GNOME Stakeholders Discussing RFC Process For Solving Major Technical Changes
GNOME has been working to establish a formal request for comments (RFC) process for solving major technical questions and changes moving forward. A drafted RFC is now under discussion by GNOME stakeholders for moving this process forward… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Lands Windows-Like Auto-Scrolling, Lower vRAM Usage For Breeze Theme
It’s been an exciting start to the month of September for KDE Plasma developers with continuing to land last minute improvements for Plasma 6.8 ahead of its official release in mid-October… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.17 Released With Initial Support For Display Mode Emulation
Wine 11.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly feature development release for this software enabling Windows games and apps to run on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Linux 2027 Shows Off Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC In The AWS Cloud
Yesterday AWS announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 as their successor to the current Amazon Linux 2023 in-house distribution. With all the software upgrades and improvements like building packages now with link-time optimizations (LTO), enforcing x86-64-v3 builds, and other changes, I was eager to run some performance benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 vs. Amazon Linux 2027 in the EC2 cloud. ⌘ Read more

NetworkManager Works To Enforce AI Policy By Tricking AI Agents To Add A Canary
Last month the NetworkManager project adopted an AI coding policy where authors are responsible for 100% of the code they submit and must be able to explain it all. In an attempt to catch AI coding agents that may be trying to bypass their policy, they have added an interesting canary to the project to try to catch such AI-generated patches so they can then be automatically dealt with… ⌘ Read more

PoCL 7.2 Released With Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On RISC-V & x86_64 CPUs
The Portable Computing Language project is out today with PoCL 7.2 as this portable, MIT-licensed OpenCL implementation that runs across various CPU architectures as well as targeting other GPUs/hardware with LLVM back-ends. Notable with PoCL 7.2 is bringing official OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 and RISC-V processors… ⌘ Read more

XDC 2026 Will Feature Many Interesting Talks: Vulkan Gallium, OpenCL On CUDA & More
The annual X.Org Developer’s Conference “XDC 2026” is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Improve Apple Silicon Audio Support & Its “Impossible” Power Management
The Apple Silicon audio driver code within the Linux kernel is preparing to make use of the recent shared GPIO infrastructure for allowing multiple drivers / kernel components to nicely share the same GPIO lines. This should help clean things up in the mainline kernel for the Apple Silicon audio support and with a cleaner architecture than the current downstream Asahi Linux code… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 47 Considering Use Of Thin LTO Compiler Optimizations
A change proposal filed for what would be part of Fedora Linux 47 is on making use of Thin LTO rather than Fat LTO for link-time optimizations. With Thin LTO being more memory efficient and faster build speeds, the hope is that more Fedora packages could also use Thin LTO for packages where no link-time optimizations are currently leveraged… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.3 Preps For Intel Nova Lake P’s New 64-bit GPU Mode
Merged overnight for Mesa 26.3 are changes to Intel’s graphics compiler code for supporting a new 64-bit shader addressing mode. It turns out with upcoming Nova Lake P graphics will be a big fundamental change… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.362 Released With New Extension Developed By Valve
Vulkan 1.4.362 is out this morning as the newest routine spec update. Making Vulkan 1.4.362 more notable beyond a couple bug fixes are two new Vulkan API extensions, both of which were worked on by Valve’s Linux graphics team and one of them being a Valve vendor extension… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 3 Monthly ISOs Released For Testing
Released tonight is Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” Snapshot 3 as the newest monthly ISO candidates for Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Linux 2027 Now in Preview: Powered By Linux 7.1, x86-64-v3 & Built With LTO
AWS announced today the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027. Given the time since Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2027 comes with a heavy arsenal of software updates as well as many performance optimizations and other tuning for better running workloads geared for the AWS cloud… ⌘ Read more

Intel Improving Its Content Match Refresh Rate “CMRR” Feature With Linux 7.4
Introduced with the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics hardware was support for Content Match Refresh Rate (CMRR) as an improvement over typical Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync to more precisely match the video or content frame rates. Particularly for video playback it aims for no stuttering or frame drops. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be better support for CMRR with the Intel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

Mir 2.29 Released With Additional Wayland Protocols
For those using Canonical’s Mir compositor for building Wayland-based shells, Mir 2.29 is now available with various improvements and new Wayland protocol coverage… ⌘ Read more

LLVM Developers Begin Debate Over AGENTS.md For Helping AI Agents
LLVM developers have begun a discussion on whether the project should host an AGENTS.md file (and CLAUDE.md) in their Git repository for helping to guide AI agents… ⌘ Read more

21st Revision Of Patches For Getting Linux To Shutdown Devices Asynchronously
Being worked on for over two years has been the latest attempt for async device shutdown support for Linux for getting Linux systems – especially servers with lots of hardware like many NVMe drives – to shutdown faster. That work is now up to its 21st version as it works toward hopefully making it to the mainline kernel in the not too distant future… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Acquiring Hugging Face For $12.93 Billion
Following rumors in recent days of NVIDIA courting Hugging Face, it’s now been officially announced that NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Now Disabling RandStruct Security Feature By Default If Rust Support Present
While Rust programming language use may help with memory safety and other security advantages, the default Linux kernel configuration is now losing randomization of sensitive kernel structures if Rust support is present… ⌘ Read more

Audacity 4.0 Audio Editor Released With Qt6 Based UI
The longtime Audacity open-source audio editor had been using wxWidgets for years but with today’s Audacity 4.0 release they have transitioned to using the Qt6 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

GCC 17 Now Supports Using -mtune=native -mcpu=native On RISC-V
As a follow up to last month’s article about patches being posted for enabling “-mcpu=native -mtune=native” support for RISC-V with the GCC compiler, that code is now merged for what will become the GCC 17.1 release in the early months of 2027… ⌘ Read more

InputPlumber 0.79 Adds Support For More Handhelds
InputPlumber is the open-source router and remapping daemon for Linux that is particularly popular among Linux gaming handhelds for combining multiple input devices and translating actions into various virtual device formats. InputPlumber supports emulating mouse, keyboard, ad gamepad inputs. With the new InputPlumber 0.79 release there is expanded hardware support and bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Lemonade 11.9 Local AI Server Released With Super Exciting AMD ROCm HRX Backend
Lemonade 11.9 is out today as the newest feature release to this AMD-backed, open-source local AI server solution across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Lemonade has long been focused on offering “100% free and private” AI use with local hardware whether it be GPUs, CPUs, or NPUs. With Lemonade 11.9’s release today it’s very interesting for having experimental ROCm HRX back-end support with Llama.cpp. HRX is the new exciting thing to watch o … ⌘ Read more

Fedora 46 Proposal Wants To Provide Official Support For Crystal Programming Language
A new change proposal that’s been filed for evaluation with next year’s Fedora 46 release is to provide official, native support for the Crystal programming language… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA-Started Open Secure AI Alliance Moves To The Linux Foundation
Earlier this year NVIDIA led an effort with more than two dozen other companies to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance with a focus on keeping open-source AI models secure. The Open Secure AI Alliance today is transitioning from being stewarded by NVIDIA to becoming a Linux Foundation project… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Lands Dwell Clicker Support To Improve Accessibility On Wayland
In preparations for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in abandoning the X11 session, another feature gap compared to X11 has been addressed… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.2.2 Enables Intel Nova Lake Graphics By Default
Mesa 26.2.2 is out today as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Early Benchmarks Of AMD EPYC On Linux 7.3 Show Some Performance Gains On The Horizon
With Linux 7.3-rc1 out this week and marking the end of the merge window, it’s onto a lot of Linux 7.3 performance testing at Phoronix and looking at all the new features of Linux 7.3. In today’s article is a first look at the AMD EPYC Turin server performance on Linux 7.3-rc1 compared to Linux 7.2 stable with a few nice performance improvements to show. ⌘ Read more

CERN Transitioning To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, besides being well known for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known among longtime Linux users as a RHEL/CentOS shop. CERN formally even co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative with other educational/research institutions in the past. So to much surprise now, CERN is transitioning to Debian Linux… ⌘ Read more

AVX-512 xor_gen For Linux Updated & Looking Real Good For RAID Arrays
Being worked on the past few months for the Linux kernel has been an AVX-512 optimized version of xor_gen() that is used for generating and validating parity blocks such as with Linux’s software RAID 5 and RAID 6 arrays. The latest iteration of AVX-512 xor_gen() was posted today and shows some impressive results on AMD Zen 5 hardware… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 51.rc Adds Cross-GPU Buffer Scan-Out Support, Other Last Minute Work
The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter in preparing for the formal “GNOME 51.rc” release in the coming days… ⌘ Read more

Greg KH Forewarns Of “Rough” Linux 7.3 Kernel Cycle Due To Continued AI Churn
While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux’s second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it’s likely to be another “rough” kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches… ⌘ Read more

GCC 17 Compiler Merges Initial Support For Intel/AMD AI Compute Extensions “ACE”
Landing today in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial support for the AI Compute Extensions (ACEv1) as the initial work out of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group between Intel and AMD for a common matrix acceleration architecture for helping AI/ML workloads with future CPUs… ⌘ Read more

FreeDesktop SDK 26.08 Released With Snap Support Dropped, Bootstrap Changes
The newest FreeDesktop SDK is now available for this collection of components used for Flatpak runtimes as well as for building out of containers and other software stacks… ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates LLM-Scaler-vLLM Build For vLLM 0.26 & Other Improvements
For those looking for the smoothest experience to get vLLM up and running on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware, out today is the newest beta of Intel’s LLM-Scaler-vLLM project for a Docker-based setup of vLLM ready to go on Intel GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Dips Below 4% For August
Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2026. After jumping above 4% in July, in August it fell back below that threshold. Meanwhile CachyOS continues gaining ground among Linux gamers… ⌘ Read more

WinBtrfs 1.10 Released With Two Years Worth Of Improvements For Btrfs On Windows
WinBtrfs is a driver for Microsoft Windows to support reading and writing to Btrfs file-systems. WinBtrfs works with Windows XP and newer. It hadn’t seen a new release in over two years but a big feature release is now available with a combination of new features and bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU Linux Driver’s Latest Patches For HDMI Passive VRR Support
As part of AMD’s ongoing effort for getting HDMI 2.1 support squared away in their upstream AMDGPU kernel graphics driver, sent out today were the latest patches around passive variable refresh rate “Passive VRR” for HDMI connections… ⌘ Read more

Linux Gets A Reverse-Engineered Driver For ASUS ROG NVMe Enclosure RGB Lighting
If you are into RGB lighting, you can even find NVMe external enclosures these days with RGB LEDs like the ASUS ROG Strix Arion. Now thanks to reverse engineering there is a Linux driver for allowing the RGB lighting controls for the ASUS ROG Strix Arion NVMe enclosure… ⌘ Read more

Lekuo SouthBridge Max Puts An AMD B650 Chipset Onto A PCIe Card For More I/O
For those looking at expanding the SATA, NVMe, and/or the USB/USB-C capabilities of your system, the Lekuo SouthBridge Max PB65MX3 is an interesting creation that I have been trying out. The Lekuo SouthBridge Max puts an AMD B650 chipset onto a low-profile PCIe add-in card to provide all of the above without any bifurcation required. Given that it’s an AMD B650 chipset, it also “just works” nicely under Linux. ⌘ Read more

systemd 262-rc1 Released With Live Update Orchestrator Integration & More
Debuting today is systemd 262-rc1 as the first test release of this next major update to this Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Linux Changes For CPPC On Zen 6 Clients - Hard-Coded Default Puts Low-Power Core At 0.47x
Following yesterday’s Linux kernel patches for tuning ACPI EPP for Ryzen Zen 6 client processors, another patch series made it out on the mailing list with adjustments for ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) with upcoming Zen 6 client processors… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver Introducing Cold Reset Recovery For Linux 7.4, Panther Lake IBC v3
While the Linux 7.3 merge window just wrapped up this weekend, on Monday Intel already sent out their first feature pull request of new Xe kernel graphics driver material that is destined for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel AI Flood, Linux 7.2 Release & Other August Highlights
It was a very busy month of August with the Linux kernel developers continue to be flooded with AI/LLM-generated patches and bug reports. Plus there was the general resolution on AI usage within the Debian project and other open-source projects now evolving in the AI era. With the Linux 7.2 stable release and Linux 7.3 merge window, the past month was all the more eventful… ⌘ Read more

EDAC Changes Merged For Linux 7.3 After Being Forgotten About During The Merge Window
While the Linux 7.3 merge window officially closed on Sunday with the Linux 7.3-rc1 release, the Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” subsystem changes were mistakenly forgotten about during the two week window. The pull request ended up being sent out on Monday evening and the late feature changes were already merged to Git… ⌘ Read more

KDE Linux Now Providing Automatic Btrfs Snapshots For All User Files
With the end of the month comes a new monthly status report from the KDE Linux project as their in-house distribution project… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Posts Linux Scheduler Patches To Further Boost SMT Performance On NVIDIA Vera
Hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today is a new kernel scheduler patch series to enable preferred SMT siblings for NVIDIA Vera with its Olympus cores… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.11 Released With Some Nifty Debug Helper Messages
Rust Coreutils 0.11 was just released as this alternative to the GNU Coreutils. Besides the long-running task of catching up the GNU Coreutils compatibility with the GNU test suite and never-ending work on optimizing the performance, Rust Coreutils 0.11 is quite a nice release for its improved error messages… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 155 Available With Faster Page Loads Via Happy Eyeballs v3, QUIC v2 For HTTP/3
The Mozilla Firefox 155 release binaries are now available ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday for this latest web browser release. With Firefox 155 it’s heavier on new features than we have seen in some time… ⌘ Read more

AMD Updates UALink Patches To Get The Linux Kernel Ready For UALoE On Helios
Earlier this month AMD posted a massive set of patches for bringing up UALink support for the mainline Linux kernel and wiring it up into the AMDGPU kernel driver. In closing out the month of August, they have updated this big set of Ultra Accelerator Link patches… ⌘ Read more