Phoronix

In preparations for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in abandoning the X11 session, another feature gap compared to X11 has been addressed...

Mesa 26.2.2 is out today as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

With Linux 7.3-rc1 out this week and marking the end of the merge window, it's onto a lot of Linux 7.3 performance testing at Phoronix and looking at all the new features of Linux 7.3. In today's article is a first look at the AMD EPYC Turin server performance on Linux 7.3-rc1 compared to Linux 7.2 stable with a few nice performance improvements to show.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, besides being well known for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known among longtime Linux users as a RHEL/CentOS shop. CERN formally even co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative with other educational/research institutions in the past. So to much surprise now, CERN is transitioning to Debian Linux for industrial accelerator-control computers...

Being worked on the past few months for the Linux kernel has been an AVX-512 optimized version of xor_gen() that is used for generating and validating parity blocks such as with Linux's software RAID 5 and RAID 6 arrays. The latest iteration of AVX-512 xor_gen() was posted today and shows some impressive results on AMD Zen 5 hardware...

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter in preparing for the formal "GNOME 51.rc" release in the coming days...

While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it's likely to be another "rough" kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches...

Landing today in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial support for the AI Compute Extensions (ACEv1) as the initial work out of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group between Intel and AMD for a common matrix acceleration architecture for helping AI/ML workloads with future CPUs...

The newest FreeDesktop SDK is now available for this collection of components used for Flatpak runtimes as well as for building out of containers and other software stacks...

For those looking for the smoothest experience to get vLLM up and running on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware, out today is the newest beta of Intel's LLM-Scaler-vLLM project for a Docker-based setup of vLLM ready to go on Intel GPUs...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2026. After jumping above 4% in July, in August it fell back below that threshold. Meanwhile CachyOS continues gaining ground among Linux gamers...

WinBtrfs is a driver for Microsoft Windows to support reading and writing to Btrfs file-systems. WinBtrfs works with Windows XP and newer. It hadn't seen a new release in over two years but a big feature release is now available with a combination of new features and bug fixes...

As part of AMD's ongoing effort for getting HDMI 2.1 support squared away in their upstream AMDGPU kernel graphics driver, sent out today were the latest patches around passive variable refresh rate "Passive VRR" for HDMI connections...

If you are into RGB lighting, you can even find NVMe external enclosures these days with RGB LEDs like the ASUS ROG Strix Arion. Now thanks to reverse engineering there is a Linux driver for allowing the RGB lighting controls for the ASUS ROG Strix Arion NVMe enclosure...

For those looking at expanding the SATA, NVMe, and/or the USB/USB-C capabilities of your system, the Lekuo SouthBridge Max PB65MX3 is an interesting creation that I have been trying out. The Lekuo SouthBridge Max puts an AMD B650 chipset onto a low-profile PCIe add-in card to provide all of the above without any bifurcation required. Given that it's an AMD B650 chipset, it also "just works" nicely under Linux.

Debuting today is systemd 262-rc1 as the first test release of this next major update to this Linux init system and service manager...

Following yesterday's Linux kernel patches for tuning ACPI EPP for Ryzen Zen 6 client processors, another patch series made it out on the mailing list with adjustments for ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) with upcoming Zen 6 client processors...

While the Linux 7.3 merge window just wrapped up this weekend, on Monday Intel already sent out their first feature pull request of new Xe kernel graphics driver material that is destined for Linux 7.4...

It was a very busy month of August with the Linux kernel developers continue to be flooded with AI/LLM-generated patches and bug reports. Plus there was the general resolution on AI usage within the Debian project and other open-source projects now evolving in the AI era. With the Linux 7.2 stable release and Linux 7.3 merge window, the past month was all the more eventful...

While the Linux 7.3 merge window officially closed on Sunday with the Linux 7.3-rc1 release, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem changes were mistakenly forgotten about during the two week window. The pull request ended up being sent out on Monday evening and the late feature changes were already merged to Git...

With the end of the month comes a new monthly status report from the KDE Linux project as their in-house distribution project...

Hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today is a new kernel scheduler patch series to enable preferred SMT siblings for NVIDIA Vera with its Olympus cores...

Rust Coreutils 0.11 was just released as this alternative to the GNU Coreutils. Besides the long-running task of catching up the GNU Coreutils compatibility with the GNU test suite and never-ending work on optimizing the performance, Rust Coreutils 0.11 is quite a nice release for its improved error messages...

The Mozilla Firefox 155 release binaries are now available ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday for this latest web browser release. With Firefox 155 it's heavier on new features than we have seen in some time...

Earlier this month AMD posted a massive set of patches for bringing up UALink support for the mainline Linux kernel and wiring it up into the AMDGPU kernel driver. In closing out the month of August, they have updated this big set of Ultra Accelerator Link patches...

One of the former Intel engineers who was a Linux OS architect on their legendary Clear Linux distribution and before that also driving their Moblin and MeeGo Linux efforts is starting a new distribution project. This new initiative, named The Ur Project, is highly leveraging Rust and will rely on AI/LLMs in part and aims to incorporate some design improvements Clear Linux...

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb is out with a new blog post highlighting their recent work on enhancing the UEFI update capsules experience for open-source firmware with Coreboot and their downstream Dasharo offerings...

With Linux 7.3-rc1 released to cap off the two week merge window, here is a look at the many exciting changes merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that is working its way toward release in the second half of October.

There is a set of 19 patches out for review on the Linux kernel mailing list that would finally allow the mainline kernel running on Apple Silicon M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs to enjoy USB4/Thunderbolt support...

Servo 0.5 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. Servo 0.5 ships many notable enhancements for benefiting those running the Servoshell example browser or looking at Servo as an opportunity for embedded use...

Ahead of the next-generation AMD Ryzen Zen 6 client processors debuting, an important patch series was posted overnight to the Linux kernel mailing list. These patches provide new Zen 6 client Energy Performance Preference "EPP" tunings that are important for optimizing performance and power consumption for these upcoming AMD Zen 6 desktop and laptop processors...

One of the latest optimizations to the Mesa Vulkan drivers by Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team is faster and more vRAM efficient sorting for Morton code keys that are important for fast BVH construction and greater GPU parallelism...

Firefox has finally begun supporting Vulkan Video decoding to complement their long-used VA-API support on Linux. This is good news for the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack as it's been the notable vendor not supporting the Video Acceleration API. But prior to Firefox rolling out its experimental Vulkan Video support, an independent implementation of VA-API built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface has been available for supporting GPU video acceleration in Firefox. That project is out today with its newest release...

With Linus Torvalds remarking in the Linux 7.3-rc1 release announcement of the AMD kernel graphics driver changes for amounting around a third of the -rc1 changes due to the big AMD GPU register files for DCN 6.0 and other new IP additions, here are some fresh code stats at large...

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.3 merge window has concluded after two weeks and the Linux 7.3-rc1 kernel now available for testing...

OpenShot 4.0 was tagged this afternoon on GitHub as the newest major feature release to this open-source non-linear video editing application...

Following last week's main set of sound subsystem updates for Linux 7.3 that brought a lot of new audio hardware support, a second round of sound updates were merged this weekend ahead of today's Linux 7.3-rc1 release...

This summer an intern with the FreeBSD Foundation worked on porting AMD ROCm to FreeBSD. The internship is concluding while the FreeBSD ROCm code is almost to the stage of being able to perform simple vector addition workloads...

The x86 platform driver changes are now in place for the Linux 7.3 kernel with additions for upcoming AMD Zen 6 hardware, the RGB LED driver controls for the Ryzen AI Halo PC, and a lot of laptop support additions and improvements for a variety of devices from different hardware vendors. Plus some handheld gaming device updates too...

Upstreamed to the FFmpeg multimedia driver code this weekend is support for Frame Rate Up-Conversion "FRUC" making use of the NVIDIA Vulkan Optical Flow extension...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" changes have landed for the Linux 7.3 merge window that is wrapping up later today...

The TTY/Serial code changes for Linux 7.3 were merged this week and include dropping the dated IPWireless driver while introducing the new 8250_mxpcie driver...

Upstreamed back in 2017 for Linux 4.12 was the RTL8723BS driver in the kernel's staging area. Nine years later it remains in staging and remains a frequent target for clean-ups and code improvements as it tries to work its way out...

Ahead of FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE hopefully debuting on 8 September, FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is out today as the final scheduled development release...

Last October I highlighted an interesting post on the Linux kernel mailing list around an x86 corporate entity other than Intel or AMD that left mysterious intrigue. The developer that detailed those x86 opcode/CPUID/MSR allocations back in July then detailed 16-tile and 32-tile AMX implementations again for something outside the current scope of Intel/AMD processors. Today another message is being relayed from that "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD."..

In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting...

ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this "open-source Windows" project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility...

Coming in as a late pull request ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window closing this weekend were the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates that have now made it into Linux Git...

This week was extremely eventful in the GNOME space with GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter now largely wrapped up and the merge request opened to facilitate the code review. There was also the announcement of the half million Euro Sovereign Tech Agency investment into Flatpak. Plus on the application side were a few more interesting advancements this week.'..

As an update to the May story about California's age verification law may end up exempting most Linux distributions, that AB-1856 bill has finally passed!..