Phoronix

Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing "attack" by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations...

The Linux 7.3 kernel is out today for an on-time release of this next stable kernel version...

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential computing with VMs has assumed the need to perform cache flushing when transitioning memory between KeyIDs used by the total memory encryption (MKTME) for unique AES encryption keys. But it's turned out to be unneeded and the Linux kernel is working now to reduce the excessive cache flushing...

The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4...

Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements...

Servo's August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser...

VirtIO-FS as the shared file-system for transferring data between guest VMs to/from a host server is showing some promising performance results with pending code for allowing synchronous queues rather than always being asynchronous...

The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too...

MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which "no human wrote any of its own code". Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system...

Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow's presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago...

Coming about the past few months has been Moose as a GNOME-aligned AI chat application built around GTK4 and libadwaita. It began as a local AI chat app for the GNOME desktop and grew to support cloud AI services as well. This past week marked the latest feature release for Moose...

Ahead of the Linux 7.3 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow, last minute workarounds were merged for the Samsung 990 PRO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe solid state drives...

With KDE Plasma 6.8 released earlier this week, KDE developers have begun working on more feature activity toward Plasma 6.9...

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 was released on Friday as the latest update to this community-maintained tablet/smartphone Ubuntu Linux platform. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.5 was also released as a maintenance update for the prior series...

Wine 11.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux. We are quickly approaching the point where this development work will culminate into the Wine 12.0 stable release in early 2027...

Just shy of two weeks since a dozen vulnerabilities were published for the X.Org Server and XWayland, more than one dozen vulnerabilities were made public today affecting multiple X.Org client libraries...

The GNOME OS Linux distribution to date has just been in GNOME OS Nightly form for tracking the latest nightly packages of GNOME in their current development form. GNOME OS Preview was announced today as their trek toward a stable GNOME OS in using the latest GNOME stable releases rather than nightly form...

The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here's a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version...

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Darrick Wong who stepped down as the XFS file-system maintainer in 2023 is now taking a step back from his other Linux kernel development roles after working on the kernel the past 23 years...

It's been nearly one year since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U Granite Rapids server platform for continuing my testing of the flagship Xeon 6980P processors. Curious how the Xeon 6980P 2P performance has evolved on Linux since then, I ran some benchmarks on the newly-released Ubuntu Server 26.10 against the tests carried out last year on Ubuntu 25.10 with the same hardware.

Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite...

The RPM v4 packaging format has been used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and its derivatives for more than two decades. With next year's Fedora 46 release, Fedora Linux may finally transition to the modern RPM v6 packaging format...

With pending code for Mesa, the LLVMpipe software-based Gallium3D/OpenGL driver could soon become faster on modern systems that support AVX-512. That's assuming the AI/LLVM-generated code is all in order...

Linux 7.4 is enabling support for a new Intel CPU feature for providing safety against possible denial of service attacks using Trust Domain Extensions "TDX" VMs. The new feature is Intel Instruction Timeout and previously in-development known as Notify VM Exit...

With the Linux 7.3 kernel due out for release on Sunday, I've continued running more benchmarks recently of this forthcoming kernel version and it looks great. In my Linux 7.3 testing of the Git state it's been looking great in testing on a variety of hardware shown across multiple systems. Recently I decided to try out this new kernel code on the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX workstation...

Intel software engineers today released the latest version of LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5, their containerized Docker stack providing a convenient AI/LLM experience atop Intel Arc Graphics hardware and born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative...

Merged today to Mesa is initial video acceleration support for the generic Zink Gallium3D driver built atop the Vulkan APIs. What this implementation allows is exposing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implemented atop the Vulkan Video interfaces...

For those eager to run the pristine Fedora 45 media, you will need to wait at least one more week...

Valve just dropped a new Steam client beta and it's a big one for Linux gamers...

A patch has been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list by an Intel engineer confirming that Nova Lake S and Nova Lake P processors with integrated graphics will support SR-IOV in conjunction with the Xe kernel graphics driver...

With the recently reviewed Star Labs StarFighter Ultra Linux laptop its BIOS allows for configurable memory speeds unlike many other laptop vendor BIOS implementations these days. Star Labs also made the default design decision to run the LPDDR5-7467 rated memory at LPDDR5-6400 speeds in the name of a balanced user experience for power/performance. So I was curious to run some benchmarks quantifying that power and performance impact of LPDDR5-6400 vs. LPDDR5-7467 plus tossed in LPDDR5-5467 testing as well as the third choice offered with this StarFighter Ultra laptop.

The open-source Memtest86+ program that is popular for RAM testing has expanded beyond the x86/x86_64 (and LoongArch64) world to now support memory testing on ARM64/AArch64 hardware...

3mdeb firmware engineers have been quite busy this year working on porting Coreboot and openSIL to an AMD Ryzen AM5 MSI motherboard and similarly getting openSIL and Coreboot up and running on a Gigabyte server motherboard for AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs. They haven't forgotten about their past projects though and today released an updated version of their Dasharo downstream firmware for the ASRock Rack SPC741D8-2L2T motherboard supporting 4th and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors...

AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks...

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now officially available as the newest six-month non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux...

For those using the generic ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver such as on a number of ARM64 Linux server platforms, if the CPUs support a "boost" mode it's disabled by default. But a patch from Huawei is now looking to enable CPU boost mode by default on Linux...

As an early improvement to Mutter to look forward to with GNOME 52 (Update: It will first appear in GNOME 51.2), the compositor is now tracking damage for secondary GPU copy buffers. This should improve the experience for those with multi-GPU setups such as some hybrid laptops...

Microsoft's newest software release for Linux is... Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to "secure Linux desktops" with Microsoft acknowledging that "more developers begin to use Linux desktops" and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support...

In addition to providing Framework systems to the CachyOS Linux distribution for optimizing the support, Framework Computers has also been providing monthly donations to the project. CachyOS confirmed today that Framework Computers has now tripled their monthly donations to this independent Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Apple compiler engineers have contributed to upstream LLVM/Clang today a Scalable Static Analysis Framework (SSAF) driver for whole-program based analysis and source-to-source code transformations...

In addition to Epic Games announced a preview of their new Epic Games Launcher, including Linux support, they also announced plans to improve their Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software on Linux. Along with this improved EAC they are also working on official Linux support for the popular Fortnite game...

In addition to Ubuntu 26.10 itself delivering some nice performance gains on Ubuntu 26.10 for AMD EPYC servers and other hardware, the optional and currently-unofficial amd64v3 package archive also provides additional performance uplift. Here is a look quantifying the performance impact of amd64v3 packages on AMD EPYC 9005 series servers.

Canonical engineer Juerg Haefliger posted a set of Device Tree patches in working to support the mainline Linux kernel on the HP EliteBook 6 G1q laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC...

The RISC-V RVA23 profile is a big deal for reducing fragmentation in the RISC-V ecosystem and standardizing more of the ISA to make it easier to distribute modern RISC-V binaries and the like. Modern versions of Ubuntu mandate RVA23 even though compliant hardware is still quite limited. Somewhat surprisingly, only coming about now is an easy ability for Linux users to find the answer to "is my RISC-V system RVA23 compliant?" Pending Linux kernel patches are finally offering a one-shot way of telling you...

Released at the end of August was Haiku R1 Beta 6 and over the course of September, further improvements continued to land for this BeOS-inspired project now in its 25th year of development...

Cloud Hypervisor, the Rust-based Virtual Machine Monitor that began as an Intel open-source project and evolved into a multi-vendor Linux Foundation project, is out today with a sizable feature update...

Rustls as the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with an emphasis on memory safety is out today with its v0.23.46 release in order to ship four new security fixes...

The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project...

While Mesa is predominantly used for GPU drivers, open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso continues advancing the capabilities of NPUs within the Mesa driver stack...

Intel ISPC 1.32 released today as the newest version of this Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler built atop LLVM/Clang. ISPC is a variant of the C programming language with extensiosn catering to Single Program Multiple Data programming for both Intel CPUs and GPUs...