Phoronix

Last week it was security issues with AppArmor to worry about on Ubuntu Linux while this week a "high" rated vulnerability for Ubuntu's Snap daemon has been revealed...

It's been a while since having any improvements to talk about for the MGLRU multi-gen LRU functionality for the Linux kernel to optimize page reclamation and help with system performance especially when enduring memory pressure. But this week a Tencent engineer posted some very promising patches for further enhancing this kernel feature...

Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support...

Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It's now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google...

The widely-used GRUB bootloader is now being developed on FreeDesktop.org with a modern GitLab-based workflow...

A new platform feature being worked on by Arm engineers for the Linux kernel is Live Firmware Activation to allow for updated firmware components to be deployed without requiring a system reboot...

For those that happen to have the Logitech MX Master 4 wireless mouse or are considering this high-end ~$120 USD Bluetooth mouse, better support for it was merged yesterday to Linux 7.0...

Version 4.3 of the CMake software development tool / build system was released today. Notable with CMake 4.3 is support for importing and exporting packages described using the Common Package Specification (CPS) for greater interoperability in the ecosystem...

Systemd 260 was just released as the newest stable version of this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Systemd 260 brings yet more features to this critical open-source project and to be incorporated into H1'2026 Linux distributions...

AMD Ryzen AI NPUs are now running LLMs on Linux with the recently debuted Lemonade 10.0 server and FastFlowLM 0.9.35 adding Linux support. In addition to those software components, AMD engineers have also been developing MLIR-AIE as a compiler toolchain for AMD AI Engine devices such as Ryzen AI NPUs in leveraging LLVM-based code generation with the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR). Out today is MLIR-AIE v1.3 with some notable new features...

OpenJDK 26 is out today as the newest GA reference version for the Java SE platform. With Java 26, it's finally time to say a goodbye to the Java Applet API...

The community-focused, RHEL/CentOS-derived AlmaLinux distribution announced its support today for the RISC-V CPU ISA with AlmaLinux Kitten 10 builds being made available...

The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem...

Last week we provided a first look at the new and completely-redesigned System76 Thelio Mira desktop chassis. Today System76 is formally announcing the availability of their new Thelio Mira Linux desktop.

Following this morning's Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 release, the Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 is now available for this open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute stack for Intel graphics hardware on Windows and Linux...

If System76 engineers didn't already have enough going on with recently shipping the COSMIC Rust-based desktop environment and also shipping Pop!_OS 24.04 as their in-house Linux distribution plus completely redesigning the Thelio Desktop, they also recently revised their Launch Keyboard. They have made this leading open-source keyboard design even better with the latest iteration of the System76 Launch Keyboard.

Blender 5.1 is out today with many exciting improvements for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. From AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing being enabled by default at long last to more mature Vulkan support and performance, Blender 5.1 is a great release...

Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 is now available for this LLVM/Clang-based compiler stack used by the Compute Runtime on Linux and under Windows is used both for graphics and compute...

Intel today announced their Core Ultra 200HX Plus series mobile processors as their refresh for Arrow Lake HX. The announcement of the Core Ultra 200HX Plus also mentions a new Intel Binary Optimization Tool software package that has the potential of being quite interesting...

Open-source developer Andy Nguyen recently demonstrated porting Linux to the Sony PlayStation 5. The PS5 notably uses a custom AMD SoC and with some patches is able to play nicely with the open-source AMD graphics driver stack...

A patch posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provides an ARM64-optimized CRC64-NVMe implementation for nearly a 6x improvement on modern Arm SoCs...

The jemalloc memory allocator "malloc" implementation has been popular for HPC and server use down to desktop use in apps like Firefox. Jemalloc has proven over the years to be effective on delivering better performance and scalability while enjoying lower memory usage and less fragmentation than alternative malloc implementations. Meta recently announced that they are renewing their investment into jemalloc...

An interesting Linux detail from today's NVIDIA GTC 2026 kickoff is that Canonical will be integrating NVIDIA's DOCA-OFED software framework into the Ubuntu Linux archive for leveraging the high-speed networking stack for HPC and AI...

A bit of time has passed since having any exciting performance improvements to report on within the GNU C Library "glibc" but that changed today with another nice x86_64 optimization for modern CPUs...

FFmpeg 8.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this widely-used, open-source multimedia library...

The Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" to allow for custom CPU scheduling policies as BPF programs continues enabling new functionality. Queued up in the sched_ext development code ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 cycle is the new SCX_ENQ_IMMED capability for enabling tighter control over when tasks land on a CPU...

Since last week's Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo". Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape.

The past several years Imagination Tech has been investing in an upstream and open-source DRM kernel graphics driver as well as a PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa. Their Mesa focus has exclusively been on the PowerVR Vulkan driver with the plans all along to use the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. With next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release, that goal is being realized with Zink now working nicely atop the PowerVR Vulkan driver for in turn achieving open-source OpenGL support on PowerVR...

A round of Intel graphics driver updates were sent today to DRM-Next in staging ahead of April's Linux 7.1 merge window. The changes in this pull aren't too particularly exciting with a lot of code refactoring and other work, but there are preparations made for supporting UHBR DP tunnels...

The work by Derek Clark on enhancing the Lenovo Legion Go gaming handheld support for Linux continues panning out nicely. The latest driver effort, the creation of the Lenovo Legion Go and Go S Series HID Drivers to help with controller configuration, is set to be introduced in Linux 7.1...

The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lite users...

A four year old optimization idea for the RADV driver was scratched off the TODO list last week for next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release...

Last week yet more AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window happening in April...

We are down to about one month to go until the Linux 7.0 stable release and out today is Linux 7.0-rc4...

Kent Overstreet today released Bcachefs 1.37 as the newest feature release to this out-of-tree file-system driver and user-space tooling for this next-gen, copy-on-write file-system...

Merged to mainline yesterday for Linux 7.0 were yet more Rust changes in preparing for upcoming Rust releases as well as enhancing the kernel build reproducibility when engaging the Rust code...

This week's "sched/urgent" pull request was sent out today of scheduler updates for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. Notable this week are fixing some hangs as well as a possible performance regression on large systems...

In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop...

SuperTux 0.7 officially released overnight for this nostalgic open-source game now seeing its first new release since December 2021. SuperTux 0.7 brings many significant improvements for this open-source game inspired by Super Mario...

An open-source, independently developed Linux kernel module called GreenBoost aims to augment the dedicated video memory on NVIDIA discrete GPUs with system memory and NVMe storage. The intent here with GreenBoost is a CUDA caching layer to more easily run larger AI models for LLMs that otherwise won't fit solely in your graphics card's dedicated vRAM...

Just under one year since the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release, GIMP 3.2 is out today as the first feature release building off the GIMP 3.0 foundation...

Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie...

This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn't a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop...

OpenRazer 3.12 was just released today as the newest update to these independently-maintained, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic GUI, OpenRazer allows for a pleasant experience for the Razer gaming peripherals under Linux...

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches bring a few improvements to the AMDXDNA accelerator driver used for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs. Plus some new panel additions and various other minor Direct Rendering Manager driver changes...

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android...

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver...

GNOME OS as the Linux-based OSTree-using distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default...

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages...