Phoronix

KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is out today as the newest monthly point release for the current Plasma 6.4 desktop series. Making this month's Plasma 6 point release notable are a number of KWin compositor fixes...

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) downstream AlmaLinux 10 is further distinguishing itself from alternatives by enabling its CRB repository by default. This will be rolling out as an update to AlmaLinux 10.0 and as part of the upcoming AlmaLinux 10.1 point release...

A new set of Linux kernel patches posted today work to improve the nested VMX performance for benefiting Intel processors making use of KVM virtualization...

Microsoft is preparing to ship Windows 11 25H2 as their newest incremental update to their operating system. Windows 11 25H2 is currently available via their preview channel in advance of the formal public release in October. With Canonical also putting the finishing touches on their Ubuntu 25.10 release also due for a stable release in October, here are some benchmarks looking at how those competing operating systems are fairing in various CPU benchmarks on the same hardware.

While the BSDs don't see nearly as much activity around Wayland as the desktop Linux distributions and they continue to predominantly rely on the X.Org Server by default, the modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop can in fact work fine on Wayland under FreeBSD 14 and the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release...

Thanks to work by open-source Intel software engineers over the past few months, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to add support for Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" for supporting next-generation, higher-resolution laptop web cameras...

The XFS file-system is ready to declare their online file-system checking "fsck" support in good enough shape for enabling by default in new kernel builds. Plus other XFS alterations ahead of Linux 6.18 that is expected to be this year's LTS kernel version...

A patch series that has been in development for a while now introduces the concept of "sheaves" for an opt-in, per-CPU and array-based caching layer for the SLUB kernel allocator. It looks like the sheaves patches are likely to be introduced for the Linux 6.18 kernel if no objections are raised...

A new AMD driver set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle barring any last minute problems is a TRNG driver for Versal SoCs...

Linux 6.17-rc5 is out for testing as the newest weekly release candidate as we near the stable Linux 6.17 release in late September...

In addition to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver updates sent out this week in advance of the Linux 6.18 kernel, there was also a batch of drm-intel-next updates also submitted for predominantly display-related changes to the open-source Intel driver...

Hangover is the open-source project that leverages Wine to allow running x86 32-bit and 64-bit Windows applications on AArch64 Linux systems. Hangover pairs Wine with an emulator like Box64 or FEX for the x86/x86_64 to AArch64 translation while also eyeing other CPU architecture support too...

Imagination's open-source PowerVR kernel graphics driver for a while has seen patches extending it to work on RISC-V given that some RISC-V hardware coming to market has featured PowerVR graphics IP. With the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel that work is landing along with enabling support for the T-HEAD TH1520's GPU...

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 15.0 is now available! FreeBSD 15.0 is a major update to this BSD operating system that aims for its stable release before Christmas...

The UI freeze for Ubuntu 25.10 is now in effect as the developers work toward the release of this next Ubuntu Linux installment in October...

Intel's open-source PEPC tool has been updated as the utility for managing and optimized Intel CPU power management features on Linux...

Coming in today as the Rust "fixes" ahead of tomorrow's Linux 6.17-rc5 release is adjusting support for the upcoming Rust 1.91 compiler release...

Following the release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie" nearly one month ago to the day, Debian 13.1 is out today with an initial batch of bug fixes and security updates...

The uutils project today released version 0.2 of the Rust Coreutils as their alternative to GNU Coreutils written in the Rust programming language. This release comes as Ubuntu 25.10 prepares to make use of it by default...

As an exciting announcement out of the KDE Akademy 2025 conference kicking off in Berlin, Germany... The KDE Linux distribution is now in alpha! This is their in-house reference Linux distribution for the KDE Plasma desktop...

Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing "Link: " tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he's had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he's going to be more strict over "useless" link tags in Git commit messages...

As a follow-up to the article last week around the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau" about to become much more reliable following fixes, that code was merged on Friday for Linux 6.17...

Ahead of Akademy kicking off in Berlin, the annual KDE developer conference, there is another weekly Plasma development update. KDE developer Nate Graham shared the latest exciting progress on Plasma 6.5 while more good news will be coming out later today...

As what might be its last test release before declaring the stable release, systemd 258-rc4 was released this week as the latest stepping stone for this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

The long-awaited beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 Linux distribution and the closely-aligned COSMIC desktop environment will be happening in late September...

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc5 release on Sunday were a few notable x86 platform driver changes. This includes some new hardware support and device quirks...

It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.

With Wine 10.15 expected to be released next Friday there will be initial support for using the NTSYNC driver found within the Linux kernel...

The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is... a 1TB SSD...

Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026...

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops...

Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake...

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel...

As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension...

As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree, sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch...

Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors...

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled...

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too...

With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.

AMD engineers have submitted a HIP-RT update for Blender developers ahead of the big Blender 5.0 release to enhance the RDNA4 ray-tracing performance...

NVIDIA engineer Ankit Agrawal today posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series working on Linux virtualization support for Extended GPU Memory (EGM)...

Following sudo-rs becoming the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 as of a few days ago, Canonical is also proceeding with its transition of using the Rust version of Coreutils for this next Ubuntu Linux release...

Miracle-WM is the Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir project with a focus on tiling and inspired by Sway/i3. Miracle-WM 0.7 is now available for advancing this Mir-powered Wayland experience with additional functionality now in place...

A change proposal filed for next year's Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel's NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives...

A new feature Microsoft has been working on for its Azure Linux operating system is OS Guard as a container-host platform that enforces immutability, code integrity, mandatory access control, and other features. Microsoft quietly revealed more about OS Guard last month and yesterday's release of Azure Linux 3.0.20250822 builds out more of the OS Guard functionality...

Linux Mint 22.2 is officially out today as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base...

On the same day as beginning to ship the Intel Arc Pro B50 ~$349 USD workstation graphics card, Intel also shipped OpenVINO 2025.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source AI toolkit...

The GNOME 49 release candidate "49.rc" was just released as we close in on the stable GNOME 49.0 release in two weeks...

Well, here is some sad news... After the better part of two decades at Red Hat, Hans de Goede shared today he will be leaving the company next month. Hans de Goede during his time at Red Hat has been responsible for countless hardware improvements especially for Linux laptops, serves as the x86 platform subsystem lead maintainer for the Linux kernel, and has done immense work over the past 17 years for bettering Linux hardware support especially on consumer devices...

SUSE's Lubos Kocman announced today on the behalf of the openSUSE team that they will be providing extended maintenance updates and community support with the upcoming Leap 16 release...