Phoronix

Patina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Patina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code...

Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on, no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed...

Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux...

Fedora 43 complete with its rocket-themed default desktop background on Fedora Workstation 43 is cleared for lifting off next week...

Back in May AMD announced the Radeon AI PRO R9700 with 128 AI accelerators, 32GB of GDDR6 video memory, and other advantages for this AI-focused RDNA4 based graphics card over the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7900. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 was supposed to be available in July while today AMD announced it will be going on sale next week...

KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl published a new blog post today outlining the KMS overlay planes support present within the newly-released Plasma 6.5 desktop. While not yet enabled by default, enabling the overlay planes functionality can result in some nice power savings such as during video playback...

The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

In addition to announced Snap-based silicon-optimized AI large language models, Canonical used the ongoing Ubuntu Summit 25.10 virtual event to announced Canonical Academy. Canonical Academy is their new effort for badges/certifications around Ubuntu Linux...

Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10's unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug...

Canonical's new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers...

GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG...

For those looking for a new RISC-V desktop option, ESWIN is launching a EBC7702 mini-DTX board powered by the EIC7702X dual-die SoC. The EBC7702 Mini-DTX is aiming for developers who want RISC-V under their desk for working on AI and other development tasks...

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code...

Crashes on NPUs and AI accelerators are unfortunately a thing and yet another obstacle to worry about it with modern computing. Qualcomm developers have sent out patches for Sub-System Restart "SSR" functionality for their Qualcomm AI Accelerator (QAIC) driver for Linux to handle restarts when workload crashes occur on their AI accelerator hardware...

The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 25.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in the coming weeks for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers...

Oracle recently launched their E6 compute shape for Oracle Cloud and powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also launched their Compute Cloud@Customer X11 and Private Cloud Appliance X11 platforms that are all powered by the E6 compute shape with 5th Gen AMD EPYC. For those curious about the performance and value of the Oracle Cloud E6 shape compared to prior-gen E5 as well as alternatives from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, these benchmarks are geared for you.

OpenZFS 2.4 stable should be out in the near future while out today is the third release candidate for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD operating systems...

Google engineer Rahman Lavaee today announced their work on a prototype software implementation to automatically insert optimal code prefetches into binaries for faster performance, especially for the latest Intel Granite Rapids and AMD Turin processors with new prefetching instructions...

While XP-PEN does provide out-of-tree drivers for their drawing tablets on Linux including the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro, the Linux 6.19 kernel is set to provide upstream support for the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro...

The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it's properly disclosed and transparent...

Announced today at the PyTorch Conference was word that the Ray AI compute engine is becoming a project hosted by the PyTorch Foundation...

The EROFS read-only file-system continues enjoying nice uptick in use from embedded devices to containers. Merged today for Linux 6.18 is some new hardening to the EROFS driver where specially-crafted file-system images could lead to system crashes or infinite loops...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) is out with their latest newsletter where they outlined some new investments in various key open-source projects...

Merged today to the LLVM/Clang compiler codebase are some long overdue adjustments to the AMD Zen 4 "znver4" CPU model for more accurately assessing various latency timings and micro-ops. These values were initially copied over from the Zen 3 (znver3) target but never adjusted properly for Zen 4 until now when an independent contributor took to sorting it out...

For those that happen to have the Dell G15 5530 laptop or considering this Intel Core i7 13650HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX high-end laptop, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is set to have AWCC platform profile support for this model as a nice enhancement. In turn this patch should also be back-ported to future stable Linux kernel point releases...

Earlier this month Intel Linux software engineers began posting patches for enabling Xe3P kernel graphics driver support with initial usage by Nova Lake processors and later the expected Celestial discrete GPUs. That initial Xe3P iGPU support is going into Linux 6.19 but expect more feature additions and optimizations in follow-on kernel cycles in 2026. Similarly the patches have now begun coming out for enabling the display engine capabilities for "Xe3P_LPD" for actually being able to drive displays (monitors) with Xe3P on Nova Lake...

Following last week LLVM/Clang 22 adding Intel Nova Lake with "-march=novalake" support, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has now received similar treatment for the promising next-generation desktop processors...

For those that have been considering the ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7 motherboard for a high-end AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop, sensor monitoring support will soon be working under Linux...

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.8 today as the newest feature release to this popular BSD operating system...

Earlier today the AlmaLinux project announced their plans for supporting the Btrfs file-system contrary to the stance by Red Hat with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They have capped off the day now by releasing the AlmaLinux 10.1 beta complete with this new Btrfs support...

Upstreamed for the current Linux 6.18 cycle was finally having mainline support for the ESWIN EIC770 SoC with its four SiFive P550 cores plus having the DeviceTree support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board using that SoC. Sadly not making it though for Linux 6.18 was the Ethernet controller support for the EIC7700 SoC but that is now destined to arrive in Linux 6.19...

It's been nearly a decade since Red Hat notably deprecated Btrfs back in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 after it being a tech preview in earlier versions of RHEL. While upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 remains on XFS and supporting the likes of Stratis Storage with LVM, AlmaLinux today announced that their AlmaLinux 10.1 release will support Btrfs...

Valkey as the popular, Linux Foundation backed fork of the Redis key-value database is out today with its big v9.0 release...

Following the recent Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake as well as Nova Lake compiler target enablement and other early hardware enablement for Intel's Nova Lake processors, today has brought initial enablement for Nova Lake's NPU...

Last year following the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P Granite Rapids processors I ran some benchmarks looking at the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering mode performance. With having an Intel Xeon 6980P server back up and running on a Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL server after my AvenueCity reference server failed nearly one year ago, I revisited the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering performance for those curious how it's looking on a modern software stack and with new/updated benchmarks.

Going public today is CVE-2025-62518, or better known by the name given by the security researchers involved: TARmageddon. The TARmageddon vulnerability affects the popular async-tar Rust library and its various forks like tokio-tar. In turn TARmageddon impacts the uv Python package manager and other users of this library...

Following the initial set of drm-misc-next updates for Linux 6.19, another round of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today in queuing ahead of that next kernel cycle. There are a number of updates to the smaller DRM graphics/display drivers as well as growing activity around the accelerator "accel" open-source drivers for different NPUs / AI accelerators...

The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" Linux driver is being extended to enable better integration with user-space tooling. AMD SystemDeck is the initial beneficiary of the integration improvements to this AMD platform Linux driver...

The Linux 6.19 kernel coming out in early 2026 will add full support for the Logitech G13 gaming keypad, a device first launched back in 2009. Some functionality has worked in Linux over the past 17 years while full support is only coming to this next version of the Linux kernel...

While the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software is being released next month, there is already exciting changes to look forward to with Blender 5.1 in the new year. Beyond AMD HIP-RT ray-tracing by default in Blender 5.1, this follow-on Blender release is also planning on enabling Vulkan API support by default...

KDE Plasma 6.5 is out today as the newest major feature release for the Plasma 6 desktop. Plasma 6.5 brings many great improvements and continues further evolving this modern, Wayland-focused open-source desktop...

The most unexpected surprise today was AMD releasing ROCm 7.9 as a new technology preview / development branch for the open-source ROCm GPU compute stack just one month after formally releasing ROCm 7.0. While not a fan of how they handled the version discontinuity, ROCm 7.9 has been working out well in my very initial tests on AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo"...

Over the weekend we wrote about the visually-impressive Tellusim Core SDK being posted to GitHub as a C++ SDK for high-end graphics and compute. The downside was that the Tellusim Core SKD was rather restrictive in only being free for education, free for companies with less than $200k USD in annual revenue, and evaluation purposes. Or you needed to obtain a negotiated license for the software. As a pleasant surprise, OSI-approved open-source projects not backed by for-profit organizations can now openly use this superb graphics SDK...

Currently on Linux if you are putting the system into hibernation, there isn't a way to interrupt it and cancel it if you change your mind, even with most systems taking a number of seconds to successfully hibernate. But a new patch series sent out this weekend would introduce that capability...

LunarG in August announced KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan-to-Metal driver for a better Vulkan API experience on Apple macOS devices compared to the likes of using MoltenVK as another Vulkan-on-Metal adaptation. As of today the KosmicKrisp driver for Vulkan 1.3 on Apple devices is now in the Mesa 26.0 codebase...

AMD is hosting an AI Day out in San Francisco today and as part of those festivities today they announced the ROCm Core SDK 7.9 SDK paired with TheRock build and release infrastructure system they have been crafting...

For those wondering how the AMD 3D V-Cache performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is looking on Linux relative to Microsoft Windows, a few weeks back I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Windows 11 25H2 against Ubuntu Linux both the Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS release and an Ubuntu 25.10 development build using both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors.

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel could land initial Tenstorrent vendor support and provide initial support for the Blackhole SoC with the initial Blackhole P100/P150 PCIe accelerator cards...

Well this wasn't on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There's long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is "NTFSPLUS" as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3...

Earlier this month Intel Linux graphics driver engineers began posting the initial Intel Xe3P graphics enablement code with a focus on the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake. Xe3P will also later be found in Intel discrete graphics cards like Crescent Island and more. That very early Intel Xe3P code is now expected to be merged as part of the Linux 6.19 kernel as what will be the first Linux kernel release of 2026...