Intel Releases VA-API libva 2.23 Adds AV1 Profile 2 Support
Intel today released libva 2.23 as the newest feature release for this Video Acceleration API “VA-API” reference library implementation. Most significant with libva 2.23 is adding AV1 Profile 2 support… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc2 Released Following A Quiet Week
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.19 is now available for testing in leading up to the stable release in early February… ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.41 Released With Wayland Improvements, Vulkan Hardware Decoding Preferred
MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs… ⌘ Read more

AMD ISP4 Linux Driver Patches Update Again For HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Future Ryzen Laptops
One of the features that sadly didn’t make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops… ⌘ Read more

Intel Prepares For KVM Guest VMs To Support Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc2 Adding Support For CRKD Guitar Controllers
Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps… ⌘ Read more

WMI Marshalling Support For Linux Aims To Match Windows’ ACPI/WMI Handling
Open-source developer Armin Wolf has been working most recently on marshalling support for the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) platform code within the Linux kernel. This WMI marshalling support is to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows’ WMI ACPI driver and ultimately to allow for better compatibility with some ACPI firmware and enhancing some WMI drivers… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Seagate Barracuda HDD Taking Down The SATA Bus
It’s not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there’s an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems’ SATA bus and/or potentially other issues… ⌘ Read more

Darktable 5.4 RAW Photography Software Reaches Parity Between X11 & Wayland
Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today’s Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support… ⌘ Read more

GotaTun Open-Source Rust WireGuard Implementation Announced By Mullvad
The Swedish VPN service Mullvad announced this week GotaTun, an open-source Rust-based WireGuard implementation that is forked from Cloudflare’s BoringTun… ⌘ Read more

Intel Readies Multi-Queue Support For Linux 7.0 As New Feature For Crescent Island
In addition to this week’s drm-intel-next pull request to DRM-Next adding Nova Lake display support, a drm-xe-next pull request was also sent out on Friday that prepares a new multi-queue feature for Xe3P_XPC – initially just the “Crescent Island” AI inference accelerator card. Plus other new features too for this Xe kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0~6.20 kernel version… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux’s Main NVIDIA Driver Packages Now Using The Open Kernel Modules
With the Arch Linux packages for the NVIDIA official graphics driver moving to the now-stable NVIDIA 590 driver series that drops the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series GPU support, Arch Linux users with those old Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards will need to transition to using the NVIDIA legacy driver packages from the Arch Linux AUR. Meanwhile for those on Turing and newer with the NVIDIA 590 driver will enjoy the open-source ke … ⌘ Read more

GNU Debugger 17.1 Released With CET Shadow Stack Support, New DAP Features
The GNU Debugger “GDB” 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint 22.3 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop
The beta release of Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” is now available for testing ahead of the holidays for this latest incremental update to this desktop OS built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base… ⌘ Read more

Gemini AI Yielding Sloppy Code For Ubuntu Development With New Helper Script
A few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was “plain wrong” and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu’s monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google’s Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in tho … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 NVK Driver Lands Improvement For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 “Turing” GPUs
In addition to the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver in Mesa merging compression support for big performance wins, another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 “Turing” graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

LoongArch Promoted To Being An Official Architecture For Debian 14
Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit “Loong64” was added to Debian Ports, it’s now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Finally Supporting Ambient Light Sensors, Fixing Windows Games With HDR
There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas… ⌘ Read more

Chrome/Chromium Add Support For Printing Via XDG Portal
Google’s Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google’s web browser… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.0-rc3 Released With Another Week Of Bug Fixing
In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate… ⌘ Read more

Intel Readies Nova Lake Display Support For Linux 6.20~7.0
For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake… ⌘ Read more

Linux Preps For “Slow Workload Hints” With Intel Panther Lake
Five years ago Intel began introducing “workload hints” used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities. Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for ne … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.12 To Linux 6.18 LTS Upgrade Offers Worthwhile Benefits For 5th Gen AMD EPYC
The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year’s Long Term Support version. As such it’s sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life. Here are benchma … ⌘ Read more

Xorgproto 2025.1 Released To Recognize Newer Keyboard Keys
For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024… ⌘ Read more

FUSE 3.18 Released With FUSE-Over-IO-uring, Statx Support
Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously referred to file-systems in user-space as for toys and misguided people. But FUSE has shown a lot of interesting use-cases over the years and has grown more capable in the decade since Torvalds’ prior comments. Out today is FUSE 3.18 as the latest release for the FUSE library… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Linux NPU User-Space Driver Adds Panther Lake Support
Since late 2024 Intel has been working on 5th Gen NPU support for their Linux IVPU driver. That 5th Gen NPU support for Intel Core Ultra “Panther Lake” SoCs was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13. Now today the Intel Linux NPU user-space driver has seen its official support added for Panther Lake… ⌘ Read more

2025 Brought “Transformative Changes” For FreeBSD On Laptops
As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it’s been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought “transformative changes” for the FreeBSD laptop experience… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Plans Confirmed For Linux 6.20 / Linux 7.0
Canonical confirmed their Linux kernel plans today for the Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release due out in April… ⌘ Read more

Cloud Hypervisor 50 Released With QCOW2 Compression, Performance Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others… ⌘ Read more

Mageia 10 Planning For April Release While Still Maintaining 32-bit Support
The Mageia development team recently met to solidify their plans for releasing Mageia 10 as the next major release of this LInux distribution with its roots that trace back to the days of Mandrake Linux… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.337 Debuts With Long Vector & 3D ASTC Compression Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it’s a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions… ⌘ Read more

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 Released With BitLocker Clear Key Support
Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4 Released With Faster Encryption Performance, Many Other Improvements
OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support… ⌘ Read more

Newer RISC-V CPUs Vulnerable To Spectre V1 - Linux Mitigation Patches Posted
Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks… ⌘ Read more

Kdenlive 25.12 Video Editor Brings New Docking System, Menu Restructuring
In addition to the release this week of OpenShot 3.4, released today is a major update to another popular open-source video editing application: Kdenlive. The Kdenlive 25.12 release brings many improvements to help with editing of any year-end / holiday videos… ⌘ Read more

Newer RISC-V CPUs Vulnerable To Spectre V1 - Linux Mitigation Patches Posted
Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks… ⌘ Read more

Mesa NVK Driver Merges Compression Support For Better Performance
Merged today to the Mesa 26.0-devel code for the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver is compression support for helping to deliver better performance… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 590.48.01 Linux Driver Brings R590 Series To Stable
NVIDIA has promoted their R590 driver series to stable with the release today of the NVIDIA 590.48.01 Linux driver as their latest new feature branch version… ⌘ Read more

AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series vs. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Open-Source Linux Performance For 2025
In the past few weeks on Phoronix we have explored a fresh look at the open-source Nouveau/NVK performance compared to the NVIDIA 580 packaged Linux driver as well as a multi-generation Nouveau vs. NVIDIA comparison from the GeForce GTX 980 to RTX 5080 since the forthcoming NVIDIA R590 driver series is ending the GTX 900/1000 series support. Today’s article provides another round of fresh open-source NVIDIA Linuc graphic … ⌘ Read more

Thunderbird Expanding Microsoft Exchange & Protocol Support For 2026
Beyond the Firefox browser to see more changes under its new CEO, the Thunderbird mail client is also expected to see some big changes in the new year… ⌘ Read more

Qt 6.11 Beta Released With New Canvas Painter, OpenAPI & TaskTree Modules
Qt 6.11 Beta 1 is out on-schedule with the code having entered its feature freeze and code branching earlier this month. This toolkit is working toward the stable Qt 6.11 stable debut in March… ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.29 Drops Gen9 GPU Targets, Add New Optimizations & Experimental RISC-V
Intel ISPC 1.29 released on Wednesday as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C variant able to target Intel hardware from their CPUs to GPUs for SIMD programming… ⌘ Read more

AMD Awarding Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” Laptops To Those Fixing ROCm Bugs
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it’s in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those … ⌘ Read more

KDE Internet of Things Development Restarted For Home Assistant Integration
Announced one year ago was KDE Internet of Things “Kiot” with an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation. Development on Kiot sadly fell through the cracks for most of the year but development on it recently restarted… ⌘ Read more

Intel Video Processing Library Adding AI Assisted Video Encoder Features
Intel’s Video Processing Library “libvpl” is out with a new version ahead of the holidays. The only major change with libvpl 2.16 is adding experimental APIs for AI-assisted video encode functionality… ⌘ Read more

Systemd 259 Released With Experimental Musl libc Support, More Features
Systemd 259 is out as the newest feature release for this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Yes, there are more features in tow for this systemd release to top off 2025… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Begin Adapting RAID Code To Use Folios
A new set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list begin adapting the Linux software RAID code paths to begin making use of the folio data structure… ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager Updated With BMG-G31 GPU Support
Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 128-Core Showdown With The Latest Linux Software For EOY2025
Since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 a while back as a Xeon 6900 series 2U server platform to replace the failed Intel AvenueCity reference server, I have been getting caught-up in fresh Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarks with the latest software updates over the past year. I’ve provided fresh looks at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance, the AMX benefits for AI, SNC3 vs. HEX mode, Latency Optimized Mo … ⌘ Read more

Asahi Linux Gets Microphone Working For M2 Pro/Max, Eyes Installer Improvements
The Asahi Linux project is out with their latest status report to highlight upstream improvements made for the newly-minted Linux 6.18 kernel as well as some of their efforts going on downstream within Asahi Linux itself… ⌘ Read more