Phoronix

Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support...

Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.

Mesa 25.2.2 is out today as another on-time, bi-weekly Mesa point release managed by Eric Engestrom...

One of the planned changes for Fedora 43 was setting an expectation that RPM package builds are reproducible. Much of Fedora's "reproducible builds" effort is already complete but this change has now been deferred to the Fedora 44 release next year...

A patch series for the Linux kernel scheduler code is queued up for expected introduction in Linux 6.18 to defer throttle when tasks exit to user-space. These changes to switch the scheduler to a task-based throttle model and task-based throttle time accounting can provide a latency win and also address a possible deadlock situation for real-time "RT" kernels...

It's not too often hearing PCMCIA these days as that defunct PC card standard for laptops from the 90's and early 00's. Back in 2023 Linux began dropping old PCMCIA drivers from the kernel while coming as a surprise today are some clean-ups for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) subsystem code persisting within the Linux kernel...

Merged overnight to Mesa 25.3 is an improvement for the Intel driver's Vulkan Video encode/decode handling that has been in the works the past few months...

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run AI large language models (LLMs) across different operating systems, hardware, and models is about to enjoy a nice speed boost...

It looks like the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library widely used by cross-platform games for software/hardware abstractions isn't done enhancing its support for running on the X.Org/X11 Server. Similarly, Valve is still committing resources to enhancing the support...

Due to a "significant portion" of Red Hat's internal QA team responsible for Fedora QA leaving the company or switching to other teams at Red Hat, there are some Fedora ARM release changes coming to deal with the reduced abilities of their quality assurance team...

Two years ago the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver was updated to handle negative temperature reporting. That's for some users with exotic cooling systems and then also use within some industrial applications where the systems may be subject to sub-zero temperatures. The AMD sbtsi_temp driver is also now being similarly updated for handling freezing CPU temperatures...

NVIDIA just released the 580.82.07 stable Linux driver as their newest R580 driver series update...

With LLVM 21.1 having been released last week as the newest half-year feature update to this open-source compiler stack, I have begun benchmarking Clang 21 on a variety of systems for getting a feel for the performance over Clang 20. Eventually it will be extended as well to looking at the Clang 21 performance against GCC and vendor compilers. For some initial Clang 21 benchmarking, here is a look at how the Clang 21 C/C++ compiler is performing on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Zen 5 processors compared to the prior release.

Arch Linux's convenient text-based OS installer "archinstall" is out with a new release today that promotes Logical Volume Manager (LVM) based installs no longer as "beta" quality...

Earlier this year Canonical announced plans for using sudo-rs as the Rust-written sudo implementation by default for Ubuntu 25.10 along with Rust Coreutils and other Rust system components. The sudo-rs goal has been achieved with the newest Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs now using this sudo implementation by default...

Separate from yesterday's upstream new GIMP 3.2 development release, open-source developer Josh Ellithorpe announced the creation of a new GIMP plug-in dubbed "Dream Prompter" for bringing the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview model to this open-source photo/image editing software...

Now that FFmpeg 8.0 has shipped for this widely-used multimedia library, development is back on of major feature work toward the next major release. Landing on Monday was the initial code for a major rewrite to the swscale code in providing a new framework that is faster and more maintainable/extensible moving forward...

Last month Intel posted new Linux patches for a "SoC power slider" feature premiering with upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptops. That SoC Power Slider support for the Intel int340x is now expected to be upstreamed with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

To help in accelerating the development of kernel graphics drivers and any other NPU/accelerator drivers written in the Rust programming language, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem is creating its own DRM-Rust development tree for drivers and associated Rust infrastructure...

For the Steam Survey results published last month for July it showed Steam on Linux use approaching 3%. With hitting 2.89% in July there was hope that perhaps in August it would breach the elusive 3.0% threshold not seen since the original days of Steam on Linux when the overall Steam user base was also much smaller than it is today. But that didn't pan out and Steam on Linux numbers for August are showing a small dip...

GIMP 3.1.4 is out today as the second development release treking toward GIMP 3.2. Most notable with GIMP 3.1.4 are the initial implementations of two of the main features planned for GIMP 3.2: link layers and vector layers...

With the Rust 1.90 release due out in mid-September, the Rust compiler on Linux x86_64 will begun using the LLD linker by default in order to "significantly reduce" linking times...

On Friday AMD sent out their initial batch of kernel graphics driver feature changes intended for merging to the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

Not your typical review on Phoronix today but rather a brief look at the Gentex PLACE Any Space smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. For those facing ten years on their Nest Protect smoke detectors and looking for an end-of-life replacement to these smoke detectors discontinued by Google, the Gentex PLACE smart smoke detectors are an interesting and capable alternative. Being faced by needing to find a replacement to Nest Protects myself that have now expired and finding many others in the same boat with no clear winning smart smoke detector right now, I decided to go with the Gentex PLACE and figured it worthwhile to share a bit of my experience.

A patch queued up into the Linux exFAT driver's development tree optimizes the allocation bitmap loading time. For cases of small cluster sizes on large partitions this can yield around 16x faster loading times...

The open-source Redox OS operating system project written in the Rust programming language is out with its status update covering August 2025...

For those using the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau", with a pending fix coming for Linux 6.17 and existing kernel releases it should be a much more stable and reliable experience...

Over the course of August on Phoronix were 267 original news articles and 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Coming somewhat as a surprise, AMD Linux testing articles and hardware reviews managed to capture all top 10 spots for the most viewed content... Something no single vendor has pulled off in the past 21 years of Phoronix. But with the launch of the Framework Desktop, AMD Krackan Point Linux testing for sub-$500 laptops, Threadripper 9000 series, and other hardware excitement, that feat happened in August...

In addition to working on new OpenCL performance optimizations, Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst just landed another important feature into Rusticl: OpenCL semaphores...

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 is one of the best supported Snapdragon X Elite laptops under Linux thus far. Thanks to active developer engagement and cooperation from Lenovo there are firmware files in upstream linux-firmware.git and Lenovo's generally robust Linux support make it one of the better choices for the Snapdragon X laptops currently out there. In further enhancing the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 on Linux, a new EC driver has been posted for supporting this Snapdragon powered laptop...

For those looking at assembling an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation and interested in having working system sensor monitoring support, the ASUS EC Sensors hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver is in the process of introducing support for the Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard...

Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the "49.rc" tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month's GNOME 49 stable release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc4 as the newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 in working toward the stable release in late September...

AerynOS 2025.08 ISOs are now available as the third release of the year for this innovative Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS...

This week a new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO was published for Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop optimizations. With this new ISO the Linux 6.17 kernel is now leveraged for the latest upstream kernel bits. Additionally, the new X1E ISO is finally working again on the Acer Swifth 14 AI laptop that I have used for my Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing...

The Krita digital painting and graphics editing application aligned with KDE/Qt could soon have color management support working on Wayland Linux desktops for enjoying a better creative experience on HDR (High Dynamic Range) displays...

This morning's "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of Linux 6.17-rc4 being released later today has a fix for old Intel Pentium 4 processors as well as an Attack Vector Controls update for handling the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) mitigation...

Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has merged a set of patches for this Rust-written open-source OpenCL driver to reduce the amount of memory allocations that happen and in turn helping reduce CPU overhead...

IceWM Is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this X11 window manager known for its speedy and simplicity...

This week's round of HID subsystem "fixes" for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel include adding a number of new device IDs and other alterations for supporting new hardware...

Wayfire 0.10 was released this week and its integration with the underlying wlroots rendering code has been overhauled. In turn this opens up Wayfire to having experimental support for rendering using the Vulkan API...

The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems...

Philip Rebohle working for Valve just released DXVK 2.7.1 as the newest version of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan API translation layer. DXVK 2.7.1 enables yet more games to correctly render now with DXVK on Linux...

GTK 4.20 released on Friday as the newest version of this open-source toolkit aligned with the GNOME project. GTK 4.20 brings improved support for Wayland on Linux along with platform enhancements for macOS, Android, and Windows too...

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed...

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job...

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director...

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17...

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices...