

OpenSUSE Leap 16.0 is out today as this community Linux distributiom built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 16...

Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel...

The Academy Software Foundation's OpenColorIO "OCIO" project as a color management solution for motion picture production and related uses has added support for the Vulkan API...

Changes merged this week to the Mesa PowerVR Vulkan driver now allow it to support all of the functionality required by the Vulkan 1.2 specification...

OpenZFS 2.4-rc2 was released on Tuesday as the latest stepping stone toward the big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release...

Due to rising demand around system memory being pushed up in large part by HBM for AI applications, Raspberry Pi announced price increases on select products to help offset the rising LPDDR costs...

After originally hoping to publish the open-source code last year, today AMD published the initial openSIL code for enabling Phoenix SoCs to make use of this in-development CPU silicon initialization alternative to AGESA...

Qualcomm engineers have posted the initial patches for bringing up the newest Adreno 800 series graphics IP within the open-source MSM Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver...

In addition to the IEEE-1394 Firewire support still being maintained within the Linux kernel, another Apple tech still seeing code churn within the Linux kernel years later are the HFS and HFS+ file-systems. For the Linux 6.18 kernel are more fixes to the HFS/HFS+ support...

Debuting today is the newest NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series release...

Merged as part of the kernel hardening updates for Linux 6.18 is not a direct hardening improvement but rather a long overdue enhancement to the kernel configuration "Kconfig" system. The introduction of this new "transitional" keyword for Kconfig options can ease the process of renaming Kconfig options across kernel versions with less breakage/headaches for those maintaining their own kernel configurations/builds...

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

So far on this last day of Q3'2025 we are at just over 800 original Linux news articles for the quarter on Linux hardware and open-source software. Here is a look back at what proved to be most popular for the quarter...

While IEEE-1394 Firewire hardware in the wild is increasingly rare, modern Linux IEEE-1394 subsystem maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has committed to maintaining Firewire support until 2029. With the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel there are more incremental improvements to this code...

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem continues seeing a lot of new hardware support and code churn across AMD, Intel, and Arm hardware platforms for the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.18 there are several notable additions...

Just a friendly reminder that today is the last day for those wishing to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate. Less than 1% of readers currently do so for helping to support the site and its Linux hardware testing and open-source news operations over the past 21 years. Joining Phoronix Premium gets you ad-free access, multi-page articles on a single page, custom forum avatar support, and other benefits all while helping for operations to continue during this difficult period for the web/ad industry...

With Linux 6.17 was the decision by Linus Torvalds to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and not accept any new Bcachefs code into the mainline kernel but keeping the existing code within the tree. That was useful for those relying on Bcachefs to still boot a mainline kernel at least. Now for Linux 6.18, the Bcachefs code was removed from the mainline kernel...

Following AMD announcing the end of the AMDVLK Vulkan driver development in favor of focusing on the Mesa RADV driver for Linux systems, Red Hat engineer David Airlie who was one of the co-lead developers of the RADV driver shared some interesting insight on NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa...

Introduced this year with the Linux 6.16 kernel was the new functionality for reporting to users when running on outdated Intel CPU microcode since it can pose security vulnerability issues and/or functionality problems. The Linux kernel support for propagating this "old_microcode" reporting via sysfs relies on a static list of microcode versions corresponding to different Intel CPU generations. For the Linux 6.18 kernel this list is being updated to reflect modern baselines for Intel recommendations on CPU microcode...

WineConf as the annual Wine developer conference, for this open-source software allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, took place this weekend in The Hague. Several interesting talks took place including the usual keynote by Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard...

Linux ACPI and power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki today sent out all of the feature updates and changes intended for the now-started Linux 6.18 merge window. There are some new Intel additions as well as for the growing range of different ARM-based SoCs and other hardware...

Earlier this year NVIDIA announced Newton as an open-source physics engine focused on robotic simulations. This physics engine was developed by NVIDIA in cooperation with Google DeepMind and Disney Research. Today it's been contributed to the Linux Foundation...

Back in August Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of Project Battlematrix for help getting generative AI "GenAI" workloads running on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards. Out today are two new LLM Scaler beta releases for further enhancing the AI capabilities on Intel Battlemage GPUs...

Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0...

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window the RISC-V changes were rejected as "garbage" for being submitted too late in the merge window and with some code choices that upset Linus Torvalds. With lessons learned, the RISC-V changes for Linux 6.18 were submitted today during the first official day of this new kernel cycle...

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17, the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing...

With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix...

While the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window is just getting formally started following yesterday's Linux 6.17 release, one thing is already quite clear: there is a a lot of new Rust programming language code set to head into Linux 6.18...

Control-Flow Enforcement Technology "CET" is coming to the virtualized world with support for running within KVM guest VMs on Linux 6.18+. This CET virtualization support works for both AMD and Intel processors...

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17 kernel on-schedule as the kernel version powering Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and other upcoming Linux distribution releases and rolling releases...

Ahead of the stable Linux 6.17 kernel release expected in the coming hours, Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet put out a blog post around the current multi-Linux distribution support for the out-of-tree DKMS packages for this copy-on-write file-system, some of their plans moving forward, and still aiming to graduate from the "experimental" phase at the end of the year...

GraalVM has been an interesting and performant Java JDK that over time added support for additional programming languages and execution models. Following their 2022 announcement that GraalVM CE Java code would be donated to OpenJDK, Oracle recently announced that moving forward GraalVM will focus on non-Java languages...

There is a lot coming for AMD processors with the Linux 6.18 kernel. Of the early pull requests submitted in advance of the planned Linux 6.17 kernel release later today, there are a number of changes already lined up with some exciting AMD CPU feature additions for the next kernel version. These AMD changes for Linux 6.18 are all the more important with that kernel expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

Adding to the list of pull requests submitted early in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening are several cryptography-related improvements. In particular, some nice performance optimizations once again for the Linux kernel...

Introduced two years ago was the Intel/Codeplay oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL support to new hardware. As part of that the oneAPI Construction Kit was brought to RISC-V and other platforms. Out this week is now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 and sadly it drops Vulkan API support...

Following the release earlier this year of the Fish 4.0 shell that was ported from C++ to Rust, Fish 4.1 was released this weekend as the next major feature release...

The Linux kernel's audit subsystem/framework for greater insight into system activity for security purposes will now be able to properly cope with multiple Linux Security Modules (LSMs)...

All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users...

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December...

When it comes to open-source games, Unvanquished remains one of the most promising and interesting open-source FPS games from a technical perspective. With its next release, Unvanquished has been ported to the SDL3 library and is working well natively on Wayland...

Thirteen years after the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs initially launched as the Radeon HD 7000 series, recently there has been an effort to improve the support for both GCN 1.0 and the GCN 1.1 graphics processors with their open-source Linux driver stack. This recent effort has been led by one of the developers on Valve's Linux graphics team...

Linux engineer at Microsoft Christian Brauner sent out his set of 12 pull requests touching the VFS portion of the Linux kernel. These changes for the Linux 6.18 kernel include one pull request that touches the writeback code to address a situation of lockups being reported by users when systemd units read lots of files...

Among the early pull requests submitted already to Linus Torvalds in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening soon is the Btrfs file-system updates. Btrfs for Linux 6.18 has a few items worth calling out but no major features this cycle...

The sched_ext scheduler framework that allows creating kernel thread schedulers via BPF programs is ready with some updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.5 beta release, the focus has shifted to bug fixing ahead of the October release of Plasma 6.5.0. There have been some minor features to still squeeze in, a lot of bug fixing has commenced, and also some early feature work around Plasma 6.6...