Phoronix

KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week...

Mesa 25.3 is out tonight as the newest quarterly feature release to this set of (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used across Linux systems. Mesa 25.3 features numerous Vulkan extensions added to the different open-source drivers, continued enhancements to the OpenGL drivers, and various other changes...

Ahead of the Wine 11.0 code freeze beginning in early December, Wine 10.19 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Sent out today is likely the last batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver feature updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window getting underway around the start of December. And it's an exciting one too from adding a new SMART POWER OLED feature to switching from the Radeon to AMDGPU drivers by default for aging GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs...

ollama 0.12.11 released this week as the newest feature update to this easy-to-run method of deploying OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models. Exciting with ollama 0.12.11 is that it's now supporting the Vulkan API...

Vulkan 1.4.333 is out with a handful of fixes plus two new extensions...

AMD's GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their "Generrative AI Is Awesome" quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.13 as another step forward for this AI demonstrator...

While the "Nova" driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what's working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support...

Intel today sent out their last batch of planned feature patches for their Xe kernel graphics driver of material intended for Linux 6.19...

Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality...

Following the mainline Linux kernel support for the VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer from StarFive, Linux kernel patches are on the way for their new VisionFive 2 Lite low-cost offering. With the StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite this RISC-V board can be procured for as little as $19.9 USD as one of the cheapest yet fairly capable RISC-V SBCs...

Intel driver engineer Suraj Kandpal presented at the recent X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2025) on the challenges around supporting content protection on Linux such as for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and Protected Audio Video Path (PAVP)...

Fedora 44 is looking at replacing the Linux kernel's console "FBCON" with the user-space-based KMSCON implementation. Eventually the hope remains to deprecate the FBCON/FBDEV code within the Linux kernel...

Compiler engineer Marek Polacek of Red Hat recently proposed making the C++20 language specification (or rather the GNU++20 dialect) the default C++ version when not otherwise specified...

The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019...

Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-3 as the newest stable update to this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enabling countless Windows games to run often extremely well under Linux...

Following the recent patch proposal for moving AMD GCN 1.1 generation GPUs over to the AMDGPU Linux driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon driver, a similar patch has now been proposed for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are at parity with the AMDGPU driver to the Radeon driver while needing this newer kernel driver for enjoying RADV Vulkan support, better performance, and overall a better experience...

For those making use of the out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver, rolling out to the snapshot/nightly testing channel is the long-in-development "rebalance_v2" functionality now known as the "bcachefs_metadata_version_reconcile" feature...

Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm...

Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how they compare to prior generation HBv4 instances while this article is taking things further and putting the performance into perspective against the older HBv2 and HBv3 instances.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available...

CUDA 13.0 Update 2 is now available as the latest incremental improvement to NVIDIA's compute stack...

For next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It's been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it's in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver...

The Linux kernel's port to the DEC Alpha processors remains alive over 30 years after these processors first appeared...

Recently when Intel contributed Nova Lake support for LLVM/Clang and the GCC compiler support there was not any AVX10 or APX support contrary to rumors and expectations. Intel has now published a new programming reference manual where they now confirm Nova Lake will in fact support AVX10.2 and APX...

Canonical announced today the expansion of the legacy add-on for Ubuntu Pro to provide total coverage of Ubuntu LTS releases up to 15 years...

Miracle-WM 0.8 was released on Wednesday as another step forward for this tiling Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir software. Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek continues driving new features into Miracle-WM as it works toward its v1.0 milestone...

Back in April PostgreSQL added AVX-512 support for CRC32 computations. At the time the gains for CRC32 computations with this popular open-source database server were reported to be 50% to 3x faster for x86_64 CPUs able to leverage AVX-512. That AVX-512 support is found with PostgreSQL 18.0 that released in September and now Intel is praising this addition to PostgreSQL for which their developers also had a part in along with AWS and others...

Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.2.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release for this stable set of open-source (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library...

Valve just sent over the press release announcing three new Steam Hardware devices...

With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path...

Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware.

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristof of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has reached general availability with a number of enhancements to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. As with so many things in 2025, AI is a big focus for RHEL 10.1...

Back in August with the Vulkan 1.4.327 spec update was the introduction of VK_VALVE_video_encode_rgb_conversion as a Valve vendor extension. The open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has now merged support for this extension that is being used now by Steam Link VR...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who developed the open-source and reverse-engineered "Rocket" accel driver for the Rockchip NPU and also worked on the Etnaviv/Vivante NPU support and other related code like Mesa's Teflon is teasing new NPU drivers coming in the new year...

Webmin continues serving as one of the best open-source, web-based server management control panels for Linux and other Unix-like platforms. Webmin 2.600 is out today with yet more features and a refined theme...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has published their October 2025 status report...

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel...

The Ubuntu 25.10 transition to using some Rust system utilities continues proving quite rocky. Beyond some early performance issues with Rust Coreutils, breakage for some executables, and broken unattended upgrades due to a Rust Coreutils bug, it's also sudo-rs now causing Ubuntu developers some headaches. There are two moderate security issues affecting sudo-rs, the Rust version of sudo being used by Ubuntu 25.10...

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it's bringing its flagship Kaspersky anti-virus software for home users over to Linux. Kaspersky software was previously available for Linux just for business/enterprise deployments...

Sent out today and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is the latest batch of 64-bit ARM "ARM64" architecture fixes. Most notable is a fix for addressing a "catastrophic performance issue" that was uncovered...

It's "Patch Tuesday" and Intel is out with new CPU microcode for Linux users in addition to making public 30 new security advisories that affect a range of Intel products...

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation...

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.

While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...

Intel on Monday released version 0.1 of their Low Power Mode Daemon, the open-source daemon in development for several years now for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core (Ultra) CPUs under Linux...

System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop...

New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU...