Phoronix

We are nearing the point of the Wine 12.0 stable release coming up in early 2027 while for now the Wine 11.xx bi-weekly development releases continue. Out today is Wine 11.19 with a few new features and plenty of fixes...

Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter today sent out the pull requests of the Apple SoC Device Tree changes they are ready to upstream for the Linux 7.4 merge window happening later this month. Most notable is the initial Device Tree for Apple systems using the base M4 SoC model as well as for the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro SoC...

Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely...

Ubuntu developer Gianpiero Carpinelli at Canonical has been working on introducing SHA3-256 and SHA3-384 support for Debian's APT packaging tool in preparing for if/when that SHA2 is broken...

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn't just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice software updates...

The newest systemd component being worked on and drafted for an initial pull request is systemd-appd as a new mechanism to centralizing the tracking of user's apps...

Imagination Tech was at XDC 2026 Toronto this week to talk up their ongoing work around their PowerVR Mesa Vulkan driver (and PVR upstream DRM kernel driver) with this driver continuing to improve, plans for supporting their new Volcanic GPU architecture, and other improvements...

As a follow-up to the news one month ago of Intel Nova Lake P's graphics introducing a new 64-bit GPU mode, the latest driver-side enablement has now landed for Intel's Iris Gallium3D OpenGL driver for supporting efficient 64-bit addressing...

Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP...

Apex Compute is the company started in California in 2024 that aims to produce high-efficiency AI accelerators for real-time edge AI inferencing. So far they have an FPGA prototype for licensing and deployment and carries the bold claim of being "20x faster than the NVIDIA Jetson" and at under 10W and one fifth the cost. Making Apex Compute much more interesting to us now is that they are developing an open-source, Mesa-based Vulkan driver for their hardware...

Coreboot 26.09 released yesterday as the latest quarterly feature release to this open-source software for replacing proprietary BIOS and system firmware on a growing selection of devices...

KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image...

As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end -- and close-up access -- to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss...

Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results are now in and it's clocking in just above 3%...

While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it's largely boring but here are some to illustrate.

Back in 2021 the Direct3D 10 User-Mode Driver "d3d10umd" was introduced as a new Gallium3D state tracker to work as a Windows WDDM UMD driver similar to Windows WARP while leveraging LLVMpipe for better performance. Now five years later the poorly maintained code is removed from the Mesa codebase...

Ubuntu 26.10 beta is now available for the official Ubuntu editions as well as the various community flavors...

During the past month on Phoronix were 284 original news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews/multi-page benchmark articles. A lot of exciting happenings both on the hardware and software fronts while October is sure to be another interesting month with the releases of Ubuntu 26.10, Fedora 45, and some more hardware fun...

With the vast array of wired and wireless networking drivers within the Linux kernel and range of protocols and other networking features, it's a big expanse of code for AI/LLM agents to analyze and critique. The Linux networking developers have acknowledged being "complete overwhelmed" by the AI/LLM-driven patch activity and bug reports as well as battling against AI slop patches. Even though Linux 7.3 stable won't be out for another three weeks, some networking fixes are already being diverted to the next kernel version...

Following yesterday's release of the Qt 6.12 LTS toolkit, The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 21 in beta form as the latest version of their integrated development environment focused on C/C++ as well as Python, JavaScript, and other programming languages...

In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version...

Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it's on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge...

Earlier this year Intel announced the "Optimization Zone" as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They've continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Intel hardware...

Back in August I wrote about NVIDIA working on Linux scheduler improvements for helping the SMT performance on their new Vera CPU with Olympus cores. That work remains ongoing but is looking fairly beneficial for performance especially for knocking it out in less than one hundred lines of code...

Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack...

The Renesas SH7305 isn't a new processor and is well known for powering various Casio graphing calculators over the past decde and a half. But finally the mainline Linux kernel may end up seeing support for this 32-bit SH-4a RISC core...

During the last round of price hikes on Raspberry Pi devices due to RAM pricing, they were able to keep the 1GB and 2GB single board computer versions steady. But Eben Upton announced today that the RAM pricing has become "unsustainable" and even the 2GB versions now are facing steep price hikes...

For ending out the month of September the OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew released OpenMandriva ROME 26.0 as their long overdue release held up by various technical issues and a reported sabotage attempt to their platform. With OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 having been their last release, this is quite a big update...

As part of Valve's work on developing the Steam Frame VR headset, they worked on foveated rendering support for the Mesa Turnip driver that supports the Qualcomm Adreno graphics with open-source Vulkan API support. Foveated rendering is the technique to more closely mimic human vision by rendering high detail at your direct gaze point and lower quality in the peripheral vision. For computer graphics, foveated rendering for headsets can be beneficial for conserving power in areas of the render frame that are less important to provide more performance with your main area of focus...

With the third quarter wrapping up, here is a look back at the most interesting content on Phoronix over the past three months...

Edison Design Group has open-sourced their EDG C/C++ front-end that has been known in the commercial world for its extensive dialect support and other features. The EDG C++ front-end has been used by the likes of Intel C++ Compiler classic, NVIDIA CUDA NVCC, and even Microsoft Visual Studio for IntelliSense...

Framework Computer today opened the pre-order process for their updated Framework Desktop featuring the new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 496 "Gorgon Halo" SoC with 192GB of LPDDR5x-8533 memory...

Immediately following the OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 27 benchmarks I expanded the scope of testing to look at how recent OpenJDK releases have been comparing to alternative JVMs like GraalVM, Temurin, and Semeru. Here are those benchmarks if curious about the Java performance in those different environments.

Qt 6.12 is now available as the newest version of the Qt6 toolkit and also serving as a Long Term Support (LTS) release...

Rusticl lead developer Karol herbst provided a status update on this Mesa Rust-based OpenCL driver during the XDC 2026 conference happening in Toronto...

While the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series "Gorgon Halo" systems are nearing the marketplace, the NPU support for Linux was seemingly overlooked until now. But at least the simple enablement patch looks like it will arrive for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel...

A proposal was posted this week to the Linux kernel mailing list by a Google engineer to make it easier for ARM64 Linux to adjust the kernel stack size. The motivation for doing so to configure the kernel stack size during boot time is on reducing system memory consumption...

Released overnight was the Intel Media Driver 2026Q3 stack for providing the latest open-source video encode/decode capabilities on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware. Most notable with the new release is rolling out Crescent Island support...

TGSI was the intermediate representation (IR) developed for Mesa's Gallium3D drivers by Tungsten Graphics at the time. It worked fine more than a decade ago but since then the Mesa front-ends and hardware drivers have largely transitioned over to the superior NIR format. Work is underway toward eliminating TGSI in the Mesa codebase...

Ahead of the October ISO refresh of the Arch Linux media, Archinstall 4.5 released today as the newest update to this convenient, text-based Arch Linux installer...

If you have an AMD Ryzen laptop/desktop and looking to leverage AI/LLM capabilities with the integrated graphics, Linux 7.4 is going to be a real treat especially for lower-end hardware. AMD's new PerfOpt feature being introduced in Linux 7.4 is set to provide some solid gains as shown in these benchmarks today across different AMD Ryzen/Radeon hardware.

Following the public preview of Linux containers on WSL, Microsoft today announced the general availability of WSLC for supporting Linux containers on Windows...

It's been a while since any new Spectre vulnerabilities have come to light but that's changing today. The embargo has now lifted on BTR, Branch Target Reuse as a new Spectre-V2 attack affecting just-in-time (JIT) compilers...

It's been a while since Canonical announced any new ISOs of their Ubuntu builds targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X series laptops. But ahead of this week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release, they shipped new Ubuntu 26.10 Snapdragon Concept images today with improved Snapdragon X1 laptop support as well as the initial Snapdragon X2 laptop support...

Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers...

For those after in-depth hardware and system monitoring support from the Linux desktop, hw-monitor continues to advance as one of the modern options. Released on Monday was hw-monitor 0.6 with per-process GPU reporting metrics when using capable DRM drivers like the AMDGPU, Intel i915 and Xe, and Nouveau drivers...

In development the past year has been the Mesa Gallium3D API implemented atop NVIDIA's CUDA driver API. Initially named "CLUDA" and now going by "NOCL", this Mesa code paired with Rusticl is working well for OpenCL atop the NVIDIA proprietary driver as a new compute option...

Over the past year Jay has been in development as a new open-source shader compiler for Intel GPUs. Alyssa Rosenzweig has been leading its development since joining Intel in 2025. For Mesa 26.3 the Jay shader compiler is being enabled by default for modern Intel graphics hardware and is around ~10% faster than the existing BRW compiler code...

BPF-based HID drivers have helped to deliver quirks/fixes for different HID devices more quickly than being bound by the conventional kernel cycle. Loading these eBPF programs from user-space have shown a lot of potential for innovating and iterating more quickly with BPF drivers for different subsystems. The latest area now seeing the BPF treatment are display panel drivers...

D7VK as a Vulkan-based implementation of the Microsoft Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5 / 3 APIs for Linux/Wine (Steam Play) usage is out with version 2.3 and the developer now believing its marking the point that the project is rather mature...