Phoronix

Following yesterday's Chrome 145 release with JPEG-XL support, Chrome 146 today was promoted to the beta channel to help facilitate broader testing of the next round of Chrome/Chromium browser improvements...

Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake... But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison looking at the general performance and power efficiency going all the way back to the Gen9 graphics era for what seemed like an eternity of Gen9-derived graphics during the Skylake era.

Two useful bits of ROCm news today for those interested in AMD's open-source GPU compute stack...

The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases...

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for Linux 7.0 and include finally setting the default Intel TSX mode to "auto" rather than being off by default...

For those using the open-source OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, OpenVPN 2.7 is out today with some notable improvements...

Intel today released a new version of their Compute Runtime stack and IGC graphics compiler for Level Zero and OpenCL usage with their integrated and discrete graphics. Separately they also upstreamed more SYCL code this week into mainline LLVM...

The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven't been able to tackle with their optimizations...

There were recently patches for getting the Adobe Photoshop 2025 installer to work on Linux under Wine. Those patches were picked up by Wine-Staging and now more traction is coming for getting those patches into the upstream Wine codebase, some of which have now been merged...

The locking code changes have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel and it introduces support for a new compiler-driven feature being introduced on the compiler side with the upcoming LLVM Clang 22...

Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut...

Merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are some pretty exciting scheduler changes: new features and never-ending work around scheduler performance optimizations and greater scalability with today's increasingly high core count systems...

For programmers fond of the Go programming language, Go 1.26 is out today with two language changes, performance improvements, and other alterations to this Google-backed programming language...

Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues...

The various SoC and platform Device Tree additions were sent out today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Easily most exciting on the SoC side this cycle among the ARM and RISC-V changes is getting support ready for the SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC...

In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel...

CodeWeavers just announced CrossOver 26, the newest version of their commercial software built atop Wine for running Windows games and applications under Apple macOS and Linux...

With recently having carried out benchmarks and finding the Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" performance has improved ~14% since launch day thanks to open-source/Linux software improvements plus also recently having carried out Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks using the latest upstream software, here is a look at how the Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" dual socket server is comparing up against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship when both are running up-to-date software.

The open-source Redis 8.6 release is now available and this GA release has brought "substantial" performance improvements and to memory reduction too. Plus various new features like TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication, time series enhancements, and new eviction policies...

In addition to the BPF filtering support for IO_uring that was merged on Monday, the other block device changes and IO_uring updates were also merged for the newly-opened Linux 7.0 merge window...

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning...

The wonderful IO_uring for the Linux kernel for high performance asnyc I/O has picked up a new capability with Linux 7.0: BPF filtering...

Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere...

The many power management, thermal, and ACPI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. As usual there are many changes coming from fixes to new hardware support and more expansive thermal control capabilities under Linux...

MythTV 36 is now available for this long-time open-source digital video recorder "DVR" software that has been around now for more than two decades as the leading choice for those wishing to watch and/or record live TV under Linux especially as an HTPC...

We are nearing the stable release of LLVM 22 in hopefully two weeks. Out today is the third release candidate of LLVM 22.1 for soliciting more testing of this open-source compiler stack...

The EFI subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel. Worth mentioning here is a new quirk for helping Valve's Steam Deck handheld...

Christian Brauner sent in a dozen VFS pull requests that are now-merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. The VFS pull requests worth noting right away in this article are the introduction of the NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE features...

Among the pull requests merged today on this first day of the Linux 7.0 merge window are the many Btrfs file-system feature updates...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to leverage Cargo and the Rust compiler "rustc" itself running within this platform. Plus they also made a heck of a lot of other improvements too over the course of the past month. Today they published a status update to outline all of the promising advancements made to this independent OS so far in 2026...

While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts... OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail...

Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state.

Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software...

Debian's tag2upload has finally reached general availability "GA" status for helping Debian developers/maintainers with an improved Git-based packaging workflow...

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.19 release is now the GNU Linux-libre 6.19-gnu downstream release that strips out support for open-source drivers dependent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements deemed against free software standards, removing the ability to load non-open-source kernel modules, and similar restrictions in the name of software freedom...

The AMDGPU and AMDKFD Linux kernel graphics driver code has been readying support for the Peak Tops Limiter (PTL) as a new feature to the latest Instinct accelerators...

While Linux 7.0 is the next kernel version solely over Linus Torvalds' numbering preference, there is a notable symbolic change that was sent in overnight for this new kernel merge window: formally concluding the "Rust experiment" with upstream kernel developers now in acceptance that Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay...

Following last week's release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere...

Following Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 6.19 stable, Linus Torvalds is now out with his customary release announcement. Notably he officially confirmed that the next kernel version is Linux 7.0 as the successor to Linux 6.19...

As anticipated due to the extra week for the cycle given end of year holidays, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 6.19 stable kernel as the first major release of 2026. There is a lot in store with this early 2026 kernel release...

After discovering this morning that Intel archived/discontinued its On Demand "SDSi" GitHub project around that controversial feature, it was a slippery slope in noticing Intel recently archived around two dozen other open-source projects they previously maintained...

D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today's release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5...

With Linux 6.19 due for release later today it then opens up the next kernel merge window. It could be Linux 6.20 but more than likely the next kernel version will be called Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds' past tradition of bumping the major version number after X.19. Whatever it ends up being called, here is a look at various "-next" changes that have been queuing up ahead of the merge window...

Back in 2021 on Phoronix was first to report on Intel preparing Linux patches for a "Software Defined Silicon" feature for activating extra licensed hardware features. That Software Defined Silicon support continued moving forward and was then announced as Intel On Demand with a focus on users being able to pay to activate additional accelerators found on select SKUs but not enabled by default...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.2 is now Wine-Staging 11.2 as this experimental/testing version of Wine with hundreds of extra patches that have yet to be introduced in upstream proper for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux. Notable in this bi-weekly update are more patches for continuing to improve the Adobe Photoshop installer support on Linux...

Of Intel's different CPU accelerator IPs, the arguably most useful and with the greatest customer interest remains around QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Intel QAT allows offloading various compression and encryption tasks for better performance. Intel this week released QATlib 26.02 as the newest version of their user-space library for leveraging QuickAssist Technology on capable hardware...

Back in 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced they were open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer and was then published in early 2023 for this renderer that has been used in a variety of featured animated films. Since then they have continued advancing this MoonRay code via the open-source OpenMoonRay project and this week published their newest feature update...

With QEMU 10.2 that released at the end of last year is the new "MSHV" accelerator for allowing VMs to be created from a Microsoft Hyper-V guest without using nested virtualization. Last weekend at FOSDEM 2026 was a presentation on this MSHV accelerator for those interested...

With the Linux 6.19 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow (8 February), here is a reminder about the top features to expect from this next version of the Linux kernel...

The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing...