Phoronix

Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution...

The PanVK driver for modern Arm Mali Vulkan driver support within Mesa has tapped into Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality as well as an in-memory cache to provide for a better experience with this open-source driver...

In addition to the patches sent out this weekend by Intel for Xe driver preparations for multi-device Shared Virtual Machine (multi-device SVM), another notable patch series making it out this weekend for the Intel Xe open-source kernel graphics driver is support for mapping DMA-BUFs via IOV interconnects...

The Linux 6.18-rc3 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release in just about one month. Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel...

Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place...

The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content...

Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size. Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes...

As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

Derek Clark who has been leading the efforts around Lenovo Legion gaming drivers for Linux and ensuring good support for the Lenovo Legion Go handheld on Linux sent out a new Linux patch series this weekend...

AMD on Friday sent in their first patch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes they are ready to begin queuing in the DRM-Next tree until the Linux 6.19 merge window kicks off in December and leading to a stable release around February...

Resources is the open-source app aligned with GNOME/GTK for system resource monitoring. Resources has proven to be quite versatile with a nice UI and able to display CPU, GPU, NPU, disk, and other metrics. Out today is Resources 1.9 with the latest capabilities for this app...

NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs...

The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation...

Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it's already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6...

The newest weekly test release of the FreeBSD 15.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the planned December official release...

The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default...

It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry...

Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code...

Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks...

With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use...

Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions...

The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts...

Valve contractor Timur Kristof for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support...

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...