Phoronix

Qualcomm engineers have initiated a discussion over upstreaming Synx to the Linux kernel, which is a global synchronization framework across different parts of SoCs. Qualcomm is already using Synx internally and is reported to provide "significant" power and performance benefits...

If you happen to have a gaming headset from the latest SteelSeries Nova 5X or Nova 7 series, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel will begin properly supporting those headsets...

For those with one of the original Valve Steam Controllers from a decade ago and looking to make use of it with the native HID Linux driver outside of the Steam client or SDL, an important addition is coming with the Linux 7.3 kernel release later in the year...

Rust Coreutils 0.10 is out today from the uutils project for this alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.10 development focused on additional security hardening plus also increasing the GNU test suite compatibility and robustness...

Mesa 26.2 stable is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers typically used on Linux systems...

One of the nifty new features of Linux 7.2 is USB4STREAM as an Intel-developed solution for quickly sending data between USB4 connected systems. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, a busy poll mode is being added to provide lower-latency data transfers at the expense of increased CPU activity...

The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities...

Cloudflare today announced the open-sourcing of Cloudflare OS as an "open platform for agents, apps, and work." Cloudflare OS is an AI "operating system" but not in the traditional OS sense...

A patch for the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver is pending to avoid confusing the processor firmware on newer platforms like Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" where Dynamic Efficiency Control (DEC) is supported...

There continues to be a lot of cleaning up of the kernel source tree to deal with noise generated by AI / LLM coding agents sending in reports and patches for old drivers that are likely not actively used by anyone on modern upstream kernel builds. Rather than continuing to carry these old drivers around with the uptick in AI/LLM-generated noise, kernel maintainers are finding it better to just retire the old drivers...

Overnight AMD engineers sent out their latest round of AMDGPU DC display code updates for their Linux driver. This week's round of display code updates include some additional fixes for their recently introduced HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support as part of the work toward their HDMI 2.1 implementation finally coming together for their open-source, upstream Linux driver...

FEX 2608 is now available as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source emulator sponsored by Valve for running x86_64 binaries on ARM64, including Steam and Windows games with Steam Play (Proton)...

AMD has posted patches proposing a new Linux subsystem for the Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI) standard that was in turn originally developed by Intel. With AMD now making use of eSPI, they are proposing a new subsystem for it within the Linux kernel, which includes a new driver for their hardware...

Last week the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm released the first open-source firmware for a modern AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with their work to port AMD openSIL and Coreboot in their downstream Dasharo flavor to an MSI desktop ATX motherboard. Now that it's working out well, 3mdeb is working to upstream their AM5 platform support and Phoenix SoC support into upstream AMD openSIL as well as Coreboot...

Now this is a pleasant and very unexpected surprise... NVIDIA has become the latest premier sponsor of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

Last month the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents as their latest AI play. That followed other "AI" initiatives from dealing with AI exploits to AI asset and data exchange. Today they have another AI foray being announced with the creation of the Tokenomics Foundation...

While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes...

Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development...

For those with a MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM handheld gaming system, the model powered by the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, an important addition is coming to the Linux 7.3 kernel so that the M-Center keys will be properly supported...

FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library...

In addition to the AMDGPU feature pull request to DRM-Next last week that landed DRM format modifiers for old AMD GPUs and a variety of other improvements, a secondary set of AMDGPU feature work followed that last week in preparation for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...

Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS...

With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H.

zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng...

GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop...

NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes...

It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-ssytem used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare...

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland...

Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier...

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations...

Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates...

Queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window is adding support for the Realtek RTL8261C and RTL8261D 10 Gigabit PHYs that launched last year...

It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release...

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time...

Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel...

Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...

Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base...

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6...

Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use...

NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system...

Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July...

Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project...

Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel...

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions...

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling...

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc...

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors...

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture...

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI...