Phoronix

As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements...

The modern AMD Kernel graphics driver consisting of AMDGPU, the AMDKFD compute code, and associated infrastructure continues to easily be the largest mainline open-source driver. With the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting as stable as soon as later today, the AMD kernel graphics driver cracks the 5.9 million line threshold. In comparison, the entire Linux kernel source tree comes in at..

In advance of the Linux 6.17 merge window expected to open soon following the Linux 6.16 release, all of the SoC updates have been submitted to Linus Torvalds for this next kernel version...

A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another...

GNU Binutils 2.45 was released on Sunday morning as the newest version of this set of open-source binary tools...

There are a few AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization improvements on the way for the Linux 6.17 kernel worth noting...

Shotcut 25.07 is out today as the newest feature release for this prominent open-source and cross-platform video editing solution...

Assuming no objections are raised by Linus Torvalds, an early pull request has been submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window to address an obscure kernel limitation that has been in place going back all the way to 1993 during the Linux v0.99 kernel days...

This past week Qualcomm sent out a set of 17 patches for the MSM DRM kernel graphics driver for enabling support for the Inter Frame Power Collapse (IFPC) feature with the X1-85 GPU found in the current Snapdragon X laptops...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted already the sound code feature changes ready for Linux 6.17...

We are just a few weeks out from seeing the release of the FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library with many new features and improvements for this widely-used open-source software...

One of the nice Linux kernel accomplishments during the pandemic was getting the NTFS3 driver upstreamed for that modern NTFS file-system read/write driver developed by Paragon Software. In recent times that NTFS3 driver has been seeing occasional fixes and for the Linux 6.17 kernel -- and perhaps then back-ported to existing kernels -- are some notable fixes for those relying on drives formatted with this Microsoft file-system...

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted ahead of the imminent Linux 6.17 merge window...

Released on Friday was a new version of the oneDNN deep neural network library maintained by Intel and the UXL Foundation. This library used by various deep learning applications continues preparing for upcoming Intel CPUs and GPUs...

One week ago in the KDE Plasma land it was talking about rounded bottom corners for windows by default while this week in the KDE Plasma space is another long overdue feature: notifications for Plasma around low printer ink cartridge levels. The upcoming KDE Plasma 6.5 will finally feature built-in notifications on printer ink levels running low...

With Linux 6.16 expected to be released on Sunday unless an extra week of testing is deemed necessary, the Linux 6.17 merge window will then kickoff the next day. Based on monitoring the various subsystem "-next" trees and other mailing list activity, here is a look at many of the changes expected for Linux 6.17 barring last minute issues or other objections raised by Linus Torvalds...

Longtime Linux developer Sasha Levin of NVIDIA (and formerly of Google and Microsoft) as well as being the Linux LTS kernel co-maintainer today proposed a Linux kernel AI coding assistant configuration and documentation/rules for contributing to the Linux kernel with patches that are (co)authored by AI coding utilities...

While there have been various elements of the Apple M1 and M2 SoC support in the mainline Linux kernel along with support for various Macs, different features have been missing from the upstream kernel such as the Apple GPU kernel graphics driver as one big example. On a more fundamental level, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to cross off another low-level expectation for Apple Silicon Macs on the mainline kernel: the ability to reboot the system...

Last week Friday the unfortunate news came down that Intel was discontinuing their Clear Linux project effective immediately. For the past ten years Intel software engineers have been crafting Clear Linux as a high performance distribution that is extensively optimized for x86_64 processors via aggressive compiler tuning, various patches to the Linux kernel and other packages, and a variety of other optimizations throughout the operating system. For years Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too. Here is a final look at the Clear Linux performance on the Intel side compared to the performance of the latest Ubuntu 25.04 release.

Another hit to the open-source Intel software ecosystem this year was the company formally archiving/discontinuing work on the PlaidML deep learning software. PlaidML was the deep learning framework that Intel acquired back in 2018 as part of their acquisition of Vertex.AI. PlaidML had a goal of "deep learning for every platform" but unfortunately those ambitions didn't materialize...

The Linux 6.16 kernel is expected to be released as stable this coming Sunday, 27 July, barring any last minute issues that cause Linus Torvalds to have reservations over issuing v6.16 stable and to instead do a v6.16-rc8 test release. With Linux 6.16 imminent, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting features in this next Linux kernel version...

Ahead of the Linux 6.16 stable kernel expected to be released on Sunday, some last minute Bcachefs file-system fixes join various other kernel regression/bug fixes landing today in Git...

Last month AMD detailed the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series as the new Zen 5 Threadrippers. After the Threadripper PRO 9000WX Series debuted this week, AMD announced today that the Threadripper 9000 series will begin hitting retailers next week...

Given that non-UEFI BIOS systems are quite old at this point and Intel/AMD systems for the past number of years have all supported UEFI, another change proposal being considered this week by Fedora Linux is limiting the release-blocking status of various (non-UEFI) BIOS systems...

Ayn is a Chinese brand of handheld gaming devices that have included Arm-based devices shipping Android as well as AMD Ryzen powered handhelds with Windows 11 or even the option of installing Ubuntu. Better support for the Ayn x86 gaming handheld devices is on the way with patches posted for a new Ayn platform driver for the Linux kernel...

Greenboot is a generic health check framework for systemd on RPM-OSTree based Linux distributions. Red Hat engineers have worked on Greenboot as part of the likes of Fedora IoT and their other RPM-OSTree initiatives for checking on the overall system health with ease...

Fedora 43 is looking to offer packages to support the Hare system programming language...

Following the Vulkanised 2025 presentation how NVIDIA is finding great success with Vulkan for AI / machine learning and already competitive to CUDA in some areas, Red Hat engineer and DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie began exploring the potential of Mesa Vulkan drivers for AI inferencing. He was successful in using the Intel ANV, NVIDIA NVK, and Radeon RADV drivers for Vulkan-based AI inferencing while for the Radeon hardware tested is where it's showing the most potential (performance) at the moment and for even competing with the ROCm compute stack...

A new Linux driver patch series posted by AMD today introduces a new kernel driver "SFS" for Seamless Firmware Servicing. I hadn't heard AMD talk about Seamless Firmware Servicing at any previous events but it appears to be supported for current-generation AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors...

With the Linux 6.16 kernel that will be debuting as stable as soon as this coming Sunday there are some minor performance benefits for the Radeon integrated graphics with the incredible Strix Halo SoC. Here are some comparison benchmarks of Linux 6.15 vs. Linux 6.16 Git for the AMD Radeon graphics of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop...

The Ubuntu Concept ISO images that contain experimental patches -- or "hacks" to make things work -- to enable Ubuntu Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops is out with a fresh spin. The new Ubuntu Concept ISOs move to using the Linux 6.16 kernel while also enabling some additional Snapdragon X laptop models...

An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD's Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag...

Well known open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak has landed his latest set of 16 patches into Mesa 25.3-devel for enhancing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Notable here is getting OpenGL sparse textures working on the latest Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4/GFX12 graphics cards...

One of the CPU architectures continuing to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel but rarely ever seeing any code activity is the SPARC64 architecture port for the once-interesting processors from Sun Microsystems...

Timur Kristof as a contractor on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he's been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he's been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it's a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default...

Born out of his work on developing the GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) over the past decade, one of the recent initiatives by GNOME developer Christian Hergert has been on Foundry, a new "IDE in a box" of sorts and with CLI tooling complementary to the GNOME Builder IDE graphical environment...

How time flies... This week already marks one year since the debut of AMD's Zen 5 Strix Point laptop processors with the likes of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 that also rolled out the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics. In marking one year that Strix Point laptops have been available, here is a performance benchmarking redux of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the ASUS Zenbook S16 for looking at how the Linux performance at launch-day compares to a very leading-edge Linux software stack now one year later.

Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components. In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella. Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer...

Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions...

The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well, and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features...

In addition to Blender 5.0 supporting HDR on Linux when using the Vulkan API and with Wayland, another important high dynamic range (HDR) milestone landed this week into Blender: the ability to both import and export HDR videos...

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series...

With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17...

For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed...

Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives...

Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor...

The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs...

The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment...

The first release candidate of Python 3.14 is now available for testing as what will be this year's big feature update to this popular scripting language...

The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Intel-based Macs as release-blocking...