Phoronix

Wine 11.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly feature development release for this software enabling Windows games and apps to run on Linux...

Yesterday AWS announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 as their successor to the current Amazon Linux 2023 in-house distribution. With all the software upgrades and improvements like building packages now with link-time optimizations (LTO), enforcing x86-64-v3 builds, and other changes, I was eager to run some performance benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 vs. Amazon Linux 2027 in the EC2 cloud.

Last month the NetworkManager project adopted an AI coding policy where authors are responsible for 100% of the code they submit and must be able to explain it all. In an attempt to catch AI coding agents that may be trying to bypass their policy, they have added an interesting canary to the project to try to catch such AI-generated patches so they can then be automatically dealt with...

The Portable Computing Language project is out today with PoCL 7.2 as this portable, MIT-licensed OpenCL implementation that runs across various CPU architectures as well as targeting other GPUs/hardware with LLVM back-ends. Notable with PoCL 7.2 is bringing official OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 and RISC-V processors...

The annual X.Org Developer's Conference "XDC 2026" is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments...

The Apple Silicon audio driver code within the Linux kernel is preparing to make use of the recent shared GPIO infrastructure for allowing multiple drivers / kernel components to nicely share the same GPIO lines. This should help clean things up in the mainline kernel for the Apple Silicon audio support and with a cleaner architecture than the current downstream Asahi Linux code...

A change proposal filed for what would be part of Fedora Linux 47 is on making use of Thin LTO rather than Fat LTO for link-time optimizations. With Thin LTO being more memory efficient and faster build speeds, the hope is that more Fedora packages could also use Thin LTO for packages where no link-time optimizations are currently leveraged...

Merged overnight for Mesa 26.3 are changes to Intel's graphics compiler code for supporting a new 64-bit shader addressing mode. It turns out with upcoming Nova Lake P graphics will be a big fundamental change...

Vulkan 1.4.362 is out this morning as the newest routine spec update. Making Vulkan 1.4.362 more notable beyond a couple bug fixes are two new Vulkan API extensions, both of which were worked on by Valve's Linux graphics team and one of them being a Valve vendor extension...

Released tonight is Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" Snapshot 3 as the newest monthly ISO candidates for Ubuntu Linux...

AWS announced today the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027. Given the time since Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2027 comes with a heavy arsenal of software updates as well as many performance optimizations and other tuning for better running workloads geared for the AWS cloud...

Introduced with the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics hardware was support for Content Match Refresh Rate (CMRR) as an improvement over typical Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync to more precisely match the video or content frame rates. Particularly for video playback it aims for no stuttering or frame drops. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be better support for CMRR with the Intel graphics driver...

For those using Canonical's Mir compositor for building Wayland-based shells, Mir 2.29 is now available with various improvements and new Wayland protocol coverage...

LLVM developers have begun a discussion on whether the project should host an AGENTS.md file (and CLAUDE.md) in their Git repository for helping to guide AI agents...

Being worked on for over two years has been the latest attempt for async device shutdown support for Linux for getting Linux systems -- especially servers with lots of hardware like many NVMe drives -- to shutdown faster. That work is now up to its 21st version as it works toward hopefully making it to the mainline kernel in the not too distant future...

Following rumors in recent days of NVIDIA courting Hugging Face, it's now been officially announced that NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face...

While Rust programming language use may help with memory safety and other security advantages, the default Linux kernel configuration is now losing randomization of sensitive kernel structures if Rust support is present...

The longtime Audacity open-source audio editor had been using wxWidgets for years but with today's Audacity 4.0 release they have transitioned to using the Qt6 toolkit...

As a follow up to last month's article about patches being posted for enabling "-mcpu=native -mtune=native" support for RISC-V with the GCC compiler, that code is now merged for what will become the GCC 17.1 release in the early months of 2027...

InputPlumber is the open-source router and remapping daemon for Linux that is particularly popular among Linux gaming handhelds for combining multiple input devices and translating actions into various virtual device formats. InputPlumber supports emulating mouse, keyboard, ad gamepad inputs. With the new InputPlumber 0.79 release there is expanded hardware support and bug fixes...

Lemonade 11.9 is out today as the newest feature release to this AMD-backed, open-source local AI server solution across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Lemonade has long been focused on offering "100% free and private" AI use with local hardware whether it be GPUs, CPUs, or NPUs. With Lemonade 11.9's release today it's very interesting for having experimental ROCm HRX back-end support with Llama.cpp. HRX is the new exciting thing to watch out for on the AMD ROCm compute landscape...

A new change proposal that's been filed for evaluation with next year's Fedora 46 release is to provide official, native support for the Crystal programming language...

Earlier this year NVIDIA led an effort with more than two dozen other companies to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance with a focus on keeping open-source AI models secure. The Open Secure AI Alliance today is transitioning from being stewarded by NVIDIA to becoming a Linux Foundation project...

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...