Iced 0.14 Released For Popular Rust Cross-Platform GUI LIbrary
Released today is a new version of Iced, the popular cross-platform GUI library for the Rust programming language. Iced is notably used by the COSMIC desktop environment and a growing variety of different Rust apps… ⌘ Read more

Linux GPIB Drivers Declared Stable - 53 Years After HP Introduced The Bus
Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel’s “staging” area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel’s staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Introduces PCIe Link Encryption & Device Authentication, AMD SEV-TIO Enabling
One of the most exciting merges this weekend to the Linux 6.19 kernel is establishing the infrastructure for supporting PCI Express link encryption and device authentication. Multiple vendors are working on PCIe link encryption for their hardware while this initial pull begins laying the foundation of AMD SEV-TIO Trusted I/O support for the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Delivers Working USB3 Support For Apple Silicon Devices
Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Delivers Working USB3 Support For Apple Silicon Devices
Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Plumbs DMA-BUF Support For VFIO PCI Devices In Linux 6.19
In addition to NVIDIA improving peer-to-peer (P2P) DMA for block devices in Linux 6.19, NVIDIA also led an effort providing DMA-BUF support for VFIO PCI devices for opening up some interesting new cases moving forward. As part of the VFIO pull request this new functionality has landed for Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

Using AI To Modernize The Ubuntu Error Tracker Produced Some Code That Was “Plain Wrong”
A week ago I wrote about AI being used to help modernize Ubuntu’s Error Tracker. Microsoft GitHub Copilot was tasked to help adapt its Cassandra database usage to modern standards. It’s worked in some areas but even for a rather straight forward task, some of the generated functions ended up being “plain wrong” according to the developer involved… ⌘ Read more

Rust Drivers In Linux 6.19 Will Now Support… Module Parameters
On top of the Rust driver core changes and other Rust code for Linux 6.19, the modules infrastructure for this new kernel version is also bringing some new code. Surprisingly, it’s taken until now for Rust kernel modules/drivers to support module parameters as is common practice for passing different options when booting the kernel or manually loading kernel drivers with extra non-default options… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Adds New Console Font To Better Handle Modern Laptops With HiDPI Displays
Sent in for the Linux 6.19 merge window when it comes to the frame-buffer device “FBDEV” subsystem are just a set of “fixes” for FBDEV drivers and code clean-ups. But it does also include a new console font option for better supporting modern laptops with high density displays… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s RAMDAX Driver Merged For Linux 6.19 To Carve Out RAM As NVDIMM Devices
The Non-Volatile Memory Device (NVDIMM) subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the NVDIMM code is a new open-source driver addition courtesy of Microsoft… ⌘ Read more

AMD Starts Enabling Zen 6 “znver6” Compiler Support In GCC
Making for a bit more exciting weekend is that minutes ago AMD has posted their first patch for enabling Zen 6 processor support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for -march=znver6 targeting… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 Bringing Support For 64K x 64K Textures With AMD RDNA4 GPUs
The latest improvement to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák is enabling support for up to 64K x 64K textures with RDNA4 GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Tenstorrent Blackhole Support & Other New RISC-V + ARM64 Hardware In Linux 6.19
The set of six branches containing SoC and platform updates/additions for the Linux 6.19 kernel have been merged for enabling a lot of new RISC-V and ARM 64-bit hardware as well as enhancing some existing SoCs/platforms… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2512 Released With More Improvements For Gaming On ARM64 Linux
FEX 2512 is out toda as the newest monthly update for this software that enables running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux, including the likes of Wine and Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for being able to run Windows games on 64-bit ARM Linux devices… ⌘ Read more

Solaris 11.4 SRU 87 Released With New Security Features, GCC 15
For anyone still relying on Solaris in production or just nostalgic Solaris users from the grand Sun Microsystems days, Solaris 11.4 SRU 87 was released by Oracle this week as one of the heavier stable release updates in recent memory… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Brings Many Driver Core Changes For Rust, Housekeeping CPUs Exposed
Beyond the main set of Rust changes to land in Linux 6.19 earlier this week, as we near the end of the first week of two for the Linux 6.19 merge window… More Rust changes. This time around the driver core updates for the kernel bring a number of Rust changes… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Supporting Per-DRM-Plane Color Pipelines, More Hardware Quirks/Fixes
It was a busy start of December for KDE Plasma developers in working out several hardware fixes for the current Plasma 6.5 series while also working on new Plasma 6.6 features like the per-DRM-plane color pipelines… ⌘ Read more

An Intel Fellow & Prominent Linux Performance Engineer Resigns From Intel
There have been many Intel Linux/open-source software engineers to leave the company over the past year among other setbacks for their Linux/open-source initiatives. Announced this Friday night is one of their highest profile departures of the year as it pertains to their Linux efforts… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.0-rc1 Released With TWAINDSM 64-bit Module For Scanners
As anticipated the first release candidate of Wine 11.0 is now available in working toward the annual stable release in January… ⌘ Read more

Linux Still Dealing With Quirky Firewire Devices As We Enter 2026
For Linux 6.19 as what will be the first stable kernel release of 2026, the IEEE-1394 Firewire stack continues dealing with device quirks and improving support for different Firewire-connected devices. In 2026 is also when the Linux Firewire maintainer plans to begin recommending users migrate away from the IEEE-1394 bus followed by closing the Linux Firewire efforts in 2029… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Improves Block Layer Peer-To-Peer DMA In Linux 6.19
The IO_uring and block subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window with a few improvements worth highlighting this cycle… ⌘ Read more

Jolla Trying Again To Develop A New Sailfish OS Linux Smartphone
Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices. But now it seems they are trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 7773X “Milan-X” Performance & Power Nearly Four Years Later
Nearly four years have passed since AMD launched their EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache. When recently rearranging some servers in the lab and realizing the four year anniversary was coming up in March, curiosity got the best of me in wondering where the Linux performance and energy efficiency on Milan-X is now with the latest Linux software stack compared to the numbers when Milan-X launched back in March 2022. ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates Cache Aware Scheduling For Linux With Better NUMA Balancing
Intel engineer Tim Chen has sent out a second version of the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling patches for the Linux kernel to enhance the CPU performance of modern processors sporting multiple cache domains… ⌘ Read more

Venus Vulkan Driver Lands Mesh Shader Support In Mesa 26.0
Venus is the VirtIO-GPU driver that allows for Vulkan support within guest virtual machines permitting sufficient host driver support and other requirements in place with hypervisors like CrosVM and QEMU. The Venus driver now supports Vulkan’s mesh shader capabilities and in turn advances the DXVK-Proton support for Linux gaming within VMs… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Score A Big Win With Linux 6.19: Color Management & Xe VFIO Driver Merged
On top of enabling Xe3P graphics for Nova Lake and Crescent Island plus other changes like CASF adaptive sharpening for Lunar Lake and newer, another set of Intel kernel graphics driver updates were merged overnight as a big win for the open-source Intel graphics stack on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Audio Support Merged For Linux 6.19
The sound subsystem updates were merged on Thursday for enabling a variety of new audio hardware with the Linux 6.19. Among the hardware standing out is getting Intel Nova Lake audio support in order… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 GPU Driver Features: Color Pipeline API, Intel Xe3P, AMDGPU For GCN 1.0/1.1
The big set of kernel graphics driver features were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel. As usual there is a lot of new feature work on the AMD Radeon, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics drivers plus the smaller Arm/embedded graphics like now having initial Qualcomm Gen8 GPU support. Plus the growing number of accelerator “accel” drivers for NPUs / AI accelerators… ⌘ Read more

Graviton5 Announced With Up To 192 Cores Per Chip, 5x Larger Cache
Amazon AWS today announced Graviton5 as their newest-generation ARM64 server processor for their EC2 cloud. Graviton5 is being promoted as offering 25% higher performance over existing Graviton4 processors… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Releases CUDA 13.1 With New “CUDA Tile” Programming Model
NVIDIA just released CUDA 13.1 for what they claim is “the largest and most comprehensive update to the CUDA platform since it was invented two decades ago.” The most notable addition with the CUDA 13.1 release is CUDA Tile as a new tile-based programming model… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Brings Temperature Monitoring For The Steam Deck APU, Apple Silicon SMC
The many hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were merged today for Linux 6.19 that is predominantly around delivering new hardware support… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Ready With Its Reconcile Feature As Biggest Change In Two Years
The out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system is ready with its reconcile feature, which previously was known as “rebalance_v2”, and what lead developer Kent Overstreet calls the biggest feature to this copy-on-write file-system in the last two years… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 Benchmarks Versus FreeBSD 14.3 On AMD EPYC
This week brought the official release of FreeBSD 15.0 as the latest major update to this BSD operating system. In being eager to test out this new FreeBSD release, for this first round of FreeBSD 15.0 benchmarking is seeing how it compares to the former FreeBSD 14.3 release on a Supermicro + AMD EPYC Turin server. ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Initial Wayland Port
Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Former Intel Open-Source Project SVT-VP9 Sees First Update In 5 Years
The open-source SVT-VP9 project started by Intel as a high performance VP9 video encoder has seen its first new release in five years… ⌘ Read more

Printk Improvement For Linux 6.19 Can Significantly Speed-Up Boot Times For Some Systems
The Linux kernel’s printk code for logging kernel messages has some useful improvements with the Linux 6.19 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Fixes A Thundering Herd Problem For Big NUMA Servers
The “timers/core” pull requests for updating Linux kernel timer-related code doesn’t tend to be too interesting each kernel cycle, but this time around for Linux 6.19 it is for addressing a problem HPE discovered on big NUMA servers… ⌘ Read more

Zlib-rs 0.5.3 Expands AVX-512 Usage For Faster Performance
The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as “a safer Zlib” for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Will Allow Enforcing IPE Security Checks On Indirectly Executed Scripts
Linux’s Integrity Policy Enforcement “IPE” module is gaining a useful addition with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.1 Released With Initial Set Of Fixes, Mesa 25.2 Comes To An End
Mesa 25.3.1 was released overnight as the first point release of the Mesa 25.3 series. The Mesa point releases are typically bi-weekly but this one dragged out to nearly three weeks. In turn this also marks an end to the Mesa 25.2 series… ⌘ Read more

EXT4 Optimizes Online Defragmentation, Improves Performance & Larger Block Sizes
The merged EXT4 changes for Linux 6.19 bring some of the most prominent feature changes in recent times for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Lands Improvements For Its USB Stack - Fixing Various Blue Screens of Death
ReactOS as the open-source operating system aiming to be an “open-source Windows” by striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and device drivers is now slightly better with its USB support… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Goes Ahead And Enables Microsoft C Extensions Support
Last month I reported on Linux 6.19 looking to enable Microsoft C Extensions support throughout the Linux kernel with setting the -fms-extensions compiler option to allow Microsoft C Extensions when building the kernel. Linus Torvalds today merged that support without objections… ⌘ Read more

Sched_EXT With Linux 6.19 Improves Recovering For Misbehaving eBPF Schedulers
The Linux kernel’s innovative sched_ext code for being able to easily write extensible task schedulers using eBPF programs has some nice enhancements merged for Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

Alpine Linux 3.23 Released With APK Tools v3 For Package Management
Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Delivered Significant Improvements In 2025
Last week I provided a look at how Intel’s GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today’s article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series “Alchemist” and B-Series “Battlemage” look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year… Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support cont … ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Cleared To Replace Kernel Console With User-Space KMSCON
A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel’s frame-buffer console “FBCON” with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year’s Long Term Support “LTS” kernel… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions & Configurable Hibernation Threads For Linux 6.19
The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel… ⌘ Read more

LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha 1 Released For Testing
The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February… ⌘ Read more