KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps Rounded Style UI Enhancement For QtWidgets-Based Apps
KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month… ⌘ Read more

GNOME GitLab Redirecting Some Git Traffic To GitHub For Reducing Costs
If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME’s infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Updated CPU Microcode For Xeon 6 SoCs “Granite Rapids D”
Catching me by surprise today was a new Intel CPU microcode drop “20260227” for Linux users/administrators outside of their typical Patch Tuesday alignment for CPU microcode releases… ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.54 Released As A “Massive” Update To This Wayland Compositor
Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what’s described as a “a massive update with no understatement” to this Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

SilverStone RM4A: 4U Rackmount Server/Workstation Chassis That’s Great For Liquid Cooling
For those looking to build a rackmount-ready server or workstation that can handle up to an SSI-EEB motherboard and capable of fitting a large liquid cooling setup, the RM4A is a new option from SilverStone that can fit up to a 360mm radiator while still fitting an SSI-EEB motherboard and up to eight expansion slots within 4U size constraints. ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver Update Brings Nova Lake S Support, AV1 Improvements
While at the end of February, today Intel released the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release as well as the latest VPL GPU Runtime for their media stack… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Talks Up RISC-V This Year With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
Canonical put out a new blog post today highlighting their RISC-V work over 2025 that included switching to the RVA23 profile baseline for Ubuntu 25.10 and moving forward. Now with RVA23-compatible RISC-V hardware coming to market this year, Canonical is talking up the RISC-V possibilities when paired with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Developers Trying To Reach A Consensus On AI Policy
If all goes well, Mesa developers are hoping to reach a consensus or at least some common ground on an AI policy in March. Mesa is the latest open-source project making considerations around the growing activity around AI coding agents and the like and how to deal with them for this project that is crucial to the Linux desktop and open-source 3D graphics drivers at large… ⌘ Read more

Numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver Fixes For Linux 7.0-rc2
Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Genode OS 26.02 Halfway Done Migrating From GitHub To Codeberg
Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS… ⌘ Read more

LXD 6.7 Released With AMD GPU Passthrough Support
Canonical today released LXD 6.7 as the latest feature update to this system container and virtual machine manager commonly used in Ubuntu Linux environments… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 4 Released
The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes… ⌘ Read more

sudo-rs Breaks Historical Norms With Now Enabling Password Feedback By Default
On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improv … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Updates DirectX Shader Compiler With Improved Vulkan Driver Interoperability
Microsoft has published a new version of its open-source DirectX Shader Compiler. Besides adding Shader Model 6.9 production support, making this DX Compiler update interesting to us are the SPIR-V back-end improvements and enhancing interoperability with Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn
For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 “Penryn” was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support … ⌘ Read more

NXP Posts New Linux Accelerator Driver For Their Neutron NPU
The Linux kernel continues seeing more open-source kernel drivers emerge for supporting different AI accelerators / NPUs. The newest open-source driver breaking cover today is from NXP and is for enabling their Neutron neural processing unit… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Looks To Support Extended Attributes On Sockets For New GNOME & systemd Functionality
While the Linux 7.0 feature merge window ended this past weekend and that next kernel release won’t debut as stable until April, there are already features out on the horizon that are being positioned for likely merging into the Linux 7.1 kernel assuming no issues appear or objections raised by Linus Torvalds. One of the features already looking like it will be submitted for Linux 7.1 is supporting extended attri … ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.20 Brings New Hardware Support
Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.20 with continuing to advance firmware updating on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

ZCULL Support For Nouveau + NVK Brings Some Small Performance Gains
Merged yesterday to Mesa 26.1 for the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver “NVK” is ZCULL support for more efficient rendering and bringing some small performance gains to this open-source NVIDIA driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Intel Vulkan Driver Sees Some Minor Optimizations For DX12 Games On Linux
Merged to Mesa 26.1-devel this week is a minor improvement to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver providing some slight enhancements to DirectX 12 games running on Linux by way of Valve’s Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton… ⌘ Read more

GStreamer 1.28.1 Adds Whisper-Based Speech-To-Text, AV1 Stateful V4L2 Decoder Support
Building off January’s GStreamer 1.28 release with many new features, GStreamer 1.28.1 was released today as a point release bringing various fixes and minor additions to this open-source multimedia framework… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 149 Beta Released With Convenient Split-View Mode
Following the Firefox 148 release with the new AI controls, Mozilla promoted Firefox 149 to beta today… ⌘ Read more

b4’s Review TUI With AI Integration Nearing Pre-Alpha Release
The b4 tool used for managing patch workflows to the Linux kernel has been seeing a lot of work recently on b4 review as the text user interface (TUI) to help expedite the patch review process for the Linux kernel. The b4 review TUI has been integrating AI agent code review helpers powered by the likes of Claude Code too for trying to help enhance the efficiency for Linux kernel patch reviews. That b4 review work is quickly approaching a pre-alpha sta … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 LTS / 6.12 LTS / 6.6 LTS Support Periods Extended
Greg Kroah-Hartman today extended the planned maintenance periods of the latest Linux 6.18, Linux 6.12, and Linux 6.6 Long Term Support (LTS) kernel series… ⌘ Read more

LLVM Clang 22 Compiler Performance Largely Unchanged Over Clang 21 On AMD Zen 5
With yesterday’s stable release of the LLVM Clang 22 compiler it didn’t take long for Phoronix readers to begin asking about the performance of this half-year feature update to this prominent open-source C/C++ compiler. What I am seeing so far are no big surprises with the performance largely being similar to Clang 21 across various open-source C/C++ workloads in the testing thus far. This initial round of reference benchmark results be … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0.1 Released With Important Security Fix For OOB Memory Access From WebGPU
Mesa 26.0.1 is now available as the first point release of this quarter’s Mesa 26.0 series. Besides the usual bug fixing, Mesa 26.0.1 is more pressing than usual since it contains a security fix for possible out-of-bounds memory access in WebGPU contexts from web browsers… ⌘ Read more

systemd 260-rc1 Released: New “mstack” Feature, System V Service Scripts No Longer Supported
The first release candidate of systemd 260 is now available for testing. Systemd 260 finally does away with System V service scripts support. Also notable to systemd 260 is the work around the new “mstack” feature… ⌘ Read more

Sub-Scheduler Support Could Be One Of The Most Exciting Features To Come For Linux 7.1
While there are many great Linux 7.0 features with that still-young development cycle, looking ahead to Linux 7.1 this summer there’s an interesting feature on track: cgroup sub-scheduler support for sched_ext… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces The EPYC 8005 “Sorano” Series
The EPYC 9005 series for high-end Zen 5 server processors is a year and a half old and then at the lower-end of the spectrum is the EPYC 4005 series AM5 server processors that launched last year. On the embedded side is also the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. AMD has now filled the void between with the long-awaited EPYC 8005 series… ⌘ Read more

Arm & Linaro Launch New “CoreCollective” Consortium - With Backing From AMD & Others
The embargo just lifted on an interesting new industry consortium… CoreCollective. The CoreCollective consortium is focused on open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem and to a large extent what Linaro has already been doing for the past decade and a half. Interestingly though with CoreCollective for open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem, AMD is now onboard as a founding member along with various other vendors… ⌘ Read more

GTK 4.22 In Good Shape With Better SVG Support
Matthias Clasen shared an update today concerning the state of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within GNOME’s GTK toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Systing 1.0 Released For Rust-Based eBPF-Based Tracing Tool Leveraging AI
Josef Bacik, of Btrfs notoriety before leaving Meta and stepping back from kernel development last year, announced the release of Systing 1.0. Systing is a newer eBPF-tracing tool for Linux complete with AI integration… ⌘ Read more

FreeRDP 3.23 Addresses 11 CVEs, Improved SDL Client
For those making use of the open-source FreeRDP project for your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) needs, FreeRDP 3.23 is out today with 11 CVEs addressed in taking care of various security-related issues that have been uncovered… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Linux Patches For SEV-SNP BTB Isolation
It’s quite a mouthful but today AMD posted Linux kernel patches for preparing SEV-SNP BTB isolation support for further enhancing the security of virtual machines (VMs) for confidential computing… ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.21 Adds Support For Running Games Inside Valve’s Latest Steam Runtime
Lutris 0.5.21 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Linux game manager. With Lutris 0.5.21 comes some new runners for executing games in different environments… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.0.8 Released With More Desktop Refinements
While System76 has been hard at work on a redesigned Thelio desktop chassis design, this hasn’t slowed down their software work. Today they shipped COSMIC Epoch 1.0.8 as the newest work on their open-source, Rust-based desktop environment used by their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution as well as found in other Linux distributions too… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.4 Released With More Improvements For Old Direct3D On Vulkan Under Linux
D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Google Cloud N4 Series Benchmarks: Google Axion vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance
Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s HIP Moves To Using LLVM’s New Offload Driver By Default
A change merged to upstream LLVM Git yesterday for LLVM 23 is moving AMD’s HIP to using the new/modern offload driver by default. This aligns with a prior change for NVIDIA CUDA and already in place for OpenMP offloading too… ⌘ Read more

Intel Formally Ends Four Of Their Go Language Open-Source Projects
Following various Intel open-source projects recently being archived with Intel formally discontinuing their development, another wave of Intel open-source projects were formally sunset on Monday… ⌘ Read more

LLVM/Clang 22 Compiler Officially Released With Many Improvements
LLVM/Clang 22.1 was released overnight as the first stable release of the LLVM 22 series. This is a nice, feature-packaged half-year update to this prominent open-source compiler stack with many great refinements… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6.1 Released With Initial Batch Of Bug Fixes
Following last week’s Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

CGIT 1.3 Web Frontend For Git Released After Six Years
Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard and Linux cryptography fame has taken a break from that to release a new version of CGIT, the lightweight web interface for Git repositories. CGIT 1.3 is the first new release in six years and comes with a lot of changes… ⌘ Read more

Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA
The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Drops Old Linux Kconfig Option To Address Tiresome Kernel Log Spam
Following yesterday’s Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel’s WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts Patches For New DSP Accelerator Linux Driver
The newest driver proposed for the Linux kernel’s accelerator “accel” subsystem is named QDA and is a Qualcomm DSP Accelerator driver… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases OpenVINO 2026 With Improved NPU Handling, Expanded LLM Support
Intel’s open-source OpenVINO AI toolkit is out with its first major release of 2026. With today’s OpenVINO 2026.0 release there is expanded large language model (LLM) support, improved Intel NPU support for Core Ultra systems, and a variety of other enhancements for benefiting Intel’s CPU / NPU / GPU range of products for AI… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls / AI Kill Switches
Firefox 148 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement on Tuesday. Most notable is the new AI controls found with Firefox 148 for those wishing to disable Firefox’s growing AI capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Features Include More Preparations For AMD Zen 6 & Intel Nova Lake
While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds’ versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0. ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD’s Rust Kernel Support Could Be Stable Enough To Try This Year
The FreeBSD Project has published their Q4’2025 status report to outline progress made on their software, infrastructure, and other initiatives over the past quarter. Meanwhile among the work to look forward to this year in FreeBSD is getting their Rust kernel driver support up to scratch… ⌘ Read more