FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 1 Brings OpenZFS Upgrade, Performance Fix For TCP LRO
The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Imagination PowerVR Mesa Vulkan Driver Enables Unofficial Support For More GPUs
Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the “PVR” Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough… ⌘ Read more

Solus Linux Preparing To Remove Python 2, Big systemd Upgrade & Finish /usr Merge
The Solus Linus project is preparing for an “epoch bump” so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository… ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager Deprecates Data Center GPU Max Series & GPU Flex Series
Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series… ⌘ Read more

Intel Simplifying P-State Driver’s Energy Model For Newer Core Ultra CPUs
Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake… ⌘ Read more

Phosh 0.50 Released, GNOME App Aims To Help You Learn Assembly
For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.5 Fixing Some Of The Most Common Crashes, Other Bugs Fixed Too
KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a “massive amount of stability work” for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code… ⌘ Read more

Coreboot 25.09 Released With 19 More Motherboards Supported, Better amdfwtool For Turin
Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.329 Released With New Fused-Multiply Add Extension
Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow… ⌘ Read more

Linux Now Disabling TPM Bus Encryption By Default For Performance Reasons
Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year l … ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.0.2 Released With Radeon RX 9060 Officially Supported
AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack… ⌘ Read more

Python 3.14 Performance Looking Good In Benchmarks
With this week’s release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Posts Latest Linux Driver Patches For Open-Source vGPU Support
Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization “vGPU” support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Hyper-V Support Further Improved With Linux 6.18
Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it’s inched along further for Linux 6.18… ⌘ Read more

New Input Drivers Merged For Linux 6.18
In addition to last week’s HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 25.10 Video Editor Rolling Out More AI-Powered Functionality
Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Lead Engineer For Linux Performance Monitoring Is Leaving The Company
This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire… ⌘ Read more

Linux Driver Support Ready For Intel Panther Lake’s NPU 5
In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away… ⌘ Read more

Linux Seeing First LED Driver Written In Rust
The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Open-Source Strategy Is Changing At Odds With The Ethos Of Open-Source
For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel’s open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel’s difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds – if not … ⌘ Read more

Intel Announces Xeon 6+ For Clearwater Forest CPUs
Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light… Especially as for what’s known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest. ⌘ Read more

Intel Showcased Panther Lake & Xe3 Graphics At Tech Tour Arizona 2025
In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026. ⌘ Read more

Intel Teases New Inference-Optimized Enterprise GPU
Intel Tech Tour 2025 in Arizona was primarily focused on disclosures around Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake / Xe3 but during the opening keynote was also teasing a yet-to-be-announced inference-optimized GPU… ⌘ Read more

Intel IPU 7.5 With Panther Lake Will Rely On Closed-Source Linux Libraries
At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel’s IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved… ⌘ Read more

Intel Refrains From Commenting On Panther Lake Xe3 SR-IOV Support
A few months back it was brought up on the Intel driver mailing list around SR-IOV support for Panther Lake’s Xe3 graphics. This goes along with Intel open-source Linux driver developers being quite busy on SR-IOV support for Battlemage dGPUs as part of their Project Battlematrix. Unfortunately, I wasn’t provided any answer at Intel Tech Tour in Arizona whether SR-IOV support will be found with all Panther Lake SKUs or reserved for select offeri … ⌘ Read more

OpenGL Mesh Shader Extension Merged
Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Ships With A New Python App In The Source Tree
Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree… ⌘ Read more

PoCL 7.1 Released For Bringing OpenCL To More Devices
PoCL 7.1 is now available for this “Portable Computing Language” implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Ships With A New Python App In The Source Tree
Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2510 Brings More Optimizations For x86_64 Binaries On AArch64
FEX 2510 is out as the newest release of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Making FEX all the more popular is its continued ability for running Wine/Proton for handling Windows games on ARM64 Linux… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Lands Detection For Intel Nova Lake & Wildcat Lake
So far the upstream GCC compiler hasn’t seen any target enablement for Intel’s future Nova Lake processors (a.k.a. -march=novalake support) but merged yesterday for the GNU C Library was initial targeting for Nova Lake as well as Wildcat Lake… ⌘ Read more

AOMedia Will Be Talking More About The AV2 Video Codec Later This Month
Last month the Alliance for Open Media “AOMedia” began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year. They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Block Code Introduces Lockless Bitmap For Software RAID
Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 USB Brings Intel USBIO Drivers, Offload Improvements
In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

System76 Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta Performing Well In Early Benchmarks
Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release. ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 RISC-V Default Kernel Builds To Support Front Panel Shutdown/Reboot Buttons
Following last week’s RISC-V pull request that brought support for the MIPS Vendor Extensions and other changes plus separately the SoC pull that added mainline ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support and the HiFive Premier P550, a secondary round of RISC-V architecture updates was submitted for the Linux 6.18 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Beta Builds Available Ahead Of Next Month’s Official Release
Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November… ⌘ Read more

Linux Fair DRM Scheduler Graduates Out Of The “RFC” Phase
Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a “fair” DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

KVM Virtualization Sees Several Exciting Improvements For AMD & Intel In Linux 6.18
In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine “KVM” feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 exFAT Driver Lands An Enticing Optimization
In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle… ⌘ Read more