Open-Source NVIDIA “Nova” Driver Sees More Functionality For Linux 7.3
Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver… ⌘ Read more
Fedora CoreOS To Enable systemd-oomd & zRAM Swap By Default
Fedora’s CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too… ⌘ Read more
Five More Lenovo Laptops To Report Fan Sensors With Linux 7.3
In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Bringing A KCFI Optimization To Benefit Older Intel CPUs
Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors… ⌘ Read more
Qt Toolkit To Introduce Edge AI Submodule, Initially For Vision AI With Qt
The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI inferencing… ⌘ Read more
Intel Xeon 678X Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Performance With The HP Z4 G6i
HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I’ve had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS performance benchmarks to see how th … ⌘ Read more
Linux Mint Improves Kernel Management & Setting System-Wide Environment Variables
Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month… ⌘ Read more
Meta Publishes Muse Glimmer As 30B Open Agentic Model
The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license… ⌘ Read more
Minor Optimization Coming For AMD Athlon XP Era Systems Running Linux
A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models… ⌘ Read more
Apple M1 Series SoCs To See ~1 Watt Power Savings With Linux 7.3
In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux… ⌘ Read more
Old SGI Drivers Being Removed In Linux 7.3 Over Security Concerns
On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2-rc7 Released Following Another Exhausting AI-Driven Week
Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend… ⌘ Read more
CachyOS August 2026 Release Preps For Upcoming Server Edition
CachyOS is out with its latest media refresh of the year. Beyond the usual desktop improvements for the performance-optimized CachyOS, they continue working toward the upcoming CachyOS Server Edition… ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For Kuno SoC Support: Cortex-A7 Platform In 2026
Qualcomm engineers posted a set of 15 patches today for the Linux kernel to enable the Qualcomm Kuno SoC support and their reference development platform… ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.3 Intel Driver Code Enables Large GRF Mode For Newer GPUs
The Intel graphics compiler code in Mesa 26.3-devel has now enabled the Large GRF mode for Alchemist/DG2 and Battlemage/Xe2 graphics and VRT for Xe3 graphics… ⌘ Read more
Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 Seeing Web Camera Support On Linux After Five Years
Launched back in 2021 was the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 business laptop/tablet powered by the at-the-time impressive Intel 11th Gen Core “Tiger Lake” processors. Remaining elusive until now has been the web cameras actually working on Linux, but patches posted this weekend finally are cracking that mystery at least for the user-facing web cam… ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 14.5 Beta 1 Released With Various Backports, Security Fixes
For those still on the FreeBSD 14 N-1 stable series rather than the latest FreeBSD 15 series, FreeBSD 14.5 is working toward release to deliver various security fixes and backports… ⌘ Read more
New Linux Patches Enable ASUS ROG Ryujin III Monitoring Support
For those with an ASUS ROG Ryujin III all-in-one CPU liquid cooling setup catering to gamers, there are now patches pending to enable this AIO liquid cooling setup to work under Linux for monitoring… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 To Better Handle Cluster Load Balancing On Intel Hybrid CPUs
A set of patches from Intel are set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window to enhance the cluster-aware scheduling code so it better handles load balancing on modern Intel Core (Ultra) hybrid CPUs with a mix of P and E/LPE cores… ⌘ Read more
Polychromatic 0.9.8 Released With Razer Blade 16 2023 Support
For those looking to manage the RGB lighting and other features of their Razer devices on Linux, Polychromatic 0.9.8 is now available for that UI front-end that interacts with the OpenRazer kernel drivers for providing a decent albeit unofficial Linux configuration experience… ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.15 Released With Wayland Fixes, Fix For A 20 Year Old MSXML3 Bug
Making its debut this Saturday rather than the usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment, Wine 11.15 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux… ⌘ Read more
GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help Thanks To Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management… ⌘ Read more
HWMON Fixes For Linux 7.2-rc7: “Most Of Them Fixing Critical Or High Severity Bugs”
It’s been another busy week in the Linux kernel camp with increased patch activity continuing due to AI/LLM coding agents / bots continuing to uncover different defects in the open-source codebase. The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem saw many fixes this week for issues mostly raised by the Sashiko AI bot with the issues being described as mostly critical or high severity bugs… ⌘ Read more
AI Helped Create A DirectX 11 Driver For QEMU VMs
Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2-rc7 Adding Support For The Most Unique Or Very Funky Gaming Controller
The input subsystem fixes for the week include a number of AI-driven patches to address various information leaks, out-of-bounds accesses, validation fixes, and other coding issues that have turned up recently. Plus some device quirks and also adding support for a rather funky gaming controller to the common XPad Linux driver used by many different gaming controllers… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Improvements For UI, Built-In Remote Desktop Server
It’s been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 To Support Logitech HID++ 2.0 Reprogrammable Button Support
For those with newer, high-end Logitech input devices, coming with Linux 7.3 is support for the re-programmable button support of the HID++ 2.0 protocol… ⌘ Read more
Initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra Support Being Upstreamed For Linux 7.3
Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was the Device Tree (DT) support for booting the mainline Linux kernel on the base Apple M3 SoC. Though it’s not yet useful for end-users with many features remaining to be supported and upstreamed. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, the M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants will also have initial support for booting on the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more
Intel QATlib 26.08 Released With Gen6 Device Support, 2MB Hugepages
Intel today released an updated version of their QuickAssist Technology library (QATlib) as the user-space component for making use of QuickAssist accelerators under Linux… ⌘ Read more
TTM Memory Management For Graphics To Be More Aggresive With Linux 7.3
This week a final batch of DRM-Misc-Next feature material was submitted for DRM-Next to queue ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later in the month. Most notable is the TTM memory management code is now being more agressive when allocating below protection limits. This is an improvement coming thanks to Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team… ⌘ Read more
Intel Makes Progress On HDMI 2.1 FRL With Their Linux Driver For Meteor Lake & Newer
Following AMD making progress with HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) and other HDMI 2.1 functionality for their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver, Intel is out today with a big set of 44 patches working on HDMI 2.1 FRL support for their kernel graphics driver with Meteor Lake hardware and newer… ⌘ Read more
PoCL 7.2-RC1 Brings Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On RISC-V & x86_64 CPUs
The release candidate of PoCL 7.2 is now available for testing of this Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL that allows for CPU-based execution or via alternative LLVM back-ends allows for OpenCL on Level Zero, NVIDIA GPUs, and even remote devices/hardware… ⌘ Read more
HyperX Driver Coming For Linux 7.3 Just To Report A Microphone’s Mute Status
A new driver coming for the Linux 7.3 kernel is HID-HyperX. It’s not some new driver to support fancy hardware and some nifty features but rather mundane in nature due to the poor behavior of a high-end HyperX USB gaming microphone… ⌘ Read more
NetworkManager Adopts Policy For AI Coding Assistants
The latest high profile open-source project to commit to an AI coding policy is NetworkManager, the widely-used software for Linux network configuration… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2-rc7 Addresses A “Nasty” Race Condition Leading To Use-After-Free After 8 Years
The Linux kernel Git activity continues being quite heavy this week on fixes. It’s looking like the Linux 7.2-rc7 kernel release on Sunday will be another big one with the changes continuing to flow in from both developers and AI bots… ⌘ Read more
AMD Updates HDMI 2.1 VRR & ALLM Patches But Will Miss Out On Linux 7.3
Complementing the HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support that AMD already upstreamed to the Linux kernel, AMD engineers have been further ironing out their HDMI 2.1 implementation for the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. The latest quest has been getting HDMI 2.1 variable rate refresh (VRR) support upstreamed along with HDMI Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM)… ⌘ Read more
GCC 16.2 Released With More Than 100 Fixes
Following the GCC 16.1 compiler release from the end of April as the first stable version of GCC 16, GCC 16.2 is now available with dozens of bug fixes collected since then for further stabilizing this year’s GNU compiler feature release… ⌘ Read more
AMD Squeezes In A Few More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 7.3
AMD today submitted their last planned feature updates ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later this month… ⌘ Read more
Zapscape Is The Latest Linux Vulnerability For KVM Guest-To-Host Escape, LPE
Made public earlier today is Zapscape as a guest-to-host escape vulnerability affecting the Linux KVM x86 code for the past six years. This 2020 kernel change to KVM x86 can also be used as a local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit too where /dev/kvm is world-writable on some Linux distributions like RHEL… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2-rc7 Restoring Btrfs Fixup Worker Infrastructure To Address Silent Data Loss
Back during the Linux 7.2 merge window the Btrfs file-system dropped its COW fixup mechanism, which was used to detect dirty pages without an ordered extent. This code was removed as it was believed the kernel’s memory management layer had solved the underlying conditions but in reality it ended up leading to silent data loss. That Btrfs fixup worker infrastructure is now restored in time for Linux 7.2-rc7 this weekend and th … ⌘ Read more
Linux Networking Continues Being Bombarded With AI Patches
While the Linux WiFi/wireless maintainer just announced taking a stand against AI/LLM generated slop patches with a new “three second review” rule, the broader Linux networking subsystem continues to be bombarded with AI-generated patches… ⌘ Read more
IceWM 4.1 Window Manager Brings Bug Fixes
As the first new release since IceWM 4.0 released back on New Year’s Day for this X11 window manager, IceWM 4.1 is now available… ⌘ Read more
Linux Patched For Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability
Made public minutes ago is the Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability which is now patched in the newest Linux kernel Git code. The Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability stems from improper handling within Linux’s Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigation affecting AMD Zen 1 through Zen 4 processors… ⌘ Read more
Apple NVMe Linux Driver Sees Fixes After Being Bitten By New Firmware
A set of patches providing fixes for the Apple Silicon NVMe driver for the Linux kernel were sent out today due to new issues cropping up when running newer Apple firmware. Firmware shipped by macOS 15+ is causing issues with the current Apple NVMe open-source Linux driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew… ⌘ Read more
The Performance Benefits To Upgrading Mesa With Intel Arc B390 On Ubuntu Linux
If you are an early customer of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro or other Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptop and using Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, there can be real benefit from upgrading your Mesa stack for the newer Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers. In this article are some benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H with Arc B390 Xe3 integrated graphics for looking at the performance impact of using Mesa Git on Ubuntu L … ⌘ Read more
Linux Accidentally Left Legacy I/O & Memory Handlers Open In Kernel Lockdown Mode
For nearly the past decade has been the kernel lockdown mode for tightening up kernel access from user-space such as when UEFI Secure Boot is enabled. The kernel lockdown mode restricts PCI BAR access, no writing to /dev/mem, and other restrictions so user-space can’t can’t modify the running kernel or access sensitive kernel memory. An oversight has allowed legacy I/O and memory interfaces via sysfs to remain open in lockdown m … ⌘ Read more
Linux Wireless Maintainer Takes Firm Stance Against AI/LLM Generated Slop Patches
In addition to the Linux kernel staging area now rejecting AI/LLM-generated patches except for real security fixes, the Linux wireless networking code is also seeing some shifts around how it will deal with AI/LLM generated patches… ⌘ Read more
Page Alloc Hogger Lets You Better Stress Memory Behavior On Linux For Testing/Debugging
A new kernel feature proposed by a Google engineer is Page Alloc Hogger to allow for fine control over where memory pages are allocated in order to more easily reproduce low-memory conditions, make it simpler to exert memory pressure, and enable other stressful memory conditions for testing/debugging how Linux copes… ⌘ Read more
AMD GFX1171 Support Merged For Mesa 26.3
Earlier this year we began seeing patches for AMD GFX1170 graphics IP labeled as “RDNA 4m” and that was then completed with also adding GFX1171 and GFX1172 as additional targets for the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU kernel driver. Merged today for Mesa 26.3 is now adding the GFX1171 target to Mesa 26.3 for the RADV and RadeonSI drivers… ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm Proposes Synx For The Linux Kernel With “Significant” Power + Performance Benefits
Qualcomm engineers have initiated a discussion over upstreaming Synx to the Linux kernel, which is a global synchronization framework across different parts of SoCs. Qualcomm is already using Synx internally and is reported to provide “significant” power and performance benefits… ⌘ Read more