The Linux Kernel Looks To “Bite The Bullet” In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Two patches queued into the Linux kernel’s build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this c … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Looks To “Bite The Bullet” In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Two patches queued into the Linux kernel’s build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the ⌘ Read more

Lenovo IdeaPad Linux Driver Adding Support For Rapid Charge Mode
Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 “for-next” Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the “Rapid Charge” USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Should Better Deal With Corrupt Minix File-Systems
For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.19
AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window… ⌘ Read more

Cloud Hypervisor 49 Released With AArch64 + Microsoft Hyper-V Improvements
For what began as an Intel open-source project focused on delivering a modern VMM for cloud workloads and written in Rust is seeing increasingly more exposure on AArch64 and Microsoft Windows platforms. In fact, Intel remains largely inactive now with Cloud Hypervisor after their lead maintainer left the company last year and has now been one year since seeing any significant contributions from Intel to this open-source project… ⌘ Read more

SquashFS Tools 4.7.3 Brings Optimizations For As Much As “1500 Times” Speed Improvement
For those dealing with SquashFS compressed, read-only file-systems, a new version of the user-space tools were released this week… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18-rc5 To Cut Down Performance Regression Observed On IBM POWER CPUs
Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc5 kernel due out on Sunday is a partial fix for a performance regression observed on IBM POWER hardware… ⌘ Read more

Ryzen AI Software 1.6.1 Advertises Linux Support
Ryzen AI Software as AMD’s collection of tools and libraries for AI inferencing on AMD Ryzen AI class PCs has Linux support with its newest point release. Though this “early access” Linux support is restricted to registered AMD customers… ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends Out Initial GNU Binutils Patch For AMD Zen 6 - Confirms New AVX-512 Features
AMD has begun their open-source compiler enablement upstreaming effort for Zen 6 processors! The first “Znver6” patch was sent out on Friday in preparing for new instructions to be found with these next-generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors… ⌘ Read more

oneDNN 3.10 Continues Preparing For Future Intel CPUs With AVX 10.2
Released one Friday was the newest version of oneDNN as this library started off by Intel and now officially under the UXL Foundation umbrella for serving as building blocks for deep learning software… ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Patches & Device Tree Additions For PCIe M.2 Connectors
On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that “just work” without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files… ⌘ Read more

Qt Merges Wayland Color Management “color-management-v1”
The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland’s color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 Released With Build Fixes For Google & Azure Clouds
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted… ⌘ Read more

GTK Adds “Reduced Motion” Accessibility Option To Follow macOS, Windows & Others
In addition to GNOME’s Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a “reduced motion” accessibility option… ⌘ Read more

NILFS2 File-System Seeing Renewed Interest With Additional Maintainer
It’s been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3-rc4 Brings Fix For Many Steam Play Games To Properly Run On Intel Linux Driver
Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month… ⌘ Read more

IncusOS Announced As Immutable Linux OS With ZFS For Running Containers
It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical’s LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development c … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development c … ⌘ Read more

Linux To Gain ML-DSA/Dilithium Post-Quantum Cryptography For Module Signing
New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Contributing “RAMDAX” Driver For Upcoming Linux 6.19 Kernel
A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Lands Fixes For HDR With Vulkan Drivers
Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Server 25.10 Performance On AMD EPYC With “amd64v3” Optimized Packages
Last week Canonical announced Ubuntu “architecture variants” with initially supporting “amd64v3” optimized packages built using the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. For this initial debut in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive an initial subset of packages are built using that higher feature level that can assume AVX/AVX2 and other more recent CPU ISA additions. More details on that and some initial desktop benchmarks can be found w … ⌘ Read more

Archinstall 3.0.13 Adds WiFi Connection Menu To Arch Linux Installer
Just days after the Archinstall 3.0.12 release for this text-based Arch Linux installer, Archinstall 3.0.13 is now available to deliver a new feature. That new feature is a text-based interface for being able to connect to a WiFi network within Archinstall… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43
With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop. ⌘ Read more

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Finally Exposes Pipeline Binary “VK_KHR_pipeline_binary”
Introduced back in August of 2024 with Vulkan 1.3.294 was VK_KHR_pipeline_binary as a pipeline binary extension to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves. Finally today for Mesa 26.0-devel the Intel “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver has enabled this extension… ⌘ Read more

CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Preview For Linux ARM64
CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra… ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Makes Open-Source The Rust Code To Tokio-Quiche
Cloudflare announced today they have open-sourced the code to Tokio-Quiche as their async QUIC library that combines their previously-open-sourced Quiche QUIC implementation with Rust’s Tokio async runtime… ⌘ Read more

RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics
Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has “slightly better” viewperf performance w … ⌘ Read more

FreeDesktop.org Adopts The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
Adding to the array of software projects and specifications under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard “FHS” has been adopted by these desktop-focused open-source developers… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Lands Electronic Privacy Screen Hotkey Handling For Some Dell Laptops
Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Preparing For Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support With Open-Source Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the open-source and upstream Nova driver for the Linux kernel. This modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA driver is still taking shape as an alternative to NVIDIA’s official downstream open-source driver and the aging and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Out on the horizon for Nova is Hopper and Blackwell GPU support… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64
FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple’s Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64… ⌘ Read more

More Intel Crescent Island Enablement Prepped For Linux 6.19
Following Intel’s disclosure less than one month ago of Crescent Island as a upcoming Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM focused on enterprise-level AI inferencing, Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been quick to begin plumbing the Xe kernel graphics driver for this next-generation graphics card… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 6 Performance Feature Benchmarks: Latency Optimized Mode
A new feature of Intel Xeon 6 “Birch Stream” platforms is the “Latency Optimized Mode” performance setting. The Intel Latency Optimized Mode will keep the uncore clock frequencies higher for more consistent performance but at the cost of increased power use. For those wondering about the performance and power impact, here are some comparison benchmarks of engaging this Latency Optimized Mode with Intel Xeon 6980P “Granite Rapids” server pro … ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Updated For Snapdragon X Elite Powered TUXEDO Elite 14 Gen1 Laptop
In mid-2024, Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers began teasing a Snapdragon X Elite powered Linux laptop with hopes of having it available by Christmas 2024. As we approach Christmas 2025, there still are no immediate signs of this new ARM-based TUXEDO laptop soon shipping but there are signs of life still with new Linux kernel patches posted for enabling this Snapdragon X Elite laptop… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.17 Released With More Hardware Support & Features
Days after the Linux Vendor Firmware Service celebrated 135 million firmware downloads, a new version of the Fwupd utility is now available for firmware updating systems and peripherals under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 To Support Additional Arm Mali & Vivante Graphics Hardware
Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week’s update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator “accel” drivers… ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.3 Released With Improved Wayland Support
LXQt 2.3 is out today as the newest release of this lightwight, Qt-based desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

3mdeb Achieves Good Progress Porting Coreboot+OpenSIL To AMD Turin Motherboard
Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD’s new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL… ⌘ Read more

systemd-appd Is A New Component Being Planned By Flatpak Developers
Given this week’s release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd… ⌘ Read more

AMD Contributes BFloat16 Support To LLVM’s SPIR-V Target
AMD software engineers continue making interesting contributions to the LLVM compiler stack around SPIR-V as the IR used by Vulkan and other Khronos APIs… ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking The AMD EPYC 9V64H: Azure HBv5’s Custom AMD CPU With HBM3
Nearly one year ago Microsoft announced the HBv5 virtual machines powered by a custom-designed AMD 4th Gen EPYC processor with high bandwidth memory (HBM3). Finally today the Azure HBv5 series is reaching general availability for those with memory-intensive HPC applications and other workloads. Microsoft kindly provided Phoronix with HBv5 access in advance to begin testing these new VMs with the AMD EPYC 9V64H CPUs featuring HBM memory, so … ⌘ Read more

Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund Announced For Long-Term Support To Rust Developers
The Rust Foundation announced today the creation of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund as a new means of providing consistent, transparent, and long-term support for developers that make the Rust programming language possible… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intel’s Adaptive Sharpness Filter “CASF” With Lunar Lake
Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality … ⌘ Read more

Open Container Initiative “OCI” Runtime Spec v1.3 Released With FreeBSD Support
The Open Container Initiative unveiled today the OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 update for this standard around operating system process and application containers. This runtime specification continues to evolve for outlining the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of a container. Notable with the v1.3 revision is introducing official FreeBSD support… ⌘ Read more

MIPS64EL & ARMEL Architectures Dropped In Debian Unstable/Experimental
The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world… ⌘ Read more