Vulkan 1.4.347 Debuts With Three New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.347 made its debut overnight as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. Beyond the usual maintenance churn over the past week, Vulkan 1.4.347 brings three new extensions… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Adding DRM Dedicated CRTC Background Color Property
Sent out today was the latest weekly round of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window that is set to happen in mid-to-late April… ⌘ Read more

Steam Linux Beta Prepares For 64-bit, Can Be Run Inside Steam Runtime Container
An interesting new Steam client beta dropped overnight from Valve with some exciting low-level enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s DXGKRNL Driver Updated For Linux - Many Changes After Four Years
Well, here’s an unexpected surprise… A new version of the Linux kernel patches for DXGKRNL were posted today for that DirectX kernel driver that began a few years ago for supporting Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) use-cases. This comes four years to the month after the prior version was posted and without much excitement for getting it into the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Thunderbird Looks To Finalize Its Exchange Support, Refresh The Calendar UI
Thunderbird announced today the availability of their public roadmaps where they are making it easier for end-users to comprehend what they are currently working on for this mail client not only for the desktop builds but also their Android and iOS versions too… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preps More GFX12.1 Enablement For Linux 7.1, Initial VCN 5.0.2 & JPEG 5.0.2 IP
AMD today sent out another batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Wayland 1.25 Released With Color Management Now Fully Documented
Simon Ser just released Wayland 1.25… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Delivers Some Nice Gains For CPU Rendering Performance On Linux
With this week’s release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux. ⌘ Read more

GNUnet 0.27 Released For Those With “Some Reasonable Pain Tolerance”
Version 0.27 of GNUnet is now available for this free software framework for constructing decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. But it comes with some big caveats before use… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Releases Llamafile 0.10 To Enhance Their AI Offering For Easy-To-Use LLMs
The last release of Llamafile was back in May and it’s led me recently to wonder if Mozilla was slowly abandoning this AI project like they had done in the past to DeepSpeech and other software projects. Fortunately, that’s not the case and out today is Llamafile 0.10 with some big updates… ⌘ Read more

OpenGL Lands New Extension To Benefit Wine
The OpenGL API is still seeing new extensions introduced in 2026. Merged today to the OpenGL Registry is a new extension intended to help Wine usage for 32-bit Windows games/apps on 64-bit Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Opera GX Web Browser Released For Linux
It’s been a while since most of you probably thought about the Opera web browser, but these days they have been catering their “Opera GX” web browser to gamers. Today they have finally delivered this Opera GX gaming-focused browser for Linux users… ⌘ Read more

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Should See Working HDMI Support For The Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V Board
Drew Fustini sent out DeviceTree patches this past weekend for enabling the HDMI display controller on the T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC. Additionally, there’s a patch for lighting up the HDMI display support on the LicheePi 4A RISC-V board… ⌘ Read more

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Intel Ends Work On Open-Source kAFL-Fuzzer For Fuzzing VMs
An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Released With Many Fantastic Improvements
GNOME 50 is out today, on-schedule and just in time for being the default desktop of the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 Released For Apple Silicon Macs
While Fedora 43 was released at the end of October and there is just one month to go now until the release of Fedora 44, Fedora Asahi Remix 43 debuted today as this spin of Fedora Linux for Apple Silicon Macs… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Performance From Linux 6.12 To Linux 7.0 Shows Regressions
Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version. ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s Snap Affected By Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Last week it was security issues with AppArmor to worry about on Ubuntu Linux while this week a “high” rated vulnerability for Ubuntu’s Snap daemon has been revealed… ⌘ Read more

Linux MGLRU Improvements Net A 30% Increase For MongoDB, More Than 100% On HDDs
It’s been a while since having any improvements to talk about for the MGLRU multi-gen LRU functionality for the Linux kernel to optimize page reclamation and help with system performance especially when enduring memory pressure. But this week a Tencent engineer posted some very promising patches for further enhancing this kernel feature… ⌘ Read more

Samba 4.24 Released With Remote Password Management Support, Other Improvements
Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support… ⌘ Read more

Google Engineers Launch “Sashiko” For Agentic AI Code Review Of The Linux Kernel
Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It’s now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google… ⌘ Read more

GRUB Bootloader Development Moves To FreeDesktop.org
The widely-used GRUB bootloader is now being developed on FreeDesktop.org with a modern GitLab-based workflow… ⌘ Read more

Arm Preparing Live Firmware Activation Support For Linux
A new platform feature being worked on by Arm engineers for the Linux kernel is Live Firmware Activation to allow for updated firmware components to be deployed without requiring a system reboot… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Better Supporting The Logitech MX Master 4 Bluetooth Mouse
For those that happen to have the Logitech MX Master 4 wireless mouse or are considering this high-end ~$120 USD Bluetooth mouse, better support for it was merged yesterday to Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

CMake 4.3 Released With Package Import/Export Using The Common Package Specification
Version 4.3 of the CMake software development tool / build system was released today. Notable with CMake 4.3 is support for importing and exporting packages described using the Common Package Specification (CPS) for greater interoperability in the ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

systemd 260 Released: mstack, SysV Service Scripts Removed & AI Agents Documentation
Systemd 260 was just released as the newest stable version of this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Systemd 260 brings yet more features to this critical open-source project and to be incorporated into H1’2026 Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

AMD MLIR-AIE Releases New AIECC C++ Compiler To Help Bring New Workloads To Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD Ryzen AI NPUs are now running LLMs on Linux with the recently debuted Lemonade 10.0 server and FastFlowLM 0.9.35 adding Linux support. In addition to those software components, AMD engineers have also been developing MLIR-AIE as a compiler toolchain for AMD AI Engine devices such as Ryzen AI NPUs in leveraging LLVM-based code generation with the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR). Out today is MLIR-AIE v1.3 with some not … ⌘ Read more

OpenJDK 26 Released With The Java Applet API Finally Removed
OpenJDK 26 is out today as the newest GA reference version for the Java SE platform. With Java 26, it’s finally time to say a goodbye to the Java Applet API… ⌘ Read more

AMD MLIR-AIE Releases New AIECC C++ Compiler To Help Bring New Workloads To Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD Ryzen AI NPUs are now running LLMs on Linux with the recently debuted Lemonade 10.0 server and FastFlowLM 0.9.35 adding Linux support. In addition to those software components, AMD engineers have also been developing MLIR-AIE as a compiler toolchain for AMD AI Engine devices such as Ryzen AI NPUs in leveraging LLVM-based code generation with the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR). Out today is MLIR-AIE v1.3 with some not … ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 Begins Supporting RISC-V
The community-focused, RHEL/CentOS-derived AlmaLinux distribution announced its support today for the RISC-V CPU ISA with AlmaLinux Kitten 10 builds being made available… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, OpenAI & Others Pony Up $12.5M To Strengthen Open-Source Security
The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

System76 New Thelio Mira Linux Desktop Running Strong - Powered By AMD Ryzen 9000 Series
Last week we provided a first look at the new and completely-redesigned System76 Thelio Mira desktop chassis. Today System76 is formally announcing the availability of their new Thelio Mira Linux desktop. ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 Brings More Features & Performance Optimizations
Following this morning’s Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 release, the Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 is now available for this open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute stack for Intel graphics hardware on Windows and Linux… ⌘ Read more

System76 Makes The Best Open-Source Keyboard Even Better
If System76 engineers didn’t already have enough going on with recently shipping the COSMIC Rust-based desktop environment and also shipping Pop!_OS 24.04 as their in-house Linux distribution plus completely redesigning the Thelio Desktop, they also recently revised their Launch Keyboard. They have made this leading open-source keyboard design even better with the latest iteration of the System76 Launch Keyboard. ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 Exposes HF8 Support For Crescent Island
Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 is now available for this LLVM/Clang-based compiler stack used by the Compute Runtime on Linux and under Windows is used both for graphics and compute… ⌘ Read more

Intel Announces Core Ultra 200HX Plus Along With “Intel Binary Optimization Tool”
Intel today announced their Core Ultra 200HX Plus series mobile processors as their refresh for Arrow Lake HX. The announcement of the Core Ultra 200HX Plus also mentions a new Intel Binary Optimization Tool software package that has the potential of being quite interesting… ⌘ Read more

Mesa & AMDGPU Linux Driver See Patches For The Sony PS5 GPU
Open-source developer Andy Nguyen recently demonstrated porting Linux to the Sony PlayStation 5. The PS5 notably uses a custom AMD SoC and with some patches is able to play nicely with the open-source AMD graphics driver stack… ⌘ Read more

ARM NEON Accelerated CRC64 Optimization Shows Nearly 6x Improvement
A patch posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provides an ARM64-optimized CRC64-NVMe implementation for nearly a 6x improvement on modern Arm SoCs… ⌘ Read more

Meta Renewing Investment Into The jemalloc Memory Allocator
The jemalloc memory allocator “malloc” implementation has been popular for HPC and server use down to desktop use in apps like Firefox. Jemalloc has proven over the years to be effective on delivering better performance and scalability while enjoying lower memory usage and less fragmentation than alternative malloc implementations. Meta recently announced that they are renewing their investment into jemalloc… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Plans To Integrate NVIDIA DOCA-OFED Into The Ubuntu Archive
An interesting Linux detail from today’s NVIDIA GTC 2026 kickoff is that Canonical will be integrating NVIDIA’s DOCA-OFED software framework into the Ubuntu Linux archive for leveraging the high-speed networking stack for HPC and AI… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Lands x86_64 FMA’ed cosh For A ~35% Improvement
A bit of time has passed since having any exciting performance improvements to report on within the GNU C Library “glibc” but that changed today with another nice x86_64 optimization for modern CPUs… ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg 8.1 Released With Experimental xHE-AAC MPS212, More Vulkan Acceleration
FFmpeg 8.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this widely-used, open-source multimedia library… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 sched_ext To Add “SCX_ENQ_IMMED” For Tighter Control When Tasks Land On A CPU
The Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” to allow for custom CPU scheduling policies as BPF programs continues enabling new functionality. Queued up in the sched_ext development code ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 cycle is the new SCX_ENQ_IMMED capability for enabling tighter control over when tasks land on a CPU… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Workstation 44 Beta Benchmarks On The AMD Ryzen AI Max Framework Desktop
Since last week’s Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo”. Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape. ⌘ Read more

Imagination’s Open-Source PowerVR Vulkan Driver Now Plays Nicely With Zink OpenGL
The past several years Imagination Tech has been investing in an upstream and open-source DRM kernel graphics driver as well as a PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa. Their Mesa focus has exclusively been on the PowerVR Vulkan driver with the plans all along to use the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. With next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release, that goal is being realized with Zink now working nicely atop the PowerVR Vulkan driver … ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver Preps For UHBR DP Tunnels With Linux 7.1
A round of Intel graphics driver updates were sent today to DRM-Next in staging ahead of April’s Linux 7.1 merge window. The changes in this pull aren’t too particularly exciting with a lot of code refactoring and other work, but there are preparations made for supporting UHBR DP tunnels… ⌘ Read more

Lenovo Legion Go HID Drivers Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.1
The work by Derek Clark on enhancing the Lenovo Legion Go gaming handheld support for Linux continues panning out nicely. The latest driver effort, the creation of the Lenovo Legion Go and Go S Series HID Drivers to help with controller configuration, is set to be introduced in Linux 7.1… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Retire UDP-Lite - Allows For Better Performance With Cleansed Code
The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lit … ⌘ Read more