Cloud Hypervisor 48.0 is now available for this Intel-started, open-source and Rust-based VMM focused on modern cloud workloads. Cloud Hypervisor continues to tailor to Windows and Linux guests while emphasizing security and cloud-native workloads...
Last month I wrote about initrd support potentially being on its way out of the Linux kernel. For years Linux developers have wanted to phase out the classic initial RAM disk support from the Linux kernel and it looks like that day may finally be near with patches having been posted for removing the support...
Ahead of the GNOME 49 stable release expected on Wednesday, libadwaita 1.8 released this week to incorporate all the enhancements made over the past six months to this GTK4 library that provides GNOME-specific widgets and features...
Following yesterday's release of the bi-weekly Wine 10.15 development release, Wine-Staging 10.15 is out with 300 patches atop the upstream Wine codebase...
In the past few months at Intel between layoffs / corporate reorganizations and some deciding to pursue job opportunities elsewhere, there have been unfortunate impacts to their Linux engineering resources. Intel over the summer lost some prominent Linux engineering talent and in turn has even led to upstream Linux drivers being orphaned along with other driver maintainers departing and various other staffing changes. Unfortunate for Intel, another notable Linux name has left the company...
Wine 10.15 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux as well as powering Valve's Proton for Steam Play...
Last month I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc A-Series graphics between the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers for Linux systems. The aging i915 driver is the default for the Alchemist GPUs but there is "experimental" support with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver. There were some performance advantages for the Arc A-Series if switching over to that newer driver option. Similarly, there are advantages with Meteor Lake too when moving from the i915 to Xe Linux drivers. Here are benchmarks to quantify that advantage.
A few days ago I wrote about Intel fixing some Panther Lake Xe3 graphics performance issues ahead of launch. The downside of those performance optimizations for Panther Lake was that they led to longer shader compilation times. The good news though is that some separate improvements were merged now for Mesa 25.3 to help enhance the Intel graphics shader compilation performance...
Samba 4.23 is out today as the newest version of this SMB protocol re-implementation for file and print services interoperability with the Microsoft Windows world...
This week's round of power management fixes for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel are on the more notable side with fixes for both AMD and Intel P-State drivers plus addressing a system hibernation issue that could lead to "serious breakage" and stems from a Linux 6.16 regression...
It was just two days ago that Fwupd 2.0.15 released with new hardware support and other improvements. That has already been replaced by Fwupd 2.0.16...
With Linus Torvalds having recently marked Bcachefs as being "externally maintained" following ongoing disagreement over the generally accepted Linux kernel development practices, the plans were laid out today for shipping Bcachefs as an out-of-tree DKMS module...
The Apache Software Foundation announced last year that they would be changing its corporate logo and overhaul its branding after being criticized by American Indian activists. Today they announced the brand new Apache Software Foundation branding...
CUPS 2.4.13 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used, open-source print server. Driving this new point release is for addressing an important security vulnerability as well as a second less notable security issue...
Since the launch of the AMD EPYC 9005 series nearly one year ago, I have performed hundreds of different benchmarks on these EPYC "Turin" processors across a wide range of workloads/disciplines to really terrific performance, power efficiency, and value. AMD EPYC 9005 performs exceptionally well compared to the competition from Intel and ARM CPU vendors. One area though I hadn't explored to this point was how well the AMD EPYC 9005 series performs for serving as the host CPU for GPU/AI servers. That changed as I recently wrapped up some benchmarks exploring that area using the AMD EPYC 9575F and it managed to accelerate past the available competition in proving capable of being the superior host processor for AI servers.
The GCC Rust compiler "gccrs" compiler developers have been keeping at it toward their goal of being able to compile the Linux kernel's Rust kernel crate and as part of that the Rust core library...
Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE sent out today what is anticipated to be the last drm-misc-next feature pull request for DRM-Next that is targeting the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle...
Mesa's Gallium3D video acceleration code has long supported both the VA-API and VDPAU interfaces for video acceleration. VA-API has enjoyed more widespread support among Linux applications and typically more robust while the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) was the interface originally started by NVIDIA for their official Linux driver. As of today, Mesa has now removed support for VDPAU acceleration...
Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced the availability today of Fwupd 2.0.15 as the latest increment to this open-source firmware updating solution built around the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...
Linus Torvalds recently marked Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and isn't merging any new Bcachefs code for the time being but for now at least is keeping the existing Bcachefs code in-tree for anyone that has been relying on this experimental CoW file-system from prior kernel versions. OpenSUSE announced today though they are resorting to disabling the kernel driver in their Linux 6.17+ builds...
A set of 14 patches were merged today to the Mesa 3D graphics driver codebase for fixing some wide-reaching performance issues that would have negatively affected the upcoming Xe3 integrated graphics with Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. The patches have been merged so will be very important that anyone buying an upcoming Intel Panther Lake laptop move to using an up-to-date Mesa to avoid these performance problems...
The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver is well optimized for Linux gaming and desktop use thanks to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz being funded by Valve. Zink has even worked with OpenCL thanks to Rusticl and now another frontier is being conquered for this generic OpenGL on Vulkan driver: workstation graphics with optimizing around the SPECViewPerf test cases...
Pogocache is the open-source fast caching software built from scratch that is optimized for low latency and CPU scalability/efficiency. Pogocache claims to outperform Memcached, Valkey, Redis, and other alternatives. Out today is Pogocache 1.2 as the newest feature release for this fast cache...
Linux kernel developers are evaluating the idea of removing HIGHPTE support from the Linux kernel due to its maintenance burden and just one ARM system currently using it...
Following the numerous Intel Linux developer departures last month from the company following layoffs at Intel and others deciding to voluntarily leave, there is another one to report today. One of the Intel IVPU accelerator driver maintainers for the Intel NPUs found in Core Ultra SoCs is departing the company...
For those preferring for the first point release to major new compiler releases before upgrading, LLVM 21.1.1 is out today along with the likes of Clang 21.1.1 for this widely-used open-source compiler stack...
Back in May was the announcement by Canonical's kernel team that they were planning to ship Linux 6.17 in Ubuntu 25.10 as what will be the latest upstream kernel version when that Ubuntu release ships in October. But due to the timing of the Linux 6.17 release around late September and the Ubuntu 25.10 kernel freeze around the same time, it's led to some confusion with committing to a Linux 6.17-rc or potentially some suggesting Ubuntu 25.10 would ship with a Linux 6.16 kernel and then ship v6.17 as a stable release update. Well, the situation is more clear with Linux 6.17 having been merged now as the default kernel of Ubuntu 25.10...
It was just a few days ago that Rust Coreutils 0.2 released with "massive" performance gains and production-ready Ubuntu support. Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is out today and is delivering a few more enhancements -- most excitingly is a faster base64 command that can now outperform the GNU Coreutils version...
FEX 2509 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source emulator allowing unmodified x86/x86_64 games and applications to run in ARM64 Linux environments...
One of the AMD software initiatives we have been most excited about in recent times has been openSIL. AMD openSIL is working toward open-source CPU silicon initialization that will jive better with the likes of Coreboot and ultimately replace their existing AGESA implementation. AMD openSIL is expected to span AMD's wide gamut of processors from client/embedded through server offerings. It's still looking to be on track for production readiness in 2026...
Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E "Concept" ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.
Canonical's Launchpad service that is closely aligned with the Ubuntu project is finally deprecating code imports from CVS and Subversion repositories that go through the defunct Bazaar...
Released just over one month ago was the general availability of CUDA 13.0 while out this week is CUDA 13.0 Update 1 as the first incremental step forward to CUDA 13...
The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle is likely to see the new "gpd-fan" driver merged as a hardware monitoring driver for the increasing number of GPD gaming handheld devices...
The long-in-development web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer used by Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) continues maturing well and expanding its usage before eventually seeing the Anaconda GTK-based UI deprecated in the future...
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.
Phoronix