Miracle-WM 0.10 released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor. With this new release is also acknowledgement they are hoping to cross the "1.0" milestone later in the year...
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" as a new GUI created by developers on Valve's open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming...
Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext's sub-scheduler support...
Early AMD Radeon Graphics Core Next "GCN" GPUs are seeing work to improve the GPU recovery process in the event of hangs. This work is yet another improvement for older AMD GPUs being led by Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team...
As a follow-up to last week's article around Firefox leveraging zlib-rs and some nice upstream improvements to this Rust-based Zlib implementation, the zlib-rs 0.6.4 release is now available to ship all of these latest enhancements...
Last month Qualcomm engineers posted patches bringing up the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 laptop on Linux. Sent out this weekend were a new set of patches from Qualcomm for bringing up the HP EliteBook X G2q laptop model powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC...
Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn't be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while discussions are ongoing in getting the vendor to provide a proper firmware fix...
When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn't too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning "Blackwell-Next" enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel...
KUnit as the unit testing framework for the Linux kernel and was inspired in part by Java's JUnit when originally conceived, is now finally able to output to the JUnit format for better interoperability with other CI systems and the like that standardize on that common format...
Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win...
Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy interface within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated...
Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM...
The open-source world waited long enough for the GIMP 3.0 release that finally came last year with its GTK3 port and more, but for those with time on their hands this weekend and want to relive GIMP's past from long ago, GIMP 0.54 has been adapted for Flatpak to work on modern Linux desktops. What makes this version of GIMP from 1996 notable is that it was the last to use the Motif toolkit...
In addition to open-source developer Namjae Jeon serving as maintainer for the new NTFS Linux driver, he also continues serving as maintainer to the exFAT file-system for that other Microsoft file-system popular with removable storage media...
With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release...
Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the "NTFS resurrection" with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support...
With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play...
Barco, the Europeean technology company that manufactures the AMD GPU based MXRT graphics cards for for multi-display medical imaging systems (and also MXRV for their NVIDIA based graphics cards), have to date only seen Windows drivers published for their professional-grade graphics cards even with using Radeon Pro derived GPUs. But a patch published today to the AMD graphics mailing list is opening the door for Linux support...
It looks like AMD's next-gen SoCs not only will be exciting on the CPU side with the much anticipated Zen 6 cores but the AMD Audio Co-Processor "ACP" IP looks to be going through some significant updates...
The networking subsystem changes have been merged for Linux 7.2 with a lot happening around the core networking code as well as the many wired and wireless networking device drivers...
Raspberry Pi engineers have released their first update to Raspberry Pi OS since April. With this new version comes the upgrade to the latest Linux 6.18 LTS kernel...
Just shy of 1,000 new patches were merged on the SoC side for the Linux 7.2 kernel. Among all those patches are enabling five more SoCs to work with the mainline Linux kernel -- including the long-awaited Apple M3 support...
Just days after AMD engineers released a new Lemonade AI server with MCP server integration to make it much more useful, they have now released a new release of their GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" open-source software. With AMD GAIA 0.21.2, they have introduced a bash coding agent is their latest big ticket item in the AI space...
For those interested in Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with modern Intel Xeon processors for confidential computing but also view system uptime as critical, beginning in Linux 7.2 the TDX support is now much more practical with allowing live updates without the need to reboot the running system in the event of security updates and similar...
For those that enjoy keeping an eye on all their system vitals from temperatures to voltages, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" updates have seen many device additions for Linux 7.2...
The media subsystem changes were merged tonight for the Linux 7.2 merge window and it includes the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver now in the mainline kernel.. This ISP4 driver is what completes the loop for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops...
Last month on Phoronix was an exclusive first look at the NVIDIA Vera CPU performance compared to prior-generation NVIDIA Grace as well as the current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition. Following that was looking at how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved over the past eight years of AArch64 Linux servers. A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested wanting to see how Vera compares to Ampere Altra. While Ampere Altra has been in the marketplace now for more than five years, they are some of the most readily available ARM Linux server options for DIY/enthusiast builds given the scarcity of AmpereOne and lack of other readily available socketed ARM CPU options. This article shows how the performance compares between Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA Vera.
The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster...
A bug in the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver leading to some laptop displays freezing after periods of use may finally be close to being resolved. Given the length and quantity of bug reports and one of the problematic commits being tracked back to 2017, it's a heavy hitting issue for some Linux users. With the help of Claude Code, it looks like a fix is on the way to the Linux kernel...
Canonical and the Ubuntu Release Team have implemented an important policy change for Ubuntu flavors moving forward. If they are to have an official release, they must now successfully submit a beta release...
With the ongoing work around the AMD GFX1250 (and GFX1251) in the open-source AMD Linux driver stack, it's led to a lot of speculation about these parts in the GFX12 series associated with RDNA4. RDNA4 refresh? Or a lot of signals have pointed to GFX125x being possible AI/HPC accelerators such as for the upcoming Instinct MI400 series. Adding to the intrigue is GFX1251 being an APU. The latest LLVM compiler activity is further pointing to GFX1250/GFX1251 being for enterprise hardware...
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) drivers, such as for dealing with ECC memory error reporting, are heavy on the Intel side with Linux 7.2 in preparing for upcoming hardware...
Overnight Valve released SteamOS 3.8.10 into the stable channel. for succeeding SteamOS 3.7. There's a lot happening across the board to their in-house Linux platform for the likes of the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine hardware...
The ongoing rise in AI/LLM-generated patches hitting the mailing lists and affecting development workflows continues to impact Linux kernel development. For the ARM64 architecture updates in Linux 7.2 is an interesting anecdote over over feeling like this activity has "slowed us down a little on the feature side" and having to deal with this AI/LLM patch activity resulted in some features now being postponed from making it for this current Linux kernel development cycle...
Kent Overstreet announced the release today of Bcachefs-Tools 1.38.6 as the user-space tools built around the Bcachefs copy-on-write file-system. There are a few new features and a lot of performance work in v1.38.6 without bringing any on-disk format breakage...
The open-source Lemonade AI server for "100% free and private" AI usage across Windows and Linux in leveraging AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, Radeon GPUs, and x86_64 CPUs, is now much more powerful with today's v10.8 release...
The original DisplayLink USB display adapters were great for working with an upstream, open-source driver while sadly the newer DisplayLink tech has been limited to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space daemon. But posted today is an experimental "Vino" driver that is a clean-room, reverse-engineered driver for newer DisplayLink hardware...
Epic Games announced today they have created a new version control system that is now open-source as Lore. Given the proliferation and excellence of Git, you may be wondering why Epic Games is pursuing another VCS option... They are specifically catering Lore to games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes...
After recently noting the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage performance improving with Linux 7.1 and similarly finding performance gains for the Arc Pro B70 on Linux 7.1, several Phoronix readers have been wondering whether the newer Xe3 graphics with Panther Lake similarly benefit. Here are some CPU and iGPU benchmarks of the Core Ultra X7 358H "Panther Lake" SoC between Linux 7.0 and the recently stabilized Linux 7.1 kernel.
Earlier this month plans were shared publicly of Ubuntu 26.10 aiming to build a context-aware desktop with local AI features and one of the first capabilities to be integrated speech-to-text support. Now we have more details on the speech-to-text plans with Canonical announcing the Myna project...
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display and accelerator driver changes have been merged for Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 DRM merge is headlined by the long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support for the AMDGPU open-source driver as part of the larger effort of finally proceeding with a full HDMI 2.1 implementation for this AMD Radeon Linux driver...
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