Phoronix

Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the "49.rc" tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month's GNOME 49 stable release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc4 as the newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 in working toward the stable release in late September...

AerynOS 2025.08 ISOs are now available as the third release of the year for this innovative Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS...

This week a new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO was published for Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop optimizations. With this new ISO the Linux 6.17 kernel is now leveraged for the latest upstream kernel bits. Additionally, the new X1E ISO is finally working again on the Acer Swifth 14 AI laptop that I have used for my Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing...

The Krita digital painting and graphics editing application aligned with KDE/Qt could soon have color management support working on Wayland Linux desktops for enjoying a better creative experience on HDR (High Dynamic Range) displays...

This morning's "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of Linux 6.17-rc4 being released later today has a fix for old Intel Pentium 4 processors as well as an Attack Vector Controls update for handling the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) mitigation...

Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has merged a set of patches for this Rust-written open-source OpenCL driver to reduce the amount of memory allocations that happen and in turn helping reduce CPU overhead...

IceWM Is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this X11 window manager known for its speedy and simplicity...

This week's round of HID subsystem "fixes" for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel include adding a number of new device IDs and other alterations for supporting new hardware...

Wayfire 0.10 was released this week and its integration with the underlying wlroots rendering code has been overhauled. In turn this opens up Wayfire to having experimental support for rendering using the Vulkan API...

The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems...

Philip Rebohle working for Valve just released DXVK 2.7.1 as the newest version of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan API translation layer. DXVK 2.7.1 enables yet more games to correctly render now with DXVK on Linux...

GTK 4.20 released on Friday as the newest version of this open-source toolkit aligned with the GNOME project. GTK 4.20 brings improved support for Wayland on Linux along with platform enhancements for macOS, Android, and Windows too...

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed...

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job...

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director...

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17...

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices...

For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.

Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs...

Version 25.08 of the Genode OS Framework has been released for this open-source operating system framework designed for software safety and security...

Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices...

Released overnight in beta form is OBS Studio 32.0, the next feature release for this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform application for desktop streaming/recording...

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.15 LTS through Linux 6.17 Git kernel performance using the latest stable and development kernels compared to the Long Term Support (LTS) kernels over the past four years. For having hardware support back to Linux 5.15 I was using an AMD EPYC Milan-X server. In those benchmarks there were some nice gains and even from Linux 6.16 to 6.17 Git was around a 3% geo mean improvement. So I was curious to run some benchmarks on the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors to see if there was similar uplift there...

The engineers over at iXsystems announced today the beta release of TrueNAS 25.10 "Goldeneye" as the latest iteration of this formerly BSD-based OS that has transitioned to making use of the Linux kernel while unifying both the TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offerings...

While the Asahi Linux project has faced some setbacks, such as most recently with Alyssa Rosenzweig leaving the project and still working to bring-up M3/M4 support, the upstreaming effort by Asahi Linux developers to get their changes to the upstream Linux kernel continues...

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list was the patch series for introducing the AMD ISP4 driver to the mainline kernel. This supports the image signal processor IP that to date is found with HP's Strix Halo powered ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. With time, future AMD Ryzen laptops will also likely be leveraging this ISP technology for offloading more webcamera work from the CPU, but for now the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is the main beneficiary of this open-source driver...

The newest monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 25.10 is now available for testing and is the final planned monthly snapshot prior to the October release of the Questing Quokka...

The newest feature addition for Mesa 25.3 is enabling support 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) within the LLVMpipe software rasterizer...

While Linus Torvalds doesn't too often like new kernel options being enabled by default, one area where it has proven beneficial and otherwise an oversight by those configuring their own kernel builds is the architecture-optimized crypto algorithm implementations. Some will enable support for different kernel crypto algorithms only to forget or be unaware that there are CPU architecture specific implementations that can also typically be enabled for much better performance over the common code. Google engineer Eric Biggers has been cleaning this up and BLAKE2s is the latest receiving treatment...

Ahead of the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 release, SUSE engineers are busy finishing up work on their new "Agama" operating system installer. Agama 17 is now available as what will be the installer powering SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 installations or a version very similar to this latest milestone...

This week's drm-misc-next pull of feature updates to the small Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver bring a few updates worth pointing out ahead of the Linux 6.18 cycle...

LF Networking, the networking group within the Linux Foundation, announced from the Open-Source Summit Europe today the release of Essedum 1.0. Essedum 1.0 is for integrating AI into networking environments...

Last year Intel and AMD formed an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group "EAG" in collaboration with key partners. The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group is to collaborate and innovate further around the x86_64 ISA. With AMD and Intel in agreement, FRED (Flexible Return Event Delivery), AVX10, and Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) are some of the early areas where they are finding common ground and interest...

With Mesa 25.2.1 recently having been released, the prior quarter's Mesa 25.1 series is now drawing to a close. Excellent Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.9 as one last point release for Mesa 25.1 before ending this branch...

Continuing on with our Framework Desktop benchmarking powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo", today we are looking at the performance and power impact of power mode tuning for this review sample powered by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SoC. A wide variety of benchmarks were done across the power saver / balanced / performance power modes for looking at the impact on performance as well as thermals and power consumption.

An initial set of Linux kernel patches were posted this week for allowing USB Rust kernel drivers to be developed for Linux...

Introduced earlier this month with the Vulkan API 1.4.325 spec update was the introduction of the untyped pointers extension with VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers and SPIR-V's underlying SPV_KHR_untyped_pointers for providing an alternative option to strongly-typed pointers. As of yesterday the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now supporting this untyped pointers extension...

Generative AI "GenAI" is now being used in part to help determine the Linux kernel patches that should be back-ported to prior current stable Linux kernel releases such as the all-important Linux Long Term Support (LTS) branches...

There's a follow-up to yesterday's surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She's now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers...

The NOVA open-source kernel graphics driver continues getting slowly built-up for the NVIDIA RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs that sport the GPU System Processor (GSP) for easing the hardware initialization and management of modern NVIDIA GPUs within the mainline kernel. This Rust-written kernel driver now has patches pending for booting up the NVIDIA GSP to its RISC-V active state...

QEMU 10.1 was released overnight as the latest iteration of this open-source machine emulator that plays an important role in the Linux virtualization stack...

As another very unfortunate setback for the Asahi Linux project moving forward after Hector Martin left the project as did Asahi Lina pausing work on open-source Apple driver development, Alyssa Rosenzweig announced today that she is stepping away from the project following the successes in bringing up Apple M1 and M2 graphics drivers for Linux...

A number of yet-to-be-completed changes/features have been delayed from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44 while permission is granted for a few features to still land late in the Fedora 43 cycle...

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks of Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver against AMD ROCm on Strix Halo. Those benchmarks caught many by surprise with how well that Rust-based open-source OpenCL driver was working on AMD GPUs for being a generic OpenCL implementation built atop Mesa's Gallium3D. For those curious about the potential of Rusticl on the Intel graphics side, here are some Battlemage benchmarks for Rusticl up against Intel's official Compute Runtime driver stack.

While the Framework 13 was upgraded earlier this year with a motherboard upgrade for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point", the larger Framework 16 has been stuck in the Zen 4 era. But today Framework announced a new upgrade path for this 16-inch modular laptop for the Ryzen AI 300 series as well as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 discrete graphics...

LLVM 21.1 is out today as the first stable version of the LLVM 21 compiler stack. This half-year stable release to the open-source LLVM compiler software brings new hardware support, new language features, and a lot of other enhancements throughout this massive and widely-used codebase...

While the ATI Radeon 9000 / X300 / X500 / X600 series "R300" GPU support has long been unmaintained on the Microsoft Windows driver side, thanks to the open-source community the Linux driver support keeps going for the old ATI R300 GPUs with that driver also supporting the X700 / X800 "R400" and X1000 "R500" series graphics cards too. Two more OpenGL extensions are now wired up for the old R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa...

Mir 2.22 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical project providing libraries for building Wayland-based shells/compositors. Mir 2.22 brings some notable improvements around NVIDIA GPU/driver support as well as initial preparations for Rust programming language support...