Intel & AMD Now Collaborating On Software Optimizations With PyTorch/oneDNN
Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 9 Arrow Lake On Star Labs StarFighter Shows Nice Gains On Ubuntu 26.10
For those running a Star Labs StarFighter Ultra or other Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake laptop, the recent Ubuntu 26.10 release is providing some nice performance gains over the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Here is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 26.10 performs with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H over dozens of different benchmarks. ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation Estimates 25% Of New Pull Requests To Be Low-Quality AI Slop
The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop… ⌘ Read more

Linux Coredumps Via Sockets Can Be Much Smaller Now With Sparse Support
Added to the Linux kernel last year was Coredump support via Unix domain sockets as an alternative to the pipe-based Coredumps. With code now merged for Linux 7.4, the core dumps via sockets has the potential of being much smaller thanks to sparse support. In extreme cases they can be 1% of the size without sparse support… ⌘ Read more

BFS Removed With Linux 7.4 As Old UnixWare File-System
Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel – as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8.1 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Following last week’s release of Plasma 6.8, the Plasma 6.8.1 point release is out today with dozens of bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Omarchy 4.5 Expanding To AArch64 World With Snapdragon X & NVIDIA N1X Laptops
The Omarchy Linux distribution to date has been centered on x86_64 support for this Arch Linux distribution. Released today was Omarchy 4.5-RC1 and with this new version there is initial AArch64 support centered around Snapdragon X and NVIDIA N1X laptop support… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Adding New Emulation Function For Some Old CPUs That May Soon Be Phased Out
Linux 7.4 is seeing a new emulation function added for cmpxchg() for compare and exchange. This is being done so that two-byte cmpxchg() can be used in common Linux kernel code that is already natively supported on newer CPU architectures. The pull request notes though that these old CPU architectures might no longer be supported by the Linux kernel moving ahead… ⌘ Read more

17k Lines Of New Rust Kernel Code Heading Into Linux 7.4
Miguel Ojeda sent out his pull request of the new Rust kernel code slated for introduction in Linux 7.4. It’s a big one this round due to updating the Zerocopy vendored library plus updating other Rust crates for the kernel… ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD 8.0 Released With Intel Arc A-Series, Other Hardware Improvements
Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 8.0 today as the 61st release of this BSD operating system… ⌘ Read more

AMD GAIA 0.25 Brings Several Improvements For Local AI Agents On Ryzen AI
AMD GAIA 0.25 is out this week as the latest feature release for this open-source project that began as “Generative AI Is Awesome” and is now going on a tag line of “AMD’s open-source agent factory” in building/using local AI agents on AMD Ryzen AI hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Sunsetting Old EDAC Drivers Due To “AI Generated Fixes Frenzy”
In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Brings More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.4
With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system… ⌘ Read more

Intel Working To Add XMX-Accelerated XeSS To Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)
An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve’s Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds’ AI Code Improved: Huge Performance Wins With Reworked Code
Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results… ⌘ Read more

Linux In 2026 Continues Improving Support For Benefiting Old Atari & Amiga Hardware
The Motorola 68000 “m68k” CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models… ⌘ Read more

Canonical’s Multipass 1.17 Adds Direct Support For Non-Ubuntu Linux Distros
Canonical’s Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.3-gnu Removes More Firmware Blobs
GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday’s Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter Lands Improvement For Reducing GPU Work While In Power Savings Mode
Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue… ⌘ Read more

SpacemiT Announces The V100 Server-Class RISC-V Processor
Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor… ⌘ Read more

SpacemiT Announces The V100 Server-Class RISC-V Processor
Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor… ⌘ Read more

BeamFS Sent Out As Newest File-System Proposal For Linux
There is yet-another-Linux-file-system attempt… An initial request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out this morning for BeamFS. The proposed BeamFS is a Reed-Solomon protected file-system… ⌘ Read more

RADV Promotes VK_EXT_host_image_copy To Enabled By Default For RDNA1 GPUs
Going back to July 2025 the open-source Radeon RADV Vulkan driver has offered experimental host image copy support with the API’s VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. This has been for RDNA1 and newer GPUs while now GFX10 RDNA 1 GPUs have this extension enabled by default while also enabling experimental support for prior GFX9 era GPUs too… ⌘ Read more

TAINT_FORCED_BIND Sent In For Linux 7.4 To Deal With Major Fuzzing Attack
Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing “attack” by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Released With Faster I/O Performance, AMD Zen 6 Preparations & More
The Linux 7.3 kernel is out today for an on-time release of this next stable kernel version… ⌘ Read more

It Turns Out Intel TDX Doesn’t Need So Much Cache Flushing
Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential computing with VMs has assumed the need to perform cache flushing when transitioning memory between KeyIDs used by the total memory encryption (MKTME) for unique AES encryption keys. But it’s turned out to be unneeded and the Linux kernel is working now to reduce the excessive cache flushing… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Features Very Exciting With Radeon HDMI 2.1 By Default, AMD PerfOpt, Apple M4
The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

Omarchy Gets The Web Browser Launching Faster By Avoiding XDG Overhead
Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weeekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements… ⌘ Read more

Servo Gets CSS Grid Working, Threadboost Offering Big Speed-Ups
Servo’s August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser… ⌘ Read more

Synchronous Queues For VirtIO-FS Show Huge Performance Potential
VirtIO-FS as the shared file-system for transferring data between guest VMs to/from a host server is showing some promising performance results with pending code for allowing synchronous queues rather than always being asynchronous… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Can Now Be Installed & Used With Its NTFS Driver
The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too… ⌘ Read more

MeshXFS: AI Adapts XFS Into A Clustered File-System
MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which “no human wrote any of its own code”. Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux Lands Fix for Rare, Varying SMP Boot Hangs Affecting Kernels Since 2024
Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow’s presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s New Local/Cloud AI Chat App Gains More Features
Coming about the past few months has been Moose as a GNOME-aligned AI chat application built around GTK4 and libadwaita. It began as a local AI chat app for the GNOME desktop and grew to support cloud AI services as well. This past week marked the latest feature release for Moose… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Lands Last-Minute Fixes For Samsung 990 PRO & 990 EVO Plus SSDs
Ahead of the Linux 7.3 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow, last minute workarounds were merged for the Samsung 990 PRO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe solid state drives… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 Brings New Hardware Support & Important Security Fix
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 was released on Friday as the latest update to this community-maintained tablet/smartphone Ubuntu Linux platform. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.5 was also released as a maintenance update for the prior series… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.20 Released With CD-ROM Support Change
Wine 11.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux. We are quickly approaching the point where this development work will culminate into the Wine 12.0 stable release in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

17 More Security Vulnerabilities Made Public For X.Org Libraries
Just shy of two weeks since a dozen vulnerabilities were published for the X.Org Server and XWayland, more than one dozen vulnerabilities were made public today affecting multiple X.Org client libraries… ⌘ Read more

GNOME OS Preview Announced In Road Toward A Stable Release
The GNOME OS Linux distribution to date has just been in GNOME OS Nightly form for tracking the latest nightly packages of GNOME in their current development form. GNOME OS Preview was announced today as their trek toward a stable GNOME OS in using the latest GNOME stable releases rather than nightly form… ⌘ Read more

The Best Features Of Linux 7.3: Performance Improvements, Lots From Valve
The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here’s a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version… ⌘ Read more

After 23 Years, Longtime Linux Developer To “Step Back For A While”
Longtime Linux kernel engineer Darrick Wong who stepped down as the XFS file-system maintainer in 2023 is now taking a step back from his other Linux kernel development roles after working on the kernel the past 23 years… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids Performance On Linux Over The Past Year
It’s been nearly one year since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U Granite Rapids server platform for continuing my testing of the flagship Xeon 6980P processors. Curious how the Xeon 6980P 2P performance has evolved on Linux since then, I ran some benchmarks on the newly-released Ubuntu Server 26.10 against the tests carried out last year on Ubuntu 25.10 with the same hardware. ⌘ Read more

AI-Generated Starling Desktop Environment Rolls Out Its Own Office Suite
Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 46 Looking At Moving To RPM v6 Package Format
The RPM v4 packaging format has been used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and its derivatives for more than two decades. With next year’s Fedora 46 release, Fedora Linux may finally transition to the modern RPM v6 packaging format… ⌘ Read more

AI Resurrects AVX-512 Support For Mesa’s LLVMpipe Software Driver
With pending code for Mesa, the LLVMpipe software-based Gallium3D/OpenGL driver could soon become faster on modern systems that support AVX-512. That’s assuming the AI/LLVM-generated code is all in order… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Enable Intel Instruction Timeout For Fending Off TDX VM DoS Attacks
Linux 7.4 is enabling support for a new Intel CPU feature for providing safety against possible denial of service attacks using Trust Domain Extensions “TDX” VMs. The new feature is Intel Instruction Timeout and previously in-development known as Notify VM Exit… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Squeezes Even More Performance Out Of The AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX
With the Linux 7.3 kernel due out for release on Sunday, I’ve continued running more benchmarks recently of this forthcoming kernel version and it looks great. In my Linux 7.3 testing of the Git state it’s been looking great in testing on a variety of hardware shown across multiple systems. Recently I decided to try out this new kernel code on the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX workstation… ⌘ Read more

Intel LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5 Brings Big Improvements
Intel software engineers today released the latest version of LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5, their containerized Docker stack providing a convenient AI/LLM experience atop Intel Arc Graphics hardware and born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative… ⌘ Read more

Mesa’s Zink Now Offers VA-API Video Acceleration Atop Vulkan Video
Merged today to Mesa 26.3 is initial video acceleration support for the generic Zink Gallium3D driver built atop the Vulkan APIs. What this implementation allows is exposing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implemented atop the Vulkan Video interfaces… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Will Not Be Released Next Week
For those eager to run the pristine Fedora 45 media, you will need to wait at least one more week… ⌘ Read more