Phoronix

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...

One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule. Meanwhile their EPYC 9005 "Turin" proof-of-concept code was recently published...

Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed...

The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September...

Merged today for the LLVM/Clang compiler is -mcpu=gb10 support for catering to NVIDIA's forthcoming Grace Blackwell GB10 Superchip...

While coming a few weeks too late for making it into the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite release, merged today to LibreOffice Git for next year's LibreOffice 26.2 is adding initial support for importing Markdown files into the LibreOffice Writer word processor...

The AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" used as the Linux kernel GPU compute driver and necessary part of their ROCm compute stack it turns out can build and run on the Chinese-developed LoongArch systems rather easily...

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle Intel is further building out their Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) capabilities with the introduction of a new discovery driver...

As a good sign of the progress being made on the Xe3 integrated graphics Linux support and of the Core Ultra Panther Lake launch approaching, the necessary graphics firmware binaries have now been upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository...

TornadoVM version 1.1.1 is now available for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that supports Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other heterogeneous hardware. The past few years TornadoVM has been making a lot of progress to automatically run Java programs across GPUs and other devices supporting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and Khronos SPIR-V/Vulkan...

Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 6.16-rc5 as the newest test release of Linux 6.16...

Minutes ago Simon Ser announced the official release of Wayland 1.24...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak has been working on a number of improvements to benefit the Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" support within the RadeonSI and RADV graphics drivers for benefiting modern Radeon GPUs under Linux...

A change proposal has been raised to compress the initrd by default using Zstd compression rather than XZ. This change would help provide some disk savings as well as speeding up the boot process on modern systems with Fedora Linux...

Sent out this morning as part of this week's "locking/urgent" pull request is a performance regression fix ahead of today's Linux 6.16-rc5 release. This latest performance regression in the Linux kernel is around the new Futex code merged this cycle with a big performance hit being observed in scheduler benchmarks...

Nearly one year after the merge request was first opened, back-ported now to the X.Org Server 21.1 stable branch are a number of GLAMOR 2D acceleration fixes around OpenGL ES 2.x as well as supporting OpenGL ES 3.x shaders for this generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL for the xorg-server and XWayland...

Intel software engineers continue ironing out their Linux support for Bartlett Lake...

Sent out today by longtime Freedreno/MSM open-source Qualcomm GPU driver developer Robin Clark are the main set of MSM kernel graphics/display driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. There are several exciting feature additions coming to this next kernel version for those relying on Qualcomm graphics capabilities...

DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux...

SUSE developers working on their new operating system installer "Agama" have been making steady progress and on Friday debuted Agama 16. With Agama 16 they have moved from X.Org to Wayland for powering their installer UI along with a number of other changes...

It shouldn't be particularly surprising as Fedora Linux has always been known for shipping with a leading-edge compiler toolchain, but the formalities have now been submitted for Fedora 43 to ship with the latest GNU and LLVM toolchain components...

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 kernel expected to be released tomorrow, a round of x86 platform driver updates were merged this week with several fixes as well as some new device additions...

It was another exciting week in the GNOME space to kick off July...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly summary to highlight all of the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the past week...

Building off Coreboot 25.03 is now the availability of Coreboot 25.06 for further enhancing this open-source system firmware project that continues to see new hardware improvements -- predominantly for Google Chromebook devices but also more Intel platforms and other hardware -- as well as new capabilities to further rival proprietary BIOS solutions...

The Vulkan working group is celebrating the US Independence Day with graphics API independence in today publishing Vulkan 1.4.321 that comes with several new extensions...

A handful of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted yesterday to Linus Torvalds for merging ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 release due out on Sunday. Today they were merged...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project just published their June 2025 status report to outline recent progress on this innovative platform...

Sent in today for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle as part of the input subsystem fixes is enabling support for the Acer Nitro Gaming Controller (NGR200)...

Intel today sent out a batch of new kernel graphics/display driver code for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening in a few weeks. There is now DRM Panic support for the Intel i915 and Xe kernel drivers, Wildcat Lake "WCL" display enablement, and experimental flip queue support for Lunar Lake and Panther Lake hardware, among other changes coming for the Intel drivers in Linux 6.17...

The Debian project is hoping to address challenges of mentoring newcomers to contribute to the Debian Linux distribution as well as making it more known that open-source contributors can do more than just work on Debian packaging but that help is needed for documentation writing, web page creation, sorting out licensing issues, finding project sponsors, and more. Debian is also looking to attain OpenAI sponsorship or open-source funds from other large language model (LLM) / AI providers to help Debian developers for those wanting to use AI to help accelerate their Debian workflows...

The first release candidate of Redis 8.2 is now available for testing of this popular in-memory key-value database. Redis 8.2 is building off the recent Redis 8.0 release that ended up going tri-licensing with the AGPLv3 stemming from developer/community feedback...

Three years since the Bash 5.2 release and one year since the first alpha release, GNU Bash 5.3 was released overnight as the newest step forward for this popular shell used on Linux and other operating systems...

Perl 5.42 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular programming language that comes one year after the prior Perl 5.40 release...

A proposal raised for Fedora 43 would end support for allowing UEFI installations on MBR-partitioned disks for x86_64 systems in the Anaconda installer. This would enforce a requirement on using GPT partition tables for all UEFI-based Fedora installations in the x86 world...

For those on an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" system, the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel is looking to be in better shape for those newest Intel SoCs. In testing carried out using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura edition laptop, there are performance gains in some areas with the Linux 6.16 development kernel.

A nice improvement was merged today to the X.Org Server for benefiting the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code when using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

Linux 6.17 is expected to clear out some final remnants of the OpenMoko Neo 1973 and Neo FreeRunner smartphone support from that Linux smartphone effort from two decades ago...

The Linux support for the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld continues to be improved upon thanks to the option of having Steam OS on this alternative to the Steam Deck...

Sent out today was the newest drm-misc-next pull request of changes built up over the past week for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. The drm-misc-next material is the usual random assortment of DRM display/graphics driver changes and core improvements, which this week includes some TTM eviction work...

Libreboot 25.06 released this week as the newest version of this Coreboot downstream focused on shipping only with free and open-source components. But due to the strict open-source nature of Libreboot, it continues to primarily see support for long outdated platforms...

Steam Survey issues prevented the survey results from being posted on the evening of the 1st as is traditionally done, but the results were just uploaded now to the Steam website. Steam on Linux usage dipped slightly but overall remains healthy with much excitement still around the Steam Deck and SteamOS efforts...