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

Debusine Repositories Enter Beta: Ubuntu PPA-Like User Archives For Debian Linux
Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more

AMD Zen 6 Compiler Support Merged For GCC 16
Ahead of AMD releasing their Zen 6 EPYC and Ryzen processors in 2026, AMD today saw their Zen 6 “znver6” support land into the GCC 16 open-source compiler… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Xe3 Fixes
Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

AMD Wants Your Logs To Help Optimize PyTorch & ComfyUI For Strix Halo, Radeon GPUs
If you are not satisfied with the current performance for PyTorch or ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion on your Strix Halo APU system or with other consumer RDNA3/RDNA4 Radeon consumer GPUs, AMD engineers are interested in your logs to help better optimize the performance going forward… ⌘ Read more

Opus 1.6 Audio Codec Adds New Machine Learning Functionality
Version 1.6 of libopus as the library for the open-source Opus audio codec is now available. Opus 1.6 brings new machine learning “ML” based features in building atop the machine learning features initially added to Opus 1.5… ⌘ Read more

Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage
Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Cache Aware Scheduling Presentation At LPC 2025
One of the exciting Intel innovations to the Linux kernel this year has been around the Cache Aware Scheduling for helping to deliver better performance on modern CPUs with multiple last level caches. The kernel patches have yet to be upstreamed but testing has shown to be quite promising for grouping tasks sharing data to the same LLC domain to help reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. Those wishing to learn more about Cache Aware Scheduling, there wa … ⌘ Read more

The Significant Performance Gains For Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing Performance In 2025
As part of my various year-end comparison benchmarking, I recently ran some tests looking at how the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA 4 performance has evolved since its debut near the beginning of the year. The Vulkan ray-tracing performance in particular was standing out this year as having evolved quite nicely while for conventional OpenGL and Vulkan performance the performance has been largely stable this year with its great at-launch su … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Names New CEO, Firefox To Evolve Into A “Modern AI Browser”
Mozilla Corporation has named its new CEO in replacing interim CEO Laura Chambers… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Acquires Another AI Company
Last year Red Hat acquired Neural Magic as part of their AI acquisitions and to bolster the open-source AI ecosystem. Today they announced another AI acquisition… ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs Enables AMD ROCm 7 Support
The ZLUDA open-source project that has been through several incarnations but ultimately about getting CUDA software up and running on non-NVIDIA GPUs now supports the AMD ROCm 7 series… ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.3 Browser Engine Brings Better Performance, Embedding Improvements
Servo 0.0.3 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based, open-source web layout engine. Servo 0.0.3 incorporates many enhancements made over the past month from better performance to enhancing its embedding API and other improvements like context menus for more web content… ⌘ Read more

MidnightBSD 4.0 Brings Many Changes To This FreeBSD 13 Derived OS
While FreeBSD 15 stable was officially released earlier this month, MidnightBSD continues plotting its own course atop its FreeBSD 13 base. Out today is MidnightBSD 4.0 as the latest iteration of this desktop-minded BSD operating system… ⌘ Read more

OpenShot 3.4 Video Editor Released: One Of Their Largest Updates Ever
OpenShot 3.4 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source video editor app. OpenShot 3.4 happens to be “one of our largest updates we’ve ever done” with a variety of improvements in tow… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Games Lab Looks To Be Revitalized As Modern Linux Gaming Showcase
One of the lesser known Fedora spins under the “Fedora Labs” initiative is the Fedora Games Lab that showcases some open-source games and can serve as an easy demonstrator for Linux gaming. Looking forward to 2026 with Fedora 44, there is a proposal to revitalize Fedora Games Lab to become a better showcase for the modern potential of Linux gaming… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2-RC2 Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Refinements
GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series… ⌘ Read more

Torvalds On Linux Security Modules: “I Already Think We Have Too Many Of Those Pointless Things”
Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board … ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Could Work Nicely “Out Of The Box” On Snapdragon-Powered Windows ARM Laptops
Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops… ⌘ Read more

Flatpak Adds Support For Building OCI Bundles Using Zstd Compressed Layers
Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Features: LUO, PCIe Link Encryption, ASUS Armoury, DRM Color Pipeline API & More
With Linux 6.19-rc1 released, the merge window for Linux 6.19 has now concluded. Here is a summary of the interesting Linux 6.19 new features and changes with this kernel version. ⌘ Read more

AmpereOne M Finally Appears - In The Oracle Cloud With A4
Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4’2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these “M” processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven’t seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors … ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.47 Released With Updated Color Management Protocol
Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code
There’s another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel’s Gaudi accelerator support on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Igalia’s Work Improving Futex For Helping Steam Play Gaming On ARM64 Linux
Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64… ⌘ Read more

Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Already Begin Lining Up For Linux 6.20~7.0
Even before the Linux 6.19 merge window wrapped up this weekend with the Linux 6.19-rc1 release, there was already the first pull request to DRM-Next of the first batch of new material to be queued for Linux 6.19’s successor… ⌘ Read more

GCC Developers Considering Whether To Accept AI/LLM-Generated Patches
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack… ⌘ Read more

The Opt-In Proactive & Crash Time Data Collection On Valve’s Steam Deck
Valve’s Steam Deck with SteamOS features built-in crash data collection as well as for logging other system events worth having knowledge about like the split-lock detection and other events. This is all opt-in by users for data collection by Steam, but for those curious about a bit more insight into this Steam Deck data collection, a presentation at this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference dove into the matter… ⌘ Read more

Early Linux 6.19 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC 9965 2P Excelling For AI & HPC Performance
As the Linux 6.19 merge window winded down this weekend, I began running this development kernel on more systems. While there are some scheduler regressions currently with Linux 6.19 Git, for HPC workloads especially I am seeing some encouraging results using a flagship AMD EPYC 9965 2P server configuration. ⌘ Read more

CentOS Kmods SIG Providing NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules For RHEL/CentOS Users
The CentOS kernel modules “Kmods” special interest group (SIG) is now providing NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its downstreams as well as for CentOS Stream… ⌘ Read more

FamFS Hopes To Go Upstream In 2026
The FamFS file-system being developed by Micron hopes to go upstream for Linux in “early-ish 2026”… ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Lands Initial Support For JPEG-XS
The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged initial support for JPEG-XS… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.5 Released - Inching Toward Full GNU Compatibility
Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to “full GNU compatibility” with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc1 Released From Japan
The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit… ⌘ Read more

TrixiePup64 11.2 Released For Debian-Based Puppy Linux With Wayland & X11 Options
For those with fond memories of the original Puppy Linux as a lightweight Linux distribution that used to run well back in the day on systems with less than 1GB of RAM, TrixiePup64 is out with a new release of this Puppy Linux based distribution with Debian GNU/Linux components. The new TrixiePup64 11.2 release is based on the latest Debian Trixie sources while continuing to offer separate builds for either X11 or Wayland usage… ⌘ Read more

Exciting Laptop & Gaming Handheld Device Improvements Merged For Linux 6.19
Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices… ⌘ Read more

Oracles Releases Updated “bpftune” For BPF-Based Auto-Tuning Of Linux Systems
The past few years Oracle has been working on bpftune as a solution for BPF-based, automatic tuning of Linux systems. Bpftune has been available via Oracle Linux and GitHub while finally their open-source GitHub code has seen the first new tagged release in a while… ⌘ Read more

NFS Lands Initial Support For Directory Delegations In Linux 6.19
The Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel with the most notable feature addition being initial support for basic directory delegations… ⌘ Read more

New RTC Drivers For Apple & NVIDIA With Linux 6.19
The Real Time Clock (RTC) driver changes were merged today for Linux 6.19 ahead of the merge window wrapping up on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

New Rule Forbids GNOME Shell Extensions Made Using AI Generated Code
The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code… ⌘ Read more

LoongArch32 Support Begins Taking Shape In Linux 6.19, GCC 16
The LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window. This domestic Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V began with 64-bit LoongArch64 but with Linux 6.19 the foundation is being laid for LoongArch32 as a 32-bit variant… ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patch Confirms: Rust Experiment Is Done, Rust Is Here To Stay
Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to “conclude the Rust experiment”. The “experiment” of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it’s now accepted to be a success and “Rust is here to stay” in the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Haiku OS Sees Port Of Go 1.18 Programming Language
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.0-rc2 Released With 28 Known Bug Fixes
Following last week’s Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Lands x2AVIC Patches For AMD SVM Handling Up To 4096 vCPUs
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine “KVM” updates for Linux 6.19 include preparations by AMD for handling up to a possible 4,096 virtual CPUs for VMs… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Lay Out Linux Kernel Adjustments For RISC-V RVA23 Hardware
With the first of RISC-V RVA23-compatible hardware expected to be released in 2026, we are beginning to see more Linux developers prepare for this RVA23 profile and the now-mandated extensions. Sent out this week was an initial “request for comments” patch series on RVA23 adjustments for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Improves User-Space I/O “UIO” With Shared Virtual Addressing
Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window were all of the “char/misc” updates. A lot of random changes throughout this time from the Industrial I/O “IIO” drivers to an interesting new feature for User-Space I/O “UIO” for PCI/PCIe devices… ⌘ Read more

Cache Aware Scheduling Raises Performance For Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
Over the past year Intel engineers have worked a lot on Cache Aware Scheduling for the Linux kernel. The yet-to-be-merged functionality allows for the Linux kernel to better aggregate tasks sharing data to the same last level cache (LLC) domain to reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. The Cache Aware Scheduling development was led by Intel but helps other CPU vendors too for processors with multiple cache domains. Back in October I show … ⌘ Read more

Blender Working On KosmicKrisp Support For Vulkan On macOS
The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.10 Released - Strix Point APUs Now Officially Supported
Sure enough, yesterday’s inaugural TheRock 7.10 release tag ended up being a precursor to ROCm 7.10 as predicted in the earlier article. Overnight ROCm 7.10 was released as a new developer preview and with it comes expanded hardware support – including for Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs finally being officially mentioned… ⌘ Read more