Google engineers today introduced KFuzzTest as a new lightweight framework for in-kernel fuzz targets for internal kernel functions. KFuzzTest aims to make it easier to exercise Linux kernel code paths that are difficult to do from the system call boundary...
A new version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler "ISPC" was just published for supporting that C programming language variant optimized for single program. multiple data (SPMD) programming that is optimized for Intel's various hardware offerings. While catering to Intel hardware, ISPC 1.28 notably adds new AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processor targets...
The IDXD Linux kernel driver used for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) support on recent Xeon processors is being cleaned up for some "not so happy code paths" after an Intel engineer uncovered memory leaks and other troubles with the open-source driver code...
It was nearly one year ago in the Linux 6.13 kernel that the ReiserFS file-system was dropped from the mainline kernel after having been deprecated in 2022. That dropped 32.8k lines of code from the Linux kernel but some documentation remnants of ReiserFS were mistakenly left in but now in the process of dropping those remnants for the defunct file-system...
The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library release continues to get more exciting almost by the day. The newest feature being squeezed into this next release is a Whisper audio filter for making use of OpenAI's Whisper model for providing automatic speech recognition / transcription capabilities...
Last week Microsoft released new versions of WSL2 for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability affecting their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 implementation. Those details around CVE-2025-53788 are now public for this vulnerability that could lead to elevation of privileges...
The xf86-input-mouse driver for mouse support when using the X.Orrg Server on operating systems like the BSDs, Illumos, GNU Hurd, and Solaris is out with a rare update...
Following the discussion over potentially obsoleting/deprecating the Itanium IA-64 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), developers are discussing similar treatment for some of the other poorly-maintained CPU ports...
Go 1.25 is out today as the newest half-year update to this popular programming language. What I find most exciting with Go 1.25 is the new experimental garbage collector yielding 10~40% reduction in overhead...
Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%...
This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities...
While most Linux gamers are content using Valve's Steam Play (Proton) these days for Linux gaming, a new release of CodeWeavers' CrossOver is now available for enjoying other Windows applications and games on Linux as well as macOS. CrossOver 25.1 enhances the stability of the Microsoft Office office suite on Linux among other changes...
Last week alongside our Framework Desktop review with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" SoC I posted benchmarks of the Strix Halo performance compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X / 9950X3D socketed desktop processors. For those wondering similarly how the top-end Strix Halo SoC in the Framework Desktop competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" flagship in performance and power efficiency, here are those comparison benchmarks.
Following this weekend's release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie", Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 has been released as the state of Trixie while running atop Hurd rather than Linux...
ZLUDA as the open-source solution bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware has been seeing a nice uptick in activity the past several months for its latest take on life. The latest feature merged to ZLUDA is the all-important kernel cache to help with performance...
The GCC 14 compiler had marked the Itanium IA-64 code as being obsolete and slated for removal in GCC 15. But then last year the Itanium port was un-deprecated with plans to "support this for some years to come." Now one year later it's back to talking about deprecating/obsoleting the Itanium IA-64 compiler code in GCC...
Intel has introduced another new PCI device ID to their open-source Linux graphics driver stack for signifying another likely product on the way based on the Battlemage BMG-G21 GPU...
The beta release of Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" is now available for testing of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base...
Intel today announced their August 2025 Software Update to Project Battlematrix and the release of the LLM-Scaler 1.0 container for optimized AI inference support on Intel Arc B-Series graphics hardware...
Even prior to the Linux 6.17-rc1 release on Sunday I already had kicked off some Linux 6.17 Git benchmarking in being eager to see how the performance is beginning to shape up for this next kernel release that is set to power the likes of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43. There is some good news and bad news with my early testing on the ZBook Ultra G1a for AMD Strix Halo...
For over a year now Intel has been working on a new DRM sharpness property for making use of Lunar Lake's new adaptive sharpening filter capabilities built into its display engine. This new sharpening filter with Lunar Lake and future SoCs can hep with sharpening blurred or upscaled content and over the past year has gone through several rounds of code review. The latest patches were sent out last week for this DRM sharpness property...
While there is already MoltenVK for Vulkan implemented over Apple's Metal graphics API, the graphics engineers at LunarG have announced KosmicKrisp as a Mesa-based driver implementing Vulkan over Metal...
Recently we looked at the performance of the AMD EPYC 4545P that is a 16 core 65 Watt processor in the EPYC 4005 "Grado" series. This is quite an interesting processor for those after low-power servers, edge AI deployments, and other purposes with no similar Ryzen 9000 series processor or competition from Intel offering sixteen performance cores at around 65 Watts. Complementing all the performance and power data from that review article, here are some additional tests putting its performance and efficiency compared to the original AMD EPYC 7601 flagship processor that ushered in the EPYC family eight years ago.
Intel engineer Chen Yu posted a fresh round of Linux kernel patches working on cache-aware scheduling/load-balancing for this functionality being sought after both by Intel and AMD. The new patches should address some performance regressions observed in the prior patches...
For those making use of the Network File System (NFS), the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel is bringing some nice improvements both for the NFS server and client code...
For hybrid CPU core designs from recent Intel Core (Ultra) processors to ARM big.LIITTLE, a patch series was posted today in seeking to enhance the generic ACPI processor idle driver around processors with multiple types of CPU cores...
While there was previously talk of Blender 5.0 likely defaulting to using the Vulkan API for rendering but keeping the OpenGL driver around, those plans look like they may be changing. OpenGL-by-default looks to now be on the table for Blender 5.0 due out later this year...
With the increased popularity of Linux gaming these days, a patch has been proposed to improve the hardware support for the Logitech G13 gameboard under Linux. The only problem is the hardware is now 16 years old and since been discontinued...
Back in May the Ubuntu engineers at Canonical announced plans to ship Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 given their recent commitment to always shipping with the latest upstream Linux kernel version. They still are committing to it even if it means the kernel and Ubuntu schedules don't perfectly align and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box may end up being on an unstable "-rc" kernel...
The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release continues to increase in excitement with this weekend Vulkan hardware acceleration for Apple's ProRes RAW codec being merged...
Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17-rc1 kernel a few hours ahead of his typical release regiment due to currently being in Europe. That marks the end of the Linux 6.17 merge window with many exciting changes merged this cycle. This is notable with Linux 6.17 expected to power Ubuntu 25.10 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases...
Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved...
Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged...
Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window...
GNU/Hurd has made it as an official platform target within SDL that is the open-source library widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions across operating systems...
There were a lot of interesting changes that landed in GNOME's Mutter compositor codebase to end out the weekend and ahead of next month's big GNOME 49 release...
Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting Plasma changes for the week. There continues to be a lot of feature work and polishing that is building up for the Plasma 6.5 desktop release...
Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel...
There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer...
We still don't know what's going to happen for Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 kernel even with the merge window set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release. Linus Torvalds commented over one month ago that they would be parting ways for Linux 6.17. At the start of the Linux 6.17 merge window a Bcachefs pull request was submitted but nearly two weeks later it's still not been pulled and Linus Torvalds hasn't commented on the matter...
A few new firmware files were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository for supporting a new GFX12.0.1 (RDNA4) "Kicker" graphics processor. There was also an AMDGPU kernel graphics driver patch that just landed as well in Linux 6.17 for the RDNA4 Kicker variant...
Phoronix