Redesigned Thelio Major Elevates System76’s All-AMD, Open-Source Linux Workstation
A few weeks back we reviewed the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Thread … ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Help Viewer Updated Due To Flatpak Sandbox Escape Vulnerability
GNOME’s help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There’s a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector… ⌘ Read more

Intel IGC 2.34.4 Compiler Brings Many Improvements
The Intel Graphics Compiler “IGC” 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows… ⌘ Read more

F2FS Preparing FSERROR Reporting Support
Introduced in Linux 7.0 was FSERROR as generic I/O error reporting infrastructure. Linux to that point had no standardized mechanism for reporting metadata corruption or file I/O errors to user-space with each file-system doing its own thing. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now the latest Linux file-system preparing for FSERROR usage… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Add Support For Switchtec PCIe Gen6 Switches
The upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel will be adding support for Microchip’s Switchtec PCIe Gen6 switches… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI & Intel NPU Drivers Adding New Power Features With Linux 7.2
Last week’s drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager and accelerator driver feature material destined for Linux 7.2 include some new power management control features both for the AMD Ryzen AI and Intel NPU drivers… ⌘ Read more

Sculpt OS 26.04 Can Finally Be Used To Self-Host For Developing/Building Genode
Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS Framework is out with a new feature release… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0.6 Released To Finish Mitigating the Dirty Frag Vulnerability
Linux 7.0.6 is out as stable this morning to finish mitigating the Dirty Frag vulnerability that was made public last week… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc3 Released With Many Networking Changes
Linus Torvalds just issued the third weekly test candidate of the Linux 7.1 kernel with around a third of the patches being for the networking subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Axboe Hacking On New Linux Patches For 60% Increase To Per-Core I/O Performance
Following a presentation at last week’s Linux storage, file-system, memory management and BPF summit (LSFMM) in Croatia where Linux I/O overhead compared to the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) was presented, Jens Axboe was motivated to pursue some new Linux kernel optimizations for greater per-core I/O performance. This lead IO_uring developer and Linux block maintainer has managed to achieve around a 60% increase to … ⌘ Read more

Debian Release Team: Debian Must Now Ship Reproducible Packages
With half-way through the Debian 14 “Forky” development cycle, the Debian release team is out with an update this weekend and some big news… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Coding Agent Helped Create A New AMD Temperature Driver For Linux
The newest open-source AMD Linux driver on the Linux kernel mailing list that has recently been undergoing review is prom21-xhci that exposes the temperature sensors found on the AMD Promontory 21 chipsets’ xHCI controllers… ⌘ Read more

Kconfirm Is On A Quest To Clean Up The Linux Kernel’s Configuration System
New tooling being worked on for possible mainline Linux kernel inclusion is Kconfirm as a new tool for detecting misusage and efforts stemming from Kconfig, the configuration system for kernel builds… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Releases Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 With Many Security Fixes
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects… ⌘ Read more

Nocturne Is The Latest Music Player For GNOME To Hit v1.0
While since GNOME 48 Decibels is the new audio player of the GNOME desktop, there is no shortage of other GNOME/GTK-aligned music players. Last month was the big Amerbol music player update and there are Lollypop and others. The latest GNOME-aligned music player now hitting the 1.0 milestone is Nocturne… ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.55 Released With Lua-Based Configuration, User-Defined Layouts
Hyprland 0.55 is out today as a big feature update for this Wayland-based compositor… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2605 Brings Performance Improvements, Initial Snapdragon X2 Elite Fixes
FEX 2605 is out this weekend as the newest monthly feature release to this emulator for running Linux x86_64 binaries on ARM64 (AArch64) devices. This is the open-source project sponsored by Valve and planned for use with the upcoming Steam Frame as well as being relevant to Linux gaming on other 64-bit ARM laptops and other devices… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 Improves Handling Of Desktop Apps, Other Fixes
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17 Fixes Support For GB10 Powered Systems
The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA’s NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that’s motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA’s packaged Linux driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux Enables Auto Counter Reload “ACR” For Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids
Merged as part of the perf subsystem fixes overnight is enabling Auto Counter Reload (ACR) functionality for upcoming Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. This ACR enabling for Diamond Rapids “DMR” is happening in time for Linux 7.1-rc3 on Sunday while the work is also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernels… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2 Brings Updated Zstd, Bug Fixes
FreeBSD 15.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in June. Out today is FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2… ⌘ Read more

HP Z6 G5 A Continues Working Out Well For Linux-Friendly, High-End Workstation
In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I’ve been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Releases CUDA-Oxide 0.1 For Experimental Rust-To-CUDA Compiler
A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more

DM-INLINECRYPT Expected For Linux 7.2 To Leverage Inline Encryption
Queued for merging as part of the DeviceMapper changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is the new dm-inlinecrypt target for leveraging inline block device encryption… ⌘ Read more

Qt Creator 20 Beta Expands AI Integration
The Qt Group released the Qt Creator 20 Beta today for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE). In building off the trends of recent releases of Qt Creator and development tools at large, AI integration continues to be a big area of focus… ⌘ Read more

OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Local, Open-Source AI Can Now Easily Interact With Your Gmail
AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account… ⌘ Read more

Linux Erroneously Thinks Intel Bartlett Lake CPUs Run At 7GHz
With Intel’s recently-launched Bartlett Lake P-core-only processors intended for the embedded market, there is a rather surprising oversight under Linux: the Intel P-State driver reporting a 7.0+ GHz clock speed. While many would yearn for a 7GHz CPU, the Core 9 273PE where this issue was discovered in reality can only boost up to 5.7GHz for its maximum turbo frequency… ⌘ Read more

Dirty Frag Vulnerability Made Public Early: Root Privilege On All Distributions
One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this “Dirty Frag” vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated… ⌘ Read more

AMD K5 CPUs The Latest To Be Retired With Linux’s Aging & Stagnate Hardware Support
Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Support Realtek RTL8159 10GbE USB Ethernet
The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek’s out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer… ⌘ Read more

AMD RadeonSI Code Reorganized To Support Multimedia-Only Driver Builds
Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver… ⌘ Read more

Flattened Image Tree 1.0 Specification For Embedded Linux Systems
The Flattened Image Tree “FIT” 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file… ⌘ Read more

AMD Instinct MI350P: PCIe Add-In Card For High Performance Open-Source AI/Compute
While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series. ⌘ Read more

Linux Drivers For The AMD Elan SoCs From The 1990s On Track For Retirement
Merged for the current Linux 7.1 cycle was beginning to phase out the Intel 486 processor support from the mainline kernel moving forward. That initial step with Linux 7.1 was dropping the various Kconfig options to allow compiling Linux kernel builds for targeting various i486 platforms. As part of that, the AMD Elan SoC configuration patches were dropped. The next step is proceeding on the AMD Elan side with beginning to remove the … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 To Provide A Much Better Experience For CPU-Based Rendering
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory “wl_shm” usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland… ⌘ Read more

SR-IOV Support Appears To Be Coming For Next-Gen Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Improvements For Running On Real Hardware
Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.9 Brings Some Hefty Performance Improvements
D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.1 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Vulkan Drivers
Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more… ⌘ Read more

PCIe 8.0 Spec Draft 0.5 Released For 1TB/s Bi-Directional x16 Bandwidth
The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU “Power Module” To Better Align With Windows
Sent out today was a batch of “new stuff” for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance
When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to rea … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Now Supports Device Generated Commands “DGC”
Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel’s open-source Vulkan driver “ANV” for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!.. ⌘ Read more

Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute
Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications… ⌘ Read more

Dell & Lenovo Now Sponsoring The Linux Vendor Firmware Service
Dell and Lenovo have stepped up to become premier sponsors for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that provides for seamless system firmware and device/component firmware updating under Linux with the Fwupd client… ⌘ Read more

VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more

AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware
Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware… ⌘ Read more

Intel Kernel Graphics Driver Brings Panel Replay Tunneling For Linux 7.2
Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer… ⌘ Read more

GCC Git Lands Fix For Missing AVX-512 Optimizations On AMD Zen 6
Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it’s not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged… ⌘ Read more