Phoronix

There's been work to get the Nix functional package manager available on Fedora Linux for those wanting to leverage its available packages or features like supporting side-by-side packages of different versions, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, non-root user for installing software, and other features. One of the hurdles though is that the Nix package manager relies by default on the /nix directory, which goes against Fedora's default directory requirements. Now though the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted permission for using the /nix directory hierarchy...

Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering.

Intel Linux engineers have begun posting patches for enabling the Xe3P architecture. While Xe3P is also expected to be found with next-generation Intel discrete GPUs, the initial focus is on enabling support for Nova Lake...

Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel...

Firefox 144.0 is now available but it's not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support...

A low-level Linux kernel improvement being worked on by engineers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is for introducing a PCI Configuration Space Cache "PCSC" to help with dense SR-IOV deployments that can end up hitting significant overhead with the current Linux kernel...

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...

Even prior to the recent ending of the Linux 6.18 merge window and its many new features, the first "drm-misc-next" pull request of new material intended for Linux 6.19 was already submitted for inclusion to DRM-Next...

Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread...

Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has published their September 2025 progress report to outline recent work on this open-source OS...

It's been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group...

Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics...

A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU security mitigations to all be toggled at run-time...

While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that's quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux...

Now that the Linux 6.18 merge window is over with Linux 6.18-rc1 having released yesterday, here is a look at all the interesting new features and changes to find with this kernel. Making Linux 6.18 all the more exciting is that it's expected to become the 2025 Linux LTS kernel once its stable release occurs in December.

Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms...

In the works the past number of months has been cache-aware load balancing / cache aware scheduling support for Linux. The latest iteration of those patches by Intel were posted this weekend and are enjoying the most uplift on AMD EPYC Genoa and newer platforms...

Box64 0.3.8 is now available for this x86_64 user-space emulator for Linux that allows ARM64 and RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems to enjoy running x86_64 games and applications. Box64 along with the likes of FEX-Emu are the leading options for those needing to run x86_64 programs on ARM64 and elsewhere...

One year ago updated Intel documentation noted AMX-TRANSPOSE as one of the new ISA additions for Diamond Rapids. But in updated Intel architecture documentation last month, it oddly removed all references to AMX-TRANSPOSE. Confirming that the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) addition for TRANSPOSE is now dead, an Intel engineer posted a patch to remove AMX-TRANSPOSE from the GCC compiler...

The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an "open-source Windows" ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers...

With last month's GNOME 49 release, the 32-bit Compatibility extension for the GNOME Flatpak Runtime is no more. This is part of the broader effort of phasing out 32-bit support...

As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries...

Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year's Linux LTS kernel version...

Well, here is a weekend surprise... Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for "CLUDA" as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow...

Intel engineers continue working on SR-IOV support for the Xe open-source kernel driver as part of Project Battlematrix for ensuring good virtualization support for the latest Intel GPUs on Linux...

Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft's extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux...

Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026...

The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing...

Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough...

The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs...

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository...

Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series...

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake...

Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support...

For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices...

KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code...

Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware...

Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow...

Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel...

AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack...

With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.

Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization "vGPU" support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag...

Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18...

One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512...

In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers...

Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality...

This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire...

In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away...

The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language...