Phoronix

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...

The Ubuntu 26.10 desktop is adjusting its default out-of-memory (OOM) daemon behavior when dealing with memory pressure on the system...

The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration of these patches were posted by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes...

Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October...

Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed...

The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes...

Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward...

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month of the Intel Xeon 600 workstation performance against AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series in over 400 benchmarks -- including when carried out at the same core count and memory configuration -- today's article is exploring the Hyper Threading / SMT impact on both the Intel Redwood Cove and AMD Zen 5 cores for workstations.

The Rust security response working group and Crates.io team have issued a warning that a targeted attack is underway against key Rust programming language developers...

Last month Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm. Modular was the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame. Released today was Mojo 1.1 and also marks the project recently now beginning code contributions from the community to its compiler...

The fourth monthly-ish snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now available for testing and comes ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta milestone...

The idea has been talked about before but in 2026 still hasn't made it to the mainline Linux kernel.... Standardized reporting of video memory statistics that would work across different vendors / kernel graphics drivers. A new proposal was raised today in an effort to get a standardized interface established...

For two years now we have been curious about the Fujitsu MONAKA CPU since some slides about this Arm-based server processor first appeared and they upstreamed compiler support in GCC 15. This week Fujitsu formally announced the MONAKA CPU and with availability beginning in November...

Released today was the Intel Compute Runtime 26.35.39758.10 update for Windows and Linux systems. With this updated OpenCL and Level Zero GPU compute driver stack comes some exciting updates for this monthly feature update...

For those hopeful of running Linux well on the ASUS Zenbook A14 or A16 laptops powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 SoC, a new ASUS EC driver has been developed for enhancing the support...

Sent out today was the latest weekly drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) material ready for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window...

Days after the recent release of GNU Coreutils 9.12, Rust Coreutils 0.12 was released overnight for advancing this alternative Rust-based implementation of these core utilities...

Released on Wednesday was a new version of the Dragonfly database that continues to promote itself as "the world's most efficient in-memory data store" and a modern replacement to the likes of Redis and Memcached while being fully compatible with their APIs...

Leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput 1.32 for improving input handling on Wayland and X.Org based environments...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek rolled out Miracle-WM 0.11 today as an end-of-summer update to this Wayland compositor built atop the Mir library...

Mesa 26.2.3 is out today as the newest stable point release in this quarter's Mesa 26.2 series...

Canonical recently began producing Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 daily ISOs to complement their experimental amd64v3 package archive that they have been trialing the past few release cycles. While we still don't know what any official plans are for amd64v3 with Ubuntu 26.10, the performance gains can be very worthwhile over the generic amd64 binaries even for low-end/budget hardware.