Linux 6.19-rc6 Released With More Bug Fixes
Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel in working toward the stable Linux 6.19 kernel release likely on 8 February...
ReactOS For "Open-Source Windows" Achieves Massive Networking Performance Boost
ReactOS as the long-in-development "open-source Windows" project has been on quite a roll recently. Beyond a big Windows NT 6 compatibility improvement and fixing a very annoying usability issue, for this third week of the year there is another big change landing: a significant improvement in networking performance on ReactOS...
Linux 6.19 Landing Fixes For USB2/USB3 Issues With Apple M1/M2 Macs
Ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel release due out later today are two USB fixes for Apple M1 / M2 Macs running the mainline kernel. These Apple USB fixes are also marked for back-porting to the stable Linux kernel series...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Apple-Mac-USB2-Fixes
Linux's Intel-Speed-Select Tool Will Allow Non-Root Use With Linux 7.0
The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for allowing some control over Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) and managing of clock frequencies / performance behavior will finally allow limited non-root usage...
Synex Server: A New Debian Based Linux Distro With Native ZFS Installation Support
Synex is a Linux distribution that's been around for some months as a Debian-based, minimalistic Linux distribution out of Argentina focused on the needs of small and medium businesses. Making it a bit more intriguing for some now is that with their new release based on Debian 13 is a server edition and they have added native OpenZFS file-system support for new installations...
FreeBSD 15.1 Aims To Have KDE Desktop Installer Option
FreeBSD 15.0 had been aiming to offer a KDE desktop installation option as part of the FreeBSD OS installer. This initiative as part of the FreeBSD laptop support enhancements project didn't pan out in time for FreeBSD 15.0 but now they are working on getting the installer option ready for FreeBSD 15.1. Adding a NVIDIA GPU driver option to the FreeBSD installer was also recently carried out...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.1-KDE-Desktop-Option
CVE-2026-0915: GNU C Library Fixes A Security Issue Present Since 1996
CVE-2026-0915 was published on Friday as a security issue with the GNU C Library "glibc" for code introduced 30 years ago. The latest Glibc Git code is now patched for this issue introduced in 1996...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Glibc-Security-Fix-For-1996-Bug
KDE Begins Landing Features For Plasma 6.7, Some Last Minute Plasma 6.6 Improvements
KDE developers have been quite busy this week in preparing for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release in February while also beginning to land features for what will be the Plasma 6.7 desktop...
Linux ThinkPad Driver Ready For Reporting Damage Device - Starting With Bad USB-C Ports
Queued yesterday into the platform-drivers-x86.git's "for-next" branch are the patches for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver to begin reporting damaged device detection. This code being in the "for-next" branch makes it material for the next version of the Linux kernel and initially will be able to report to the user on damaged USB-C ports...
AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" Shows Some Nice Linux Performance Gains Over The Past Two Years
As part of my various end-of-year benchmarks, recently I looked at the Linux LTS kernel performance on AMD EPYC 9005 over the past year, the AMD EPYC Milan-X performance over the past four years, and various other performance comparisons over time to look the evolution of the Linux software performance. Another run I had carried out was looking at the AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" series since its launch just over two years ago. Here is a look at how an up-to-date Linux software stack can deliver some additional performance gains for these energy efficiency and cost-optimized server processors.
Linux 7.0 Looks To Enable Intel TSX By Default On Capable CPUs For Better Performance
A patch queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle enables the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) functionality by default on the mainline kernel for capable CPUs and those not affected by side-channel attacks due to TSX Async Abort (TAA) and similar vulnerabilities. For newer Intel CPUs with safe TSX support, this change can mean better performance with the kernel defaults...
Linux 7.0 To Expand Temperature Reporting For Intel Graphics Cards
The upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle will provide expanded GPU temperature reporting capabilities for Intel graphics cards. Additional temperature sensors will now be exposed under Linux with the Intel Xe driver using the hardware monitoring (HWMON) interface for easy consumption by different Linux user-space software...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Intel-GPU-Temperature
Imagination Driver To Support The TI AM62P SoC In Linux 6.20~7.0
Sent out today was the latest DRM-Misc-Next pull request of new material ahead of the next kernel cycle either Linux 6.20 or 7.0 depending upon what Linus Torvalds decides to call it...
Linux Patches Bring Mainline Kernel Support For The ASUS IPMI Expansion Card
DeviceTree patches worked on recently allow for the mainline Linux kernel to run on the ASUS "Kommando" IPMI Expansion Card. This is interesting for opening up new possibilities for this external IPMI/BMC expansion card but too bad that less than three years after launching it's difficult to find...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-IPMI-Expansion-Card-Linux
Another RADV Ray-Tracing Merge Lands Some Additional Gains For Mesa 26.0
Separate from the Mesa merge request talked about earlier today for new RADV code that can deliver 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, another merge request landed today in Mesa 26.0 that was also carried out by Valve contractor Natalie Vock. That second merge request now in Mesa 26.0 delivers some additional gains for at least some ray-tracing games on RDNA3 and RDNA4 GPUs...
GRUB 2.14 Bootloader Released With EROFS Support, Shim Loader Protocol
More than two years after the release of GRUB 2.12, GRUB 2.14 shipped today as the newest feature release of this widely-used bootloader on Linux systems and elsewhere...
An Early Run With Ubuntu 26.04 On AMD EPYC Turin - The Current Performance Gains Over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
There still are several months to go until the official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release -- including one month until the feature freeze and the future Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel is expected to land too before the latter kernel freeze in early April. But for those curious how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking so far for servers, here are some very early benchmarks of it on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" in its present development state. The main motivation here for this early look was stemming from the recent rolling-release CachyOS benchmarks on AMD EPYC and wanting to see how it goes up against the current development state of Ubuntu Linux.
GlobalFoundries Acquires Synopsys ARC Processor IP, To Be Integrated Into MIPS
Last year GlobalFoundries acquired MIPS while an interesting new development announced today is that GlobalFoundries has acquired the ARC Processor IP and its solutions business from Synopsys. The Synopsys ARC Processor IP will be brought into the MIPS umbrella...
XWayland RandR Improvements Merged For Kicking Off 2026 X.Org Server Activity
Michel Dänzer of Red Hat has kicked off 2026 xorg-server activity with landing a patch series enhancing the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension support under XWayland for improving mode handling by X11 clients...
New "Thames" Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver
Tomeu Vizoso as the open-source developer behind the "Rocket" driver for reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU support, Teflon as a Mesa framework for TensorFlow Lite and NPU uses, and various Etnaviv driver work, has announced his newest creation: Thames...
Google Posts Device Trees For Booting Pixel 10 Hardware With The Mainline Linux Kernel
A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel...
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs. 9950X3D On Windows 11 & Ubuntu Linux
For those wondering how the AMD 3D V-Cache performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is looking on Linux relative to Microsoft Windows, a few weeks back I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Windows 11 25H2 against Ubuntu Linux both the Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS release and an Ubuntu 25.10 development build using both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-linux-amd-9950x-9950x3d
GNU Linux-libre 6.17 Deblobs The New Intel IPU7 Driver, Adjusts Existing Drivers
Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17, the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing...
Mesa 25.3 Lands SPIR-V Shader Replacement Support
Merged to Mesa 25.3-devel on Monday is SPIR-V shader replacement support as a new feature for helping Mesa's Vulkan drivers in testing and debugging issues...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-SPIR-V-Shader-Replacement
Ad-Free Viewing By Showing Your Support During The Phoronix Oktoberfest / Autumn Sale
While years ago it was a annual ritual and closest thing to a vacation around here (even though the daily original content persisted), the Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich sadly remains on hiatus. Web publishing operations remain difficult given the state of the industry and rampant ad-block use make even daily operations tight. But for those wishing to show their support for Phoronix during this autumn/fest period, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to help the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...
KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta Released With KNightTime, Rounded Bottom Window Corners
The beta release of KDE's Plasma 6.5 desktop took place on Thursday as they work toward the stable release expected on 21 October...
Latest Open-Source AMD Improvements Allowing For Better Llama.cpp AI Performance Against Windows 11
When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I also ended up carrying out some Llama.cpp AI benchmarks as the first time exploring the AI inferencing performance between Windows and Linux for both CPU and GPU-accelerated deployments. Here are those results for exploring the Llama.cpp performance between Windows and Linux with different large language models.
Samsung Exynos 7870 Seeing New Open-Source Driver Activity For Linux 6.18
The Samsung Exynos 7870 Octa SoC released back in 2016 on a 14nm process and powered by eight Arm Cortex-53 cores and a Mali T830 GPU. Finally now for late 2025 there is open-source display driver happenings going mainline for this aging SoC...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Samsung-Exynos-7870-Linux-6.18
AMD openSIL Production Phase Reaffirmed For 2026
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...
NVIDIA's Open-Source Nova Driver Now Explicitly Requires 64-bit Support
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 Mint 22.2 Officially Released With Fingwit, UI Tweaks
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...
IceWM 3.9 Released With Few Enhancements To This Speedy X11 Window Manager
IceWM Is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this X11 window manager known for its speedy and simplicity...
Armbian 25.8.1 Brings Expanded Board Support, Linux 6.16 Option For Many Boards
Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices...
Servo Lands APNG & Animated WebP Support, Vello Backends For Faster 2D Graphics
The Servo browser project has published a monthly status report to outline all of the interesting changes made to this interesting, Rust-based browser layout engine over the past several weeks. Development continues moving along with Servo as more critical functionality continues to be added as well as new performance optimizations and other features to make it a compelling option for future embedded web use and more...
AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance For Budget "Krackan Point" Laptops
Earlier this month we looked at the Linux laptop performance of AMD's Krackan Point using the Ryzen AI 5 340 within a HP OmniBook 5 that can be found for as low as ~$450 during sales. For six Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics, Krackan Point worked well as a budget Linux laptop option. For those wondering how the Linux vs. Windows 11 performance compares for the budget HP OmniBook, here are some benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-krackan-point-windows-linux
Intel Compute Runtime 25.31.34666.3 Continues Prepping For Panther Lake
Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware...
Linux 6.17-rc2 Released With Performance Fixes & More
Linux 6.17-rc2 is now available to facilitate the latest weekly testing of the Linux 6.17 kernel...
Fedora Copr Repository Offers Up XLibre Packages For Alternative X Server
While a proposal to replace the upstream X.Org Server with the XLibre fork was ultimately withdrawn prior to voting by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), a Fedora Copr repository has now surfaced for those wanting to try out this alternative X Server implementation on Fedora Linux...
GNOME Disks Continues Being Ported To Rust
In addition to yesterday's GNOME 49 beta release marking the 28th birthday of GNOME, a lot of other exciting GNOME developments materialized this week...
Linus Torvalds Rejects RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.17: "Garbage"
Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window...
Linux 6.17 Optimizes khugepaged For ARM64 With Huge "16x" Impact For One Code Path
Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-khugepaged-Optimize
Linux 6.17 Introduces hash_pointers= Boot Parameter
Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...
Linux 6.17 Making Kdump Crash Kernel More Reliable, Less Wasted Memory
In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability...
Arch Linux Installer Adds Bluetooth Support & U2F Authentication
Archinstall 3.0.9 released today as the newest iteration of this text-based Arch Linux operating system installer...
Linux 6.17 Lands New file_getattr & file_setattr System Calls
Along with the better handling of multi-device file-systems such as Btrfs' native RAID capabilities and now allowing more efficient writing of zeroes to modern storage devices, the number of VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 also added some other extra goodies...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-file-getattr-setattr
Ayn Gaming Handhelds To See Better Linux Support With New Open-Source Driver
Ayn is a Chinese brand of handheld gaming devices that have included Arm-based devices shipping Android as well as AMD Ryzen powered handhelds with Windows 11 or even the option of installing Ubuntu. Better support for the Ayn x86 gaming handheld devices is on the way with patches posted for a new Ayn platform driver for the Linux kernel...
Linux 6.16-rc7 Released: "I Think We're In Good Shape"
The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now availablr for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week...
Wayland Color Management For HDR Under Review For Chrome/Chromium
The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser...
Google Continues Working On "Magma" For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface
Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn't ready for merging in this quarter's release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it's written in Rust...
More AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 Improvements Land For Open-Source Driver
It's a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 "FSR 4" improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver...
ESWIN Computing EBC77 RISC-V SBC To Support Ubuntu Linux
Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer...
Firefox 141 Beta Lowering RAM Use On Linux But Still Benchmarking Behind Chrome
Following this week's release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month's Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I've been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.
Linux 6.16 Exposes Statistics For NUMA Task Migration & Swapping
In addition to the memory management "MM" changes merged last week that included features like Kernel HandOver "KHO" support, a second batch of MM changes were submitted and merged this week for Linux 6.16...
Ubuntu Developers Discuss The Difficult Issue Of Splitting Up Firmware Packages
Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the "linux-firmware" package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It's nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the out-of-the-box hardware support on Ubuntu Linux...
ByoWave Modular Proteus Controller Kit Support Lands In Linux 6.16
Valve engineer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais contributed ByoWave Proteus controller support to the Linux kernel. ByoWave Proteus are some modular controller designs that can be adapted based upon the needs of the gamer and even what title you may be playing at the moment. The triggers and buttons are all repositionable for a very customized controller experience. The only downside is the modular gaming controller kit retails for $299 USD, but at least now works off the mainline Linux kernel...
Linux 6.16 Networking Brings Some Big Performance Improvements & OpenVPN Driver
There is a lot of exciting networking changes to find with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel both for wired and wireless devices as well as some exciting core networking improvements/optimizations...
AlmaLinux 10.0 Stable Released - Unlike RHEL 10, It Continues Supporting x86-64-v2 CPUs
Building off the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, AlmaLinux 10.0 stable is now available as this RHEL-derived popular community Linux OS alternative...
FFmpeg FFV1 Vulkan Encoder Lands +35% Improvement For AMD, +50% For NVIDIA
FFmpeg developers have been working on Vulkan-accelerated FFV1 video encode/decode for that two decade old lossless video coding format. Merged this week to FFmpeg Git were more enhancements to their Vulkan-based FFV1 encoder and yielding big performance improvements for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors...
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series Launching In July For Linux Workstations
Along with announcing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and Radeon RX 9060 XT specifications, on the CPU side AMD used their Computex 2025 keynote for introducing the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series that will be launching in July...
AMD Provides Initial Details On The Radeon RX 9060 XT
In addition to announcing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and Threadripper 9000 series processors, AMD also introduced the Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card at Computex 2025...