Linux 7.2 Introducing The Rust Zerocopy Library To Eliminate More “Unsafe” Code
Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Better Communicate File-System Casefolding For Helping Windows NFS & More
Newly-merged code for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel will now expose the case-folding (case insensitive) behavior of local file-systems so that Linux file servers and others can properly report the actual behavior rather than guessing if case-folding is actually used/supported… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal
Following yesterday’s release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Raise LLVM/Clang Compiler Requirement, Add Support For Distributed ThinLTO
Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today’s Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics
Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it’s coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans… ⌘ Read more

Revised AVX-512 xor_gen() Implementation For Linux RAID Yielding More Performance Gains
A few days back I wrote about Google’s Eric Biggers spearheading an AVX-512 implementation of xor_gen() as the Linux kernel function used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5/RAID6. That initial implementation was yielding up to 41% better performance while a new implementation has now been posted for scoring some additional victories… ⌘ Read more

pkgcli As PackageKit’s Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface
Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer… ⌘ Read more

Wine-Staging 11.11 Released With 289 Patches Atop Upstream
Following Friday’s exciting release of Wine 11.11 with Wayland driver improvements, Wine-Staging 11.11 is now available for this experimental/testing derivative that continues carrying nearly 300 patches atop the upstream codebase… ⌘ Read more

Intel Ending Development Of BigDL: An Open-Source AI/LLM Effort Getting Axed
Among Intel’s ongoing reduction in open-source projects they maintain, their BigDL open-source project focused on running large language models across Intel XPUs from Core Ultra laptops to discrete GPUs to cloud / data center hardware all in a low-latency manner, is being ended… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Considering A Lightened GRUB Bootloader For Confidential Compute
Among the changes being considered for the in-development Fedora 45 is a lightened version of the GRUB UEFI bootloader that would focus on being a minimal implementation suitable for confidential computing… ⌘ Read more

Intel Thermald 2.5.12 Released… With Initial Support For ARM
Released on Friday was the newest version of Intel Thermald, the thermal daemon developed by Intel for their processors on Linux for monitoring and helping control temperatures across modern Intel-powered laptops and desktops. Catching me immediately by surprise was Intel Thermald 2.5.12 introducing support for ARM… ⌘ Read more

GCC 17 Merges Function Multi-Versioning For APX & AVX10.2
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel working on function multi-versioning support for APX and AVX10.2 with the GCC compiler. This allows developers to write optimized code paths specifically targeting Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) or Advanced Vector Extensions 10.2 capabilities of future processors while being able to otherwise fall-back to generic or other optimized code paths for other ISA target features. This work is now merged for GCC 17.. … ⌘ Read more

Haiku OS Now Enables AVX-512 Support, Other Hardware Improvements
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Sees Last Minute Fixes Ahead Of Next Week’s Release
Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control - More Than 1,500 Affected Packages
The day started out with Arch Linux’s AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4.3 Released With Many Bug Fixes
OpenZFS 2.4.3 is out today as the newest stable point release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation as well as point releases for the OpenZFS 2.3 and 2.2 series too… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.11 Released With Wayland Improvements
Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.11 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) and allows for running Windows games and applications under Linux as well as other platforms… ⌘ Read more

AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform
AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Features Expected: Apple M3, Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, USB4STREAM, Cache Aware Scheduling
Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Releases Second Developer Preview Of RHEL 10 For RISC-V
Last year when releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, Red Hat announced a RHEL 10.0 developer preview for RISC-V. Since then that RISC-V developer preview hadn’t been updated but now Red Hat has published a new developer preview snapshot based on RHEL 10.2… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Reaffirms Plans For Switching To Dbus-Broker
Among the many new features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 is switching the default D-Bus implementation over to using the high performance Dbus-Broker drop-in replacement… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Success Achieved For Greater Transparency & Security: Running AMD openSIL + Coreboot On EPYC
Ever since AMD announced openSIL in early 2023 for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA and enhance their Coreboot support, I have been eager to try it out. The openSIL code drops to date though have just focused on select reference platforms with only aiming for production status in the Zen 6 timeframe. But thanks to 3mdeb porting openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte server mothe … ⌘ Read more

New NTFS Linux Driver Being Improved For Windows Native Symbolic Links
One of the exciting additions to the Linux 7.1 kernel is the introduction of the new NTFS file-system kernel driver. While in good shape already and proving advantageous over other NTFS open-source driver options, one of the initial limitations on it is around Windows native symbolic link handling but that is now in the process of being resolved… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux’s AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware
The Arch Linux User Repository “AUR” was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised… ⌘ Read more

Wine Wayland Driver Lands Alpha Modifier Support For Opacity Handling
The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces… ⌘ Read more

Qt 6.12 Beta Released With Qt Quick 3D XR Apps Now Able To Run On 2D AR Glasses
The first beta release of the Qt 6.12 toolkit is now available for testing. Qt 6.12 is packing a number of refinements and new features compared to earlier Qt6 releases. For paying Qt commercial customers, Qt 6.12 is also going to be the latest Qt6 Long Term Support (LTS) release… ⌘ Read more

GCC 15.3 Compiler Brings Nearly A Year Worth Of Bug Fixes
For those relying on last year’s stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.2 Preps For AMD GFX1156 For New, Post-Strix-Halo RDNA 3.5 Graphics
Being submitted on the kernel side with the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is initial support for the GFX 11.5.6 graphics IP block along with several other newer IP blocks such as SDMA 6.4, NBIO 7.11.5, IH 6.4, HDP 6.4, MMHUB 3.4.2, SMU 15.0.5, ATHUB 3.4.2, and VPE 2.2. Now in user-space for the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers is the GFX1156 (GFX 11.5.6) support being prepared too… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.55-rc0 Released With Rust Enabled By Default
Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking The Performance Benefits To Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Packages
With Canonical engineers again experimenting with x86_64-v3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux using an “amd64v3” archive for the current Ubuntu 26.10 development, I decided to see how these latest amd64v3 packages comparing to their conventional Ubuntu 26.10 amd64 packages. ⌘ Read more

Khronos Releases glTF 2.1 To Make This 3D Asset Standard Work Well For Large Scenes
It’s crazy realizing that glTF 2.0 is already nine years old for this API-neutral 3D runtime and asset delivery format. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group today extended that with the debut of glTF 2.1 as a backward-compatible revision to the specification… ⌘ Read more

YSERVER: Modern X11 Server Written In Rust With The Help Of Claude Code
Open-source developer Jos Dehaes wrote in to Phoronix today in announcing a new X11 server he has been working on from scratch that has been quietly developed to this point but now ready to announce to the world… The YSERVER… ⌘ Read more

OpenJPH 0.28 Up To 1.9x Faster With New AVX2 Optimizations For High-Throughput JPEG2000
OpenJPH as an open-source implementation of high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (or JPH or HTJ2K) is now significantly faster for both encode and decode operations thanks to new AVX2 optimizations for Intel and AMD processors… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Foundation Announces First Participants Of Fellowship Program
Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life
ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform… ⌘ Read more

Framework Laptop 13 Pro To Begin Shipping In July
Framework Computer began informing those that pre-ordered the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro that it will begin shipping in July rather than their original June target. The setback is coming to address two issues that came up in their testing process that delayed the start of mass production… ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager 2.0 Overhauls Windows & Linux Management For Arc Pro GPUs
Just a week after the release of Intel XPU Manager 1.3.7, Intel today released XPU Manager 2.0 as a major overhaul for this software for monitoring and management of their data center GPUs on Microsoft Windows and Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Enable ESWIN SoC Support By Default For RISC-V Kernel Builds
An important one-liner is set to come for Linux 7.2 to enable ESWIN SoC support by default for RISC-V kernel builds. This change will allow default RISC-V kernel builds in turn to boot on the likes of SiFive’s HiFive Premier P550 developer board… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Lemonade SDK For Local AI Adds NVIDIA CUDA Support
Lemonade, the local AI server solution developed by AMD that is designed to work across their CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, is out with a new version today that also adds NVIDIA CUDA support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc Pro B70 Showing Off Some Performance Wins With Linux 7.1
After recently noticing the Intel Arc B580 performing better on Linux 7.1 for that kernel version soon to be released as stable, I was curious if there were performance gains also to be found with the new flagship Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 workstation graphics card. Here are some benchmarks of the Intel Arc Pro B70 in relevant workloads between Linux 7.0 and the near-final Linux 7.1 kernel. ⌘ Read more

Linux’s CrOS EC Driver To Support Custom Fan Curves - Useful For Framework Laptops
The cros_ec Linux kernel driver is used for supporting the ChromeOS Embedded Controller “EC” used by Chromebooks and various other laptops like Framework Laptops. With patches pending to cros_ec, support for custom fan curves is being introduced… ⌘ Read more

KDE KWin Patches Aiming To Optimize Gaming Latency To Better Compete With Windows
Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE’s KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11… ⌘ Read more

Linux Firmware Repository Preps For AI Coding Agents
The linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the de facto home of all the binary blobs used by the mainline Linux kernel open-source drivers has now introduced AGENTS.md documentation and other preparations for embracing AI coding agents… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU Linux Driver Preps For HDMI 2.1 Compliance Testing
While not as exciting as features like HDMI 2.1 FRL and Display Stream Compression itself, as part of AMD’s efforts to provide a fully open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for AMDGPU, new code is being prepped for their kernel driver to support the HDMI compliance testing efforts… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s KVM Preps For APX Support In VMs
Among the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window are preparations for supporting Advanced Performance Extensions within KVM virtual machines… ⌘ Read more

RADV Driver Now Leveraging RDNA3+ Hardware Feature For Better Instruction Cache Prefetching
Initially introduced in RDNA3 (GFX11) GPUs is INST_PREF_SIZE to specify the number of instruction bytes to prefetch prior to a wavefront beginning execution. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” is now making use of this feature in RDNA3/RDNA4 GPUs for better instruction cache prefetching… ⌘ Read more

Linux Sees Patches For “Critical” Vulnerability Affecting Many Arm CPUs
Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a “critical” security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI… ⌘ Read more

Alpine Linux 3.24 Improves Installer Experience, Adds COSMIC Desktop Option
Alpine Linux, the Linux distribution popular especially for containers / micro-services and embedded devices, is out with its newest feature release… ⌘ Read more

macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 “Golden Gate” beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V CPU Performance Up 8x In Five Years: SiFive HiFive Unmatched To SpacemiT K3
Recently I published some initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has co … ⌘ Read more