Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads… ⌘ Read more

3mdeb Gets More Bits Of AMD openSIL & Coreboot Working On Ryzen AM5 Motherboard
There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone … ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Newest Linux Patches To Accelerate Page Migration For Better Performance
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results… ⌘ Read more

Servo Browser Engine Seeing Progress On FreeBSD Support
Following the recent Servo 0.1 release, the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine… ⌘ Read more

The Intel Lunar Lake CPU Performance Gains On Linux Over The Past Year
Recently I ran benchmarks looking at the Xe2 graphics performance gains on Intel Lunar Lake over the past year with what’s shipped by Ubuntu and comparing against our original tests of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. With those Lunar Lake iGPU benchmarks out of the way, here is a look at how the Lunar Lake CPU performance has evolved on Linux since April 2025. ⌘ Read more

Linux’s sched_ext Sees A Bunch Of Bug Fixes Following Increased AI Code Review
Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren’t just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Zed 1.0 Code Editor Released
Zed, the cross platform, open-source text/code editor written by the developers behind the Atom editor, has finally reached version 1.0… ⌘ Read more

Hygon C86-4G CPU Support Added To The GCC 17 Compiler
Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Developers Target June For Weston 16 Release
Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Devuan Developer Working On Reviving GTK2 With Modern Fixes
A Devuan developer, the Linux distribution that provides a Debian-based operating system without dependence on systemd, is working on “gtk2-ng” for providing modern fixes and improvements to the old GTK2 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

AMD Introducing New Linux Driver For Their Halo Box: For Its RGB LED Light Bar
AMD CEO Lisa Su back at CES 2026 showed off the Ryzen AI Halo box as a mini PC built around their excellent Strix Halo SoC. The Ryzen AI halo box is to serve as an AI development platform to compete with the likes of NVIDIA’s DGX Spark and Dell GB10. This week is the first time I am seeing new Linux driver activity specifically referencing this exciting AMD “Halo Box” system… ⌘ Read more

Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today… ⌘ Read more

IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390
At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance
The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It’s a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Lemonade SDK 10.3 Now 10x Smaller By Getting Rid Of Electron
Lemonade as the open-source local AI server backed by AMD and supported across AMD CPUs / GPUs / NPUs on Windows and Linux is out with a big update… ⌘ Read more

Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16’s Improved Error Messages, Experimental HTML Output
GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year’s open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Released For Living On The Leading-Edge Of Linux Innovations
Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages… ⌘ Read more

Proton 11.0 Beta 2 Updates VKD3D-Proton
Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve’s Steam Play is now out with a second beta release… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s “AI Kill Switch” Is Achieved By Removing Snaps, Initially Opt-In
Following yesterday’s polarizing news of Canonical to begin shipping AI features in Ubuntu Linux over the course of the next year, Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical has now provided some clarifications around their AI plans… ⌘ Read more

AMDXDNA Driver Preps Hardware Scheduler Time Quantum For Ryzen AI Multi-User Fairness
The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is preparing a new feature called hardware scheduler time quantum for ensuring fairness between multiple users/contexts wanting to leverage this neural processing unit for AI workloads… ⌘ Read more

7-Zip 26.01 Now Allows Making Use Of Huge Pages On Linux For Faster Compression
7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives… ⌘ Read more

WayVNC 0.10 Released For Advancing This Leading VNC Server For Wayland
WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat’s Stratis Storage 3.9 Released With Online Encryption/Decryption/Reencryption
It’s crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3 … ⌘ Read more

RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Memory Protection Using AMD Trusted Memory Zone
The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Valve Confirms Steam Controller Release Date, $99 Price
Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Provides Exceptional Value For Linux Users
After looking at the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor earlier this month with its nice performance evolution for Arrow Lake on Linux, today we are looking at the other new Intel desktop CPU offering: the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus that retails for just $219 USD. ⌘ Read more

With Linux 7.1 The Mainline Kernel Now Supports Real-Time “RT” On ARM
The Linux 7.1 mainline kernel will allow building a real-time “PREEMPT_RT” kernel for the ARM architecture with no longer needing any out-of-tree patches… ⌘ Read more

XWayland 24.1.11 Brings Crash Fixes
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Linux Will Begin Landing AI Features Throughout The Next Year
Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has shipped, Canonical is opening up on their next major focus for Ubuntu development: lots of AI features… ⌘ Read more

AMD VPE 2.0 Support Merged For Mesa 26.2
Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Linux Will Begin Landing AI Features Throughout The Next Year
Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has shipped, Canonical is opening up on their next major focus for Ubuntu development: lots of AI features… ⌘ Read more

D7VK v1.8 Continues Improving Legacy Direct3D Atop The Vulkan API
D7VK as what began as an implementation of the Direct3D 7 API on top of the Vulkan API, based off DXVK as part of Steam Play (Proton) for D3D8 through D3D11 support, continues enhancing its legacy D3D API support that over time has stretched now from D3D7 to D3D3… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc1 Released With New NTFS Driver, FRED By Default & Much More
The Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel was just released for concluding the Linux 7.1 merge window. A lot of new features are in tow for this next kernel version that will then be out as stable in mid-June… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Introduces New Default GUI Package Manager, Kyber For NVMe I/O Scheduler
The April 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux based CachyOS is now available with a variety of refinements, new hardware support, and other polishing… ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Tree About To Hit 40 Million Lines, AMD Driver Above 6 Million Lines
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines… ⌘ Read more

The New Linux Kernel AI Bot Uncovering Bugs Is A Local LLM On Framework Desktop + AMD Ryzen AI Max
Earlier this month on Phoronix we were the first to draw attention to a new fuzzing tool / AI bot uncovering kernel bugs by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the “second in command” for Linux kernel development and stable maintainer. Greg has now shared more light on the “gregkh_clanker_t1000” for this tool that has been uncovering more Linux kernel bugs the past few weeks… ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 Support On Asahi Linux Is Approaching The Original Alpha Quality Of The M1
A new progress report from the Asahi Linux project is now published that highlights recent upstreaming work for the Linux 7.0 kernel release as well as the latest additions to the downstream Asahi Linux code. The Asahi Linux project also pushed out their first updated Asahi installer in nearly two years… ⌘ Read more

Legacy NVIDIA xf86-video-nv Driver Sees First Release In Years
The legacy xf86-video-nv driver for user-space mode-setting on old NVIDIA GPUs is out with a rather rare release and the first in over two years with a collection of different bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

LACT 0.9 Released With UI Updates, Voltage-Frequency Curve Editor For NVIDIA
LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend… ⌘ Read more

Niri 26.04 Wayland Compositor Adds Much Sought After Blur Support
Niri 26.04 is out today as the latest feature update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Reportedly Looking At Rebasing Azure Linux On Fedora
Microsoft’s in-house Azure Linux operating system used within Azure and for WSL and other purposes is reportedly pursuing an overhaul where it would be derived from Fedora Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Brings Audio Support For The Line6 POD HD PRO & NexiGo N930W Webcam
Following last week’s Linux 7.1 sound subsystem feature pull that added bus keeper support in working toward better Apple Silicon support along with a variety of other new audio hardware support, a secondary set of sound updates were merged as we approach the end of the Linux 7.1 merge window… ⌘ Read more

New NTFS Driver Sees A Number Of Fixes Ahead Of Linux 7.1-rc1
With the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out tomorrow to cap off the Linux 7.1 merge window, one of the most notable additions this cycle is the introduction of the new NTFS driver that aims to provide better performance and more modern features than the existing NTFS3 in-kernel driver that was originally contributed by Paragon Software… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Releasing Next Week
After being deemed not ready for debuting this week as an early release target, Fedora stakeholders have decided that Fedora 44 will be ready to officially debut next Tuesday… ⌘ Read more

Godot 4.7 Reaches Beta With HDR Output, Ray-Tracing Improvements & Editor Enhancements
Godot 4.7 reached its beta milestone on Friday for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Enables Overlay Planes For Intel Graphics, More Performance/Efficiency
KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It’s a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

Farewell ISDN, Ham Radio & Old Network Drivers: Linus Torvalds Merges 138k L.O.C. Removal
Linus Torvalds did it! He merged the pull request to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters. This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining… ⌘ Read more

GCC Establishes Working Group To Decide On AI/LLM Policy
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.1.2 Brings Support For Firmware Updates On More Hardware
Fwupd 2.1.2 is out today as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that allows for updating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux… ⌘ Read more