Phoronix

With the recent release of Java/OpenJDK 27 I began some fresh benchmarks in not having looked at the OpenJDK Java performance in a few years. Carried away, I ended up re-testing all the major OpenJDK versions going back to the venerable JDK 8.

NTFS-3G 2026.9.18 was released this morning as the newest update to this FUSE-based open-source driver for NTFS file-system support...

Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver...

In addition to AMD working on AVX10_V2_AUX support for the GCC compiler, this summer they also posted AVX10_V2_AUX support for the LLVM/Clang compiler. As of yesterday that enablement was merged for LLVM 24 for that important step toward AI Compute Extensions (ACE)...

Merged at the start of the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle was adding Logitech Bolt USB receiver support for Logitech HID++ devices to the hid-logitech-dj driver code. That has resulted in too many bug reports of early Linux 7.3 users encountering varying issues with their Logitech mice that the functionality is now being reverted until it can be better developed...

The Nouveau Linux kernel graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA driver support has new patches posted for enabling HDMI Deep Color support...

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop...

In 2024 Canonical generated nearly $300M USD in revenue for this company behind Ubuntu Linux and other services and software solutions. For 2025, they not only broke $300M but well exceeded it with $345M in revenue...

A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop...

SPEC back in May 2025 introduced SPECViewPerf 15 as the newest major release of this industry-standard workstation graphics benchmark. Sadly, the Linux support once again fell behind with SPECViewPerf 15 only debuting on Microsoft Windows. Today though Linux has caught up with SPEC releasing a Linux-native build of SPECViewPerf 15.0.1...

Systemd 262 made it out today as the newest feature update to this Linux init system and service manager. As with most systemd releases, it's heavy on new features and functionality...

The open-source YSERVER project as a modern X11 sever written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code is out today with a new feature release. Most notable for this AI Rust X11 server is X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) support for multi-user shared desktops...

The Omarchy project announced today that Alibaba Cloud will be contributing a total of three million USD to their foundation for helping development of this Linux distribution and working to make it an "ideal agentic operating system"...

Sent out today was a new HID subsystem pull request of fixes for the week to the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides some conventional bug fixes are also supporting some additional devices via quirks and new IDs...

Later this week it looks like the latest round of Cache Aware Scheduling fixes will be merged for enhancing this kernel scheduler functionality for grouping related tasks together on CPU cores that share the same last level cache (LLC). Cache Aware Scheduling can lead to better cache locality and lower latency by avoiding the costs of potential cache bouncing -- that is when bugs don't get in the way...

A convenient addition that surprisingly hasn't been added to the Linux kernel until now is /sys/devices/system/cpu/sev/sev_status as a new sysfs interface for reporting the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) status...

ZLUDA as the open-source project working on CUDA for non-NVIDIA GPUs like AMD Radeon graphics cards now has implemented support for some of NVIDIA's core cuFFT APIs...

Valve's Steam client beta today introduced Pyrowave as an experimental video codec for high bandwidth, low-latency video streaming...

AMD sent out their latest Linux kernel graphics driver patches today for enabling some new hardware IP blocks. And as part of that, preparing for GDDR7 video memory with the AMDGPU driver...

There's a new Linux distribution focused on supporting Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Gravity Linux is this new distribution that is a spin of Fedora Remix and is catering to the still-experimentally-supported Apple M4 Macs and newer. In addition to leveraging Asahi Linux code and reverse engineering, Gravity Linux also leverages OpenAI Codex and Claude Code...

While the downstream Asahi Linux kernel has offered working speaker support and headset jack capabilities on Apple Silicon Macs, the mainline Linux kernel hasn't supported this functionality. But a set of 28 patches sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working toward mainlining this important functionality for using Apple Macs on the upstream Linux desktop...

NBL is a new Ethernet networking driver destined to premiere in the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel for supporting Nebula Matrix NICs...

With the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel showing some nice performance improvements over Linux 7.2 in different areas, Linux 7.2 also having brought some nice gains especially for I/O, and the preceding kernels also having seen some nice performance optimizations this year, I wanted to measure how far the Linux kernel performance has evolved so far in 2026. Today's article is looking at that with how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel at the end of 2025 to the current Linux 7.3 kernel.

Amazon released the Kindle 4 back in 2011 with a 6-inch E-ink display, 2GB internal storage, and running a modified version of Linux. In the years since the Amazon Kindle 4 has been jail-broken and there are some customized Linux distributions with a patched kernel to run on the Kindle 4. Now in 2026 there are patches on the Linux kernel mailing list looking to mainline support for that fifteen year old e-reader device...

Here's some very intriguing work taking place by a Google engineer... With the hyperscalers and other cloud providers pushing for zero-downtime, a set of experimental patches for "Orphaned VMs" allow for the virtual machines to continue to run while the host kernel is offline for security updates or rebooting with the Live Update Orchestrator. The experimental patches and request for feedback from other Linux kernel stakeholders was sent out this weekend on Orphaned VMs...

GNU Wget2 is up to version 2.3 today with the first new release of 2026 for this popular command-line tool for non-interactive file downloading and being able to easily fetch website contents...

The AMD BC-250 as the product designed at the time for cryptocurrency mining and based on a cut-down Sony PlayStation 5 APU continues having an interesting second-life being re-tasked for Linux use from general purpose workloads to AI. Sent out this weekend were the latest Linux kernel patches for continuing to enable more of the BC-250...

The Igalia Linux/open-source consulting firm based out of A Coruna, Spain is celebrating twenty five years of contributions to upstream open-soure projects...

A big patch series sent out this weekend for the Linux kernel's perf subsystem removes the embedded Python and Perl scripting in favor of standalone Python scripts with a new Python perf module. This perf module for Python written in C is much faster than the status quo...

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4...

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel release due out in the coming hours, an important batch of x86/x86_64 fixes have been merged to address a few outstanding issues...

Gzip 1.15 is out today for succeeding the Gzip 1.14 release from April 2025. With this release comes a number of fixes for bugs present since the beginning of Gzip...

At the KDE Akademy 2026 conference going on right now in Graz, Austria the three KDE goals for the next two years were unveiled...

From a few months ago you may recall Starling as the new Linux desktop written with its own Wayland compositor, using the Swift programming language, and written in large part via AI with Claude Code. Out today is Starling 0.5 with this desktop now gaining an optional 3D desktop mode...

Vulkan 1.4.363 is out as the latest routine update to the Vulkan API specification and also introduces a new Intel vendor extension...

Sent out this morning were a big batch of input subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel releasing later today. Alongside many bug fixes to different drivers is also expanding the range of supported gaming controllers by the XPad driver...

Merged today were this week's set of Btrfs file-system fixes for the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel, which include two notable bug fixes...

More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading...

Building off yesterday's Wine 11.18 bi-weekly development release is now Wine-Staging 11.18. This experimental flavor of Wine is presently carrying 273 extra patches over that upstream Git state, including some new patches for helping enhance the WoW64 support...

In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space...

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM...

Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9...

If you missed out on the Phoronix Premium special back during the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com in June, there is another promotion now active for helping to support the site and allow for continued daily original content and relentless Linux performance benchmarking and other open-sourced focused hardware testing...

As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel...

Wine 11.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and apps on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API...

Google's Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first "real" drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is set to be retired...

The latest Apple Silicon enablement code working its way from the Asahi Linux project toward the upstream Linux kernel is the AVD driver used for accelerated video playback across Apple M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs...

Ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the "Stonking Stingray" on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today's tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo".

Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery "FRED" that debuted with the Core Ultra Series 3 processors...