Phoronix

As an exciting announcement out of the KDE Akademy 2025 conference kicking off in Berlin, Germany... The KDE Linux distribution is now in alpha! This is their in-house reference Linux distribution for the KDE Plasma desktop...

Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing "Link: " tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he's had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he's going to be more strict over "useless" link tags in Git commit messages...

As a follow-up to the article last week around the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau" about to become much more reliable following fixes, that code was merged on Friday for Linux 6.17...

Ahead of Akademy kicking off in Berlin, the annual KDE developer conference, there is another weekly Plasma development update. KDE developer Nate Graham shared the latest exciting progress on Plasma 6.5 while more good news will be coming out later today...

As what might be its last test release before declaring the stable release, systemd 258-rc4 was released this week as the latest stepping stone for this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

The long-awaited beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 Linux distribution and the closely-aligned COSMIC desktop environment will be happening in late September...

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc5 release on Sunday were a few notable x86 platform driver changes. This includes some new hardware support and device quirks...

It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.

With Wine 10.15 expected to be released next Friday there will be initial support for using the NTSYNC driver found within the Linux kernel...

The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is... a 1TB SSD...

Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026...

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops...

Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake...

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel...

As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension...

As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree, sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch...

Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors...

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled...

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too...

With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.

AMD engineers have submitted a HIP-RT update for Blender developers ahead of the big Blender 5.0 release to enhance the RDNA4 ray-tracing performance...

NVIDIA engineer Ankit Agrawal today posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series working on Linux virtualization support for Extended GPU Memory (EGM)...

Following sudo-rs becoming the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 as of a few days ago, Canonical is also proceeding with its transition of using the Rust version of Coreutils for this next Ubuntu Linux release...

Miracle-WM is the Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir project with a focus on tiling and inspired by Sway/i3. Miracle-WM 0.7 is now available for advancing this Mir-powered Wayland experience with additional functionality now in place...

A change proposal filed for next year's Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel's NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives...

A new feature Microsoft has been working on for its Azure Linux operating system is OS Guard as a container-host platform that enforces immutability, code integrity, mandatory access control, and other features. Microsoft quietly revealed more about OS Guard last month and yesterday's release of Azure Linux 3.0.20250822 builds out more of the OS Guard functionality...

Linux Mint 22.2 is officially out today as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base...

On the same day as beginning to ship the Intel Arc Pro B50 ~$349 USD workstation graphics card, Intel also shipped OpenVINO 2025.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source AI toolkit...

The GNOME 49 release candidate "49.rc" was just released as we close in on the stable GNOME 49.0 release in two weeks...

Well, here is some sad news... After the better part of two decades at Red Hat, Hans de Goede shared today he will be leaving the company next month. Hans de Goede during his time at Red Hat has been responsible for countless hardware improvements especially for Linux laptops, serves as the x86 platform subsystem lead maintainer for the Linux kernel, and has done immense work over the past 17 years for bettering Linux hardware support especially on consumer devices...

SUSE's Lubos Kocman announced today on the behalf of the openSUSE team that they will be providing extended maintenance updates and community support with the upcoming Leap 16 release...

The Rust Foundation today announced the creation of the Rust Innovation Lab that will serve as a stable, neutral home to select Rust projects with governance support, legal and administrative support, fiscal sponsorship, and more...

Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle, which will likely end up being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) version, the AMD Secure AVIC driver appears ready for merging. The AMD Secure AVIC patches were queued this week into a TIP branch and this likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window...

Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support...

Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.

Mesa 25.2.2 is out today as another on-time, bi-weekly Mesa point release managed by Eric Engestrom...

One of the planned changes for Fedora 43 was setting an expectation that RPM package builds are reproducible. Much of Fedora's "reproducible builds" effort is already complete but this change has now been deferred to the Fedora 44 release next year...

A patch series for the Linux kernel scheduler code is queued up for expected introduction in Linux 6.18 to defer throttle when tasks exit to user-space. These changes to switch the scheduler to a task-based throttle model and task-based throttle time accounting can provide a latency win and also address a possible deadlock situation for real-time "RT" kernels...

It's not too often hearing PCMCIA these days as that defunct PC card standard for laptops from the 90's and early 00's. Back in 2023 Linux began dropping old PCMCIA drivers from the kernel while coming as a surprise today are some clean-ups for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) subsystem code persisting within the Linux kernel...

Merged overnight to Mesa 25.3 is an improvement for the Intel driver's Vulkan Video encode/decode handling that has been in the works the past few months...

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run AI large language models (LLMs) across different operating systems, hardware, and models is about to enjoy a nice speed boost...

It looks like the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library widely used by cross-platform games for software/hardware abstractions isn't done enhancing its support for running on the X.Org/X11 Server. Similarly, Valve is still committing resources to enhancing the support...

Due to a "significant portion" of Red Hat's internal QA team responsible for Fedora QA leaving the company or switching to other teams at Red Hat, there are some Fedora ARM release changes coming to deal with the reduced abilities of their quality assurance team...

Two years ago the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver was updated to handle negative temperature reporting. That's for some users with exotic cooling systems and then also use within some industrial applications where the systems may be subject to sub-zero temperatures. The AMD sbtsi_temp driver is also now being similarly updated for handling freezing CPU temperatures...

NVIDIA just released the 580.82.07 stable Linux driver as their newest R580 driver series update...

With LLVM 21.1 having been released last week as the newest half-year feature update to this open-source compiler stack, I have begun benchmarking Clang 21 on a variety of systems for getting a feel for the performance over Clang 20. Eventually it will be extended as well to looking at the Clang 21 performance against GCC and vendor compilers. For some initial Clang 21 benchmarking, here is a look at how the Clang 21 C/C++ compiler is performing on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Zen 5 processors compared to the prior release.

Arch Linux's convenient text-based OS installer "archinstall" is out with a new release today that promotes Logical Volume Manager (LVM) based installs no longer as "beta" quality...

Earlier this year Canonical announced plans for using sudo-rs as the Rust-written sudo implementation by default for Ubuntu 25.10 along with Rust Coreutils and other Rust system components. The sudo-rs goal has been achieved with the newest Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs now using this sudo implementation by default...

Separate from yesterday's upstream new GIMP 3.2 development release, open-source developer Josh Ellithorpe announced the creation of a new GIMP plug-in dubbed "Dream Prompter" for bringing the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview model to this open-source photo/image editing software...

Now that FFmpeg 8.0 has shipped for this widely-used multimedia library, development is back on of major feature work toward the next major release. Landing on Monday was the initial code for a major rewrite to the swscale code in providing a new framework that is faster and more maintainable/extensible moving forward...