Phoronix

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios...

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers...

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores...

Intel today released a new version of their NPU Linux driver user-space components that interface with the upstream IVPU kernel driver...

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10...

All of the multimedia subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

A new Free Software Foundation president has been elected...

Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of "non-MM" patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18...

As the first update to the Intel Thermal Daemon since February when v2.5.9 brought Panther Lake support, Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.10 was tagged on Thursday...

The Slab pull request was merged this evening for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window. Most notable with the Slab updates is the introduction of Sheaves...

For those wanting to run virtual machines with more than 255 vCPUs on modern AMD EPYC servers, an important code refactoring was merged for Linux 6.18 to ensure the proper topology information is exposed to KVM guest VMs...

After Linus Torvalds yesterday shot down RISC-V big endian prospects for the Linux kernel, today he has used his authority to wage a war on "crazy" Rust code formatting as well as to critique poor text formatting...

ZLUDA 5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for running CUDA software on non-NVIDIA GPUs...

The many SoC and platform/machine DeviceTree additions have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel! This includes finally having mainline support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board and its EIC7700 SoC, Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra DeviceTrees added and associated Apple Mac system support, various new Snapdragon X1 laptops now being supported by the mainline kernel and much more...

The Kbuild changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

Following last month's release of the first KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta, a second beta milestone was released today ahead of the stable release coming later in October...

So far Intel has posted very few Linux kernel driver enablement patches around Nova Lake but it looks like that is about to change...

Following the recent Raspberry Pi 500+ launch, the latest Raspberry Pi news is the release of Raspberry Pi OS now re-based against Debian 13 "Trixie" along with some additional changes...

The BPF changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for September with a slight increase to the Linux gaming userbase...

TrueNAS 25.10-RC1 is out today as the newest test release of this OpenZFS+Linux-based operating system for network attached storage (NAS) hardware and other storage devices...

Sent out today was the x86/mm pull request of the x86/x86_64 memory management changes destined for this next version of the Linux kernel. This pull has just one new patch but is worth mentioning...

Made public and mitigated within the mainline Linux kernel last month was the VMSCAPE vulnerability affecting both AMD and Intel CPUs. Now merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is adding VMSCAPE to the recently-introduced Attack Vector Controls functionality...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been sent out for the Linux 6.18 kernel with some notable additions...

During the month of September on Phoronix were 271 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts the most on Phoronix during September...

In addition to XFS enabling online fsck by default, Bcachefs being stripped from the mainline Linux kernel, and Btrfs improvements making for a notable first few days of the Linux 6.18 window, there's more. The EXT4, EROFS, and NTFS3 drivers are bringing the latest batch of file-system changes for Linux 6.18...

OpenSUSE Leap 16.0 is out today as this community Linux distributiom built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 16...

Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel...

The Academy Software Foundation's OpenColorIO "OCIO" project as a color management solution for motion picture production and related uses has added support for the Vulkan API...

Changes merged this week to the Mesa PowerVR Vulkan driver now allow it to support all of the functionality required by the Vulkan 1.2 specification...

OpenZFS 2.4-rc2 was released on Tuesday as the latest stepping stone toward the big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release...

Due to rising demand around system memory being pushed up in large part by HBM for AI applications, Raspberry Pi announced price increases on select products to help offset the rising LPDDR costs...

After originally hoping to publish the open-source code last year, today AMD published the initial openSIL code for enabling Phoenix SoCs to make use of this in-development CPU silicon initialization alternative to AGESA...

Qualcomm engineers have posted the initial patches for bringing up the newest Adreno 800 series graphics IP within the open-source MSM Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver...

In addition to the IEEE-1394 Firewire support still being maintained within the Linux kernel, another Apple tech still seeing code churn within the Linux kernel years later are the HFS and HFS+ file-systems. For the Linux 6.18 kernel are more fixes to the HFS/HFS+ support...

Debuting today is the newest NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series release...

Merged as part of the kernel hardening updates for Linux 6.18 is not a direct hardening improvement but rather a long overdue enhancement to the kernel configuration "Kconfig" system. The introduction of this new "transitional" keyword for Kconfig options can ease the process of renaming Kconfig options across kernel versions with less breakage/headaches for those maintaining their own kernel configurations/builds...

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

So far on this last day of Q3'2025 we are at just over 800 original Linux news articles for the quarter on Linux hardware and open-source software. Here is a look back at what proved to be most popular for the quarter...

While IEEE-1394 Firewire hardware in the wild is increasingly rare, modern Linux IEEE-1394 subsystem maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has committed to maintaining Firewire support until 2029. With the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel there are more incremental improvements to this code...

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem continues seeing a lot of new hardware support and code churn across AMD, Intel, and Arm hardware platforms for the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.18 there are several notable additions...

Just a friendly reminder that today is the last day for those wishing to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate. Less than 1% of readers currently do so for helping to support the site and its Linux hardware testing and open-source news operations over the past 21 years. Joining Phoronix Premium gets you ad-free access, multi-page articles on a single page, custom forum avatar support, and other benefits all while helping for operations to continue during this difficult period for the web/ad industry...

With Linux 6.17 was the decision by Linus Torvalds to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and not accept any new Bcachefs code into the mainline kernel but keeping the existing code within the tree. That was useful for those relying on Bcachefs to still boot a mainline kernel at least. Now for Linux 6.18, the Bcachefs code was removed from the mainline kernel...

Following AMD announcing the end of the AMDVLK Vulkan driver development in favor of focusing on the Mesa RADV driver for Linux systems, Red Hat engineer David Airlie who was one of the co-lead developers of the RADV driver shared some interesting insight on NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa...

Introduced this year with the Linux 6.16 kernel was the new functionality for reporting to users when running on outdated Intel CPU microcode since it can pose security vulnerability issues and/or functionality problems. The Linux kernel support for propagating this "old_microcode" reporting via sysfs relies on a static list of microcode versions corresponding to different Intel CPU generations. For the Linux 6.18 kernel this list is being updated to reflect modern baselines for Intel recommendations on CPU microcode...

WineConf as the annual Wine developer conference, for this open-source software allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, took place this weekend in The Hague. Several interesting talks took place including the usual keynote by Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard...

Linux ACPI and power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki today sent out all of the feature updates and changes intended for the now-started Linux 6.18 merge window. There are some new Intel additions as well as for the growing range of different ARM-based SoCs and other hardware...

Earlier this year NVIDIA announced Newton as an open-source physics engine focused on robotic simulations. This physics engine was developed by NVIDIA in cooperation with Google DeepMind and Disney Research. Today it's been contributed to the Linux Foundation...

Back in August Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of Project Battlematrix for help getting generative AI "GenAI" workloads running on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards. Out today are two new LLM Scaler beta releases for further enhancing the AI capabilities on Intel Battlemage GPUs...