Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware...
Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library...
For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD's ROCDXG "librocdxg" library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL...
While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state is performing relative to Ubuntu 25.10 with this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.
Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs...
The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015...
Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to enable FRED by default. Now this week that patch appears all-set for merging with the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window...
A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration "RVCC" as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal...
After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going...
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week's drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling...
Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed...
SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams...
Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes...
Here's something that wasn't on my bingo card for this year of the "MKISS" driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn't seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago...
Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware...
Sent out this week was another drm-misc-next pull heading to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. Notable with this week's Direct Rendering Manager code changes was introducing per-process buffer object "BO" memory usage query support for user-space...
Released this week was Nginx 1.29.7 as the newest mainline version of this HTTP(S) web server. Releasing alongside Nginx 1.28.3 stable, it fixed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and some other vulnerabilities. Making Nginx 1.29.7 more exciting though is that it landed Multipath TCP support...
It's fairly rare for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to hit OpenGL rendering game bugs these days as besides more games going opting for Vulkan API use, RadeonSI is rather robust and very mature at this stage. Recently though a Linux gamer that upgraded to a Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card noticed that the open-source EDuke32 Duke Nukem 3D build and its derivatives were failing to render properly with the RadeonSI driver...
It was just two weeks ago that GIMP 3.2 released, one year after the big GIMP 3.0 debut. Out today is GIMP 3.2.2 with various bug fixes, plug-in / file format handling updates, and some minor UI/UX work...
AMD's GAIA AI agent framework (that previously stood for "Generative AI Is Awesome" albeit they seemed to have dropped promoting it as that name) for Ryzen AI hardware is out with a new version. AMD GAIA 0.17 introduces Agent UI as a new privacy-first web application for local AI agents...
The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux...
Last year LLVM began landing their Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" support as an enhancement to their ThinLTO approach for link-time optimizations. An improvement merged this week to LLVM addresses a performance bottleneck discovered when adding files to the link...
Following the release of GNOME 50, Gedit 50 was released on Friday as the newest version of this graphical text editor aligned with the GNOME desktop. Moving forward the Gedit developers are banning AI / large language model (LLM) driven developments and aim to ship more releases faster...
Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device "DRBD" for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It's a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline...
Framework Computer as the company behind the modular Framework laptops and incredible Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop has stepped up their support for the KDE community...
Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.
Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM...
With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers...
In addition to this week's ROCm 7.2.1 stable point release, ROCm 7.12 was also released as the newest tech preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0...
An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform...
Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down...
Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager...
Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April...
As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing against the NVIDIA official Linux graphics driver for putting that Nouveau/NVK performance into perspective.
Sent out today was a new batch of "drm-xe-next" material of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ready for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Standing out in this pull is enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support for drm_pagemap as a big win for those making use of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for GPU compute and the like...
One of the early features for Fedora 45 that was approved this week is enabling IPv6-mostly support within NetworkManager for a more modern out-of-the-box network experience...
Last month NXP posted open-source Linux kernel driver patches for their Neutron NPU accelerator. The NXP Neutron NPU aims to help with edge AI applications and this neural processing unit is found in their different SoCs. Unfortunately, their GitHub repository for the user-space software ends up containing a binary-only blob that will end up delaying plans on getting this driver into the mainline Linux kernel...
A new set of Linux kernel patches for batch TLB flushing for dirty folios within the kernel's vmscan path were recently floated on the Linux kernel mailing list. This batch TLB flushing optimization for dirty folios during memory reclaim can be a significant performance win with today's multi-core hardware...
Merged today was another round of platform-drivers-x86 changes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. There are bug fixes plus some new hardware support additions that make this merge notable. Due to the new hardware support amounting to just device IDs and not risking existing hardware support, it's fine for merging at this late stage of Linux 7.0 development...
With just a few weeks to go until the official Fedora 44 release, there is already feature planning and activity beginning for Fedora 45 that will be released toward the end of 2026. Among the early feature approvals is a new web front-end feature to the DRM Panic "Blue/Black Screen of Death" functionality with a specialized QR code for kernel errors...
Building off the release of ROCm 7.2 from January, ROCm 7.2.1 is now available with Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS support as well as various bug fixes to this open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack...
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