GNOME Mutter 51 Beta Released With Wayland Background Blur, Improved Frame Scheduling
Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Adding Support For MCTP-Over-USB v1.1
Within the Linux networking subsystem’s “net-next” Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks loike crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS Issues First Development Update & New ISOs In Three Months
It’s been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that’s been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc6 Released: “This RC Is Huge”
Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week’s time… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Begin Laying The Groundwork For Intel Starfire
Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments… like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Support The Qualcomm Adreno 704 & Adreno 722 GPUs
Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Touch Making Progress Toward Ubuntu 26.04, Vulkan & App Updates
Following last week’s release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc6 Fixes Some AMD Zen 5 CPUs Being Mistakenly Identified As Zen 6
Today’s batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6… ⌘ Read more

Box64 v0.4.4 Released With New Box64-Configurator App
Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July
Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use… ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 11.0 Released With RISC-V Support, Enhanced Linux System Call Compatibility
NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system… ⌘ Read more

MPEG-4 Patent Expiration, RADV On Windows, Open-Source AI & Other July Highlights
Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July… ⌘ Read more

Prominent Arch Linux Developer Resigns After 10 Year Run
Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud “Foxboron” announced today he is resigning from the project… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc6 Working Around Several Buggy Western Digital SATA Drives
Merged ahead of tomorrow’s Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Working To Establish An RFC Process, Battling Sloppy AI-Generated Extensions
GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Enjoy Huge Performance Gains For Multi-GPU/eGPU Performance
It’s been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin’s multi-GPU / external GPU handling… ⌘ Read more

Picolibc 1.8.12 Brings Latest Improvements To This Embedded-Focused C Library
If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc… ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Posting Display Core Next 6 “DCN6” Linux Patches For RDNA5 GPUs
AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core “DC” patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 “DCN6” as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

AMD Publishes CDNA5 ISA Documentation For Instinct MI455X
Following last week’s launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture… ⌘ Read more

The First Open-Source Firmware Released For Modern AMD Ryzen AM5 Platform
Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 26.7 Video Editor Released With Stock Asset Library
Shotcut 26.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editing solution… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Preparing To Finally Enable Atomic Mode-Setting By Default
In addition to the Nouveau kernel driver unblocking Vulkan Video H.264 support for the Mesa NVK driver, another feature change on the way is this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver finally preparing to enable atomic mode-setting by default… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux AUR Under Another Wave Of Malicious Packages, Package Adoptions Halted
Last month the Arch Linux User Repository “AUR” saw more than 1,500 malicious packages amid a sophisticated malware attack and then also seeing an influx of spam and profanities amid this community/user-maintained repository for the popular Arch Linux distribution. Unfortunately, there is another round of AUR troubles… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Allow Tuning AMD P-State Dynamic EPP With Per CPU Core Granularity
Sent out last night was the last batch of planned AMD P-State driver feature improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.4 Browser Engine Gets More Websites Rendering Correctly
Servo 0.4 was just released for closing out the month of July. This month the Servo browser engine with its servoshell demo browser began rendering more real-world websites correctly… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Patch For Linux 7.3 Opens The Door For NVK Vulkan Video Atop NVIDIA NVDEC
This week’s round of drm-misc-next patches for staging ahead of the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window bring an exciting change for the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver… ⌘ Read more

x86_64 Shadow Stack By Default Retargeted For Fedora 46
In recent weeks there was a proposal to enable x86_64 Shadow Stack support by default with the upcoming Fedora Linux 45 release. That change has been approved now by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but with the feature being punted off to Fedora 46 next year… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.358 Released With New Image Tiling Control Extension
After two weeks without any Vulkan spec update, Vulkan 1.4.358 was released overnight. Besides the usual assortment of minor clarifications/fixes, Vulkan 1.4.358 introduces one new extension: VK_EXT_image_tiling_control… ⌘ Read more

Sound Fixes For Linux 7.2-rc6: “Far Larger Than Wished”
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE previously warned of many sound driver fixes due to AI/LLMs and a “new normal” of patch activity as a result. While we are approaching the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window with the stable release coming up in August, the sound patches continue trending higher and this week were “far larger than wished” ahead of Linux 7.2-rc6 due out on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Will Treat Intel Nova Lake S Graphics As Stable
Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Linux Patches For HDMI 2.1 Auto Low-Latency Mode “ALLM” & VRR
Following AMD posting AMDGPU patches for HDMI 2.1 FRL support after the HDMI 2.1 open-source support was long blocked by the HDMI Forum, as part of working toward a complete HDMI 2.1 implementation in this AMD Linux driver it was followed by HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC) support. Now the latest on the AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 enabling path is enabling Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM) as well as HDMI Variable Rate Refresh!.. ⌘ Read more

There’s Finally A New Game Powered By The Unigine 2 Engine
It’s been about a decade since seeing any new games released on the visually-impressive, Linux-friendly Unigine Engine. Unigine Corp has mostly been focusing on Unigine Engine usage for simulations and other professional applications, but coming as a surprise today is a new game being developed on their latest Unigine 2 engine technology… ⌘ Read more

OPI Abstraction v0.1 Published With Aiming To Standardize DPU/IPU Ecosystems
The Linux Foundation hosted Open Programmable Infrastructure “OPI” announced its first coordinated release with OPI Abstraction v0.1. The work of the Open Programmable Infrastructure is hoping to standardize the data processing unit (DPU) and infrastructure processing unit (IPU) ecosystems… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R610 On CachyOS With The GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU
With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer’s certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I had run some graphics benchmarks to see … ⌘ Read more

AMD Zen 6 Client HSMP Patches Points To “Ryzen Master” Functionality On Linux
In an interesting twist, patches this week posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are enabling AMD Zen 6 client desktop and laptop SoCs for the HSMP driver. Up to now the AMD HSMP Linux driver was just used for modern EPYC server processors while now we are seeing this HSMP driver supporting the upcoming Medusa and Olympic Ridge client platforms… Including mentions of overclocking and even noting “Ryzen Master” as the Windows-only … ⌘ Read more

Xen 4.22 Released With AMD Zen 5 BLT Support, Improved RISC-V Virtualization
The Xen Project today released Xen 4.22 as the newest feature release of this open-source hypervisor popular for open-source virtualization in automotive systems and other embedded use-cases as well as the cloud… ⌘ Read more

Huawei Considers Open-Sourcing A Half-Hearted Mesa Vulkan Driver
A Huawei engineer posted to the Mesa mailing list today over potentially upstreaming a Vulkan driver they have developed for an in-house GPU. However, at least in current form, this new in-house GPU Vulkan driver is likely dead in the water from being upstreamed into Mesa… ⌘ Read more

Patches Posted To Improve Linux Media Acceleration On Intel Alchemist GPUs
The Intel Arc A-Series graphics (DG2) remains in a bit of an awkward state on Linux due to the transition period moving from the i915 kernel driver to more modern and feature capable Xe kernel driver. It’s only post-Alchemist where the Intel Xe driver is officially supported and used by default while those opting for the Xe driver with the A-Series can often enjoy better performance and functionality. Except one of the caveats in using t … ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver & VPL GPU Runtime 2026Q2 Updates Continue Prepping For Nova Lake
Over the past few Intel VA-API Media Driver releases we have seen preparations made for Nova Lake video acceleration. That has continued today with the Intel Media Driver and Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime releases today with their new quarterly feature releases… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.5 Brings More Fixes & Improvements To System76’s Desktop
The System76 and Pop!_OS developers continue quickly iterating on their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

DRM Format Modifiers For Old AMD GPUs Coming With Linux 7.3: Thanks Valve
Sent out today was another week’s worth of features and other code changes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver. We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material for next month’s Linux 7.3 kernel but there is some nice feature work in store for this week… ⌘ Read more

Steam Client Adds HDR Streaming On Steam Deck OLED, AV1 Video Streaming
Today’s Steam client beta update brings some new game streaming enhancements for Linux gamers… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver Support For Xe3 “Peak Bandwidth Threshold” Feature In Linux 7.3
Intel today sent out their latest batch of kernel graphics driver updates that are ready for staging ahead of next month’s Linux 7.3 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows
Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver to Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more

Vibe Coded X11 YSERVER Gets Steam Working, Full-Screen Games With Cinnamon
A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest… ⌘ Read more

GCC To Decline Any Significant Contributions Made Via AI/LLMs - Except For Test Cases
The GCC Steering Committee announced today that they have accepted the recommended policy of the GCC AI Policy Working Group, which means no “legally significant” code contributions made via AI/LLM agents will be accepted into this open-source compiler… ⌘ Read more

ARCTIC Launches Its New Fan Controller That Already Has Mainline Linux Support
In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller… ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC… ⌘ Read more

Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI
There’s yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Slight Advantage Over Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into the benchmarking mix. ⌘ Read more