It's been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group...
Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics...
A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU security mitigations to all be toggled at run-time...
While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that's quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux...
Now that the Linux 6.18 merge window is over with Linux 6.18-rc1 having released yesterday, here is a look at all the interesting new features and changes to find with this kernel. Making Linux 6.18 all the more exciting is that it's expected to become the 2025 Linux LTS kernel once its stable release occurs in December.
Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms...
In the works the past number of months has been cache-aware load balancing / cache aware scheduling support for Linux. The latest iteration of those patches by Intel were posted this weekend and are enjoying the most uplift on AMD EPYC Genoa and newer platforms...
Box64 0.3.8 is now available for this x86_64 user-space emulator for Linux that allows ARM64 and RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems to enjoy running x86_64 games and applications. Box64 along with the likes of FEX-Emu are the leading options for those needing to run x86_64 programs on ARM64 and elsewhere...
One year ago updated Intel documentation noted AMX-TRANSPOSE as one of the new ISA additions for Diamond Rapids. But in updated Intel architecture documentation last month, it oddly removed all references to AMX-TRANSPOSE. Confirming that the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) addition for TRANSPOSE is now dead, an Intel engineer posted a patch to remove AMX-TRANSPOSE from the GCC compiler...
The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an "open-source Windows" ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers...
With last month's GNOME 49 release, the 32-bit Compatibility extension for the GNOME Flatpak Runtime is no more. This is part of the broader effort of phasing out 32-bit support...
As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries...
Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year's Linux LTS kernel version...
Well, here is a weekend surprise... Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for "CLUDA" as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow...
Intel engineers continue working on SR-IOV support for the Xe open-source kernel driver as part of Project Battlematrix for ensuring good virtualization support for the latest Intel GPUs on Linux...
Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft's extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux...
Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026...
Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough...
The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs...
The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository...
Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series...
Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake...
KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code...
Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware...
Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel...
With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.
Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization "vGPU" support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag...
One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512...
In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers...
Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality...
This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire...
In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away...
The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language...
For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel's open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel's difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel's open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel's open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.
Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light... Especially as for what's known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.
In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.
Intel Tech Tour 2025 in Arizona was primarily focused on disclosures around Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake / Xe3 but during the opening keynote was also teasing a yet-to-be-announced inference-optimized GPU...
At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel's IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved...
A few months back it was brought up on the Intel driver mailing list around SR-IOV support for Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics. This goes along with Intel open-source Linux driver developers being quite busy on SR-IOV support for Battlemage dGPUs as part of their Project Battlematrix. Unfortunately, I wasn't provided any answer at Intel Tech Tour in Arizona whether SR-IOV support will be found with all Panther Lake SKUs or reserved for select offerings...
Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry...
Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree...
PoCL 7.1 is now available for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc...
FEX 2510 is out as the newest release of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Making FEX all the more popular is its continued ability for running Wine/Proton for handling Windows games on ARM64 Linux...
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