systemd 260-rc2 Released With More Changes
Last week marked the release of systemd 260-rc1 with a new “mstack” feature, a new “FANCY_NAME” field for os-release, dropping System V service script support, and other changes. Out today is systemd 260-rc2 release with more changes in further working its way toward a stable release for empowering 2026 Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

Linux Preps IBPB-On-Entry Feature For AMD SEV-SNP Guest VMs
Heading toward the Linux 7.0 kernel and marked for back-porting to current stable Linux kernel versions is employing a new SEV-SNP security feature found on AMD Zen 5 processors for enhancing security of guest virtual machines… ⌘ Read more

AMD Engineer Leverages AI To Help Make A Pure-Python AMD GPU User-Space Driver
AMD’s VP of AI Software, Anush Elangovan, has used Claude Code to help craft a pure-Python AMD GPU user-space driver. This Python user-space driver is currently being created to help exercise other ROCm code and for debugging in passing through the ROCm/HIP user-space stack… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Still Figuring Out A Plan For Dealing With California’s Digital Age Assurance Act
The talk this week among open-source projects from Linux distributions to app stores like Flathub is how to deal with California’s latest insanity: the Digital Age Assurance Act. California’s AB 1043 state law is mandating that operating systems – Linux included – collect age information during account setup and exposing that age to eligible apps beginning on 1 January 2027. That leaves much uncertainty for Linux distri … ⌘ Read more

Using KMSCON As The Default VT Console Delayed To Fedora 45
For the past few months have been an ambitious proposal to replace FBCON with the user-space KMSCON as the default VT console starting on Fedora 44. Unfortunately, this and a few other features have now been delayed to the Fedora 45 release six months later… ⌘ Read more

AMD DPTCi Driver Posted For Linux To Better Enhance Ryzen Gaming Handhelds
A request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list to introduce the AMD Dynamic Power and Thermal Configuration Interface “DPTCi” driver. With this driver it would provide better upstream Linux kernel support for tuning the power / performance / thermals of modern Ryzen-powered gaming handheld devices. Though don’t get too excited right away as the driver was assembled in part by AI that is already ca … ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome Moving To A Two-Week Release Cycle
Google announced today that beginning later this year they are moving the Chrome web browser from its four week release cycle down to a two week release cadence… ⌘ Read more

Intel Rendering Toolkit & OpenVINO AI GPU Performance On Intel Panther Lake’s Xe3 B390
Over the past month I have been running a lot of Linux benchmarks on Intel’s new Panther Lake using the Core Ultra X7 358H and its Xe3-based Arc B390 Graphics. The Arc B390 on Linux has been quite interesting with its OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance compared to prior generations of Intel graphics plus the Intel Compute Runtime / OpenCL performance too. In today’s article are more benchmarks of the latter in looking a … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 50.rc Released With Better NVIDIA Performance, SDR-Native & Better HDR
There is two weeks to go until the GNOME 50 stable release while out today is the release candidate of Mutter 50. This Mutter 50.rc release brings some exciting last-minute enhancements to this Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Sovereign Tech Fellowship Opens Up To Community Managers, Technical Writers
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency announced a new and expanded Sovereign Tech Fellowship program that is now open to community managers and technical writers, beyond just FOSS maintainers from the prior round… ⌘ Read more

Apple Announces “Fusion Architecture” With M5 Pro & M5 Max
Apple announced today the new Fusion Architecture with the M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs that also feature a next-generation GPU… ⌘ Read more

Intel Adapting Linux’s LAM In Preparing For ChkTag
Last year AMD and Intel as part of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group announced ChkTag for x86 memory tagging across processors to better fight buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. In preparing for ChkTag with future processors, Intel has begun adapting their Linear Address Masking (LAM) support to more nicely jive with it… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps A Lot Of Xe3 Code For Linux 7.1 Kernel
Intel yesterday sent out their first “drm-xe-next” pull request to DRM-Next of new Xe kernel graphics driver improvements they have readied for their eventual upstreaming into the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD Makes rocprof-trace-decoder Open-Source
AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder “rocprof-trace-decoder”, a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack… ⌘ Read more

ARCTIC Cooling Publishes ARCTIC Fan Controller Driver For Linux
A Linux driver has been published for the ARCTIC Fan Controller to be able to read fan speeds under Linux as well as setting the PWM fan speed for each of the ten fans supported by this controller. Making this driver all the more exciting is that ARCTIC Cooling is directly working on this driver rather than just being a community/third-party creation. Furthermore, ARCTIC Cooling is working on getting this driver to the upstream Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC3 Released In Preparation For The Stable GIMP 3.2
Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Turin 128 Core Comparison: EPYC 9745 “Zen 5C” vs. EPYC 9755 “Zen 5”
The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 “Turin” launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with “full fat” cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows for a 400 Watt TDP compared to the 500 Watt EPYC … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Will Power Off The System By Default If A Fatal ACPI Error Occurs
An important default kernel behavior change worth noting in advance for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is that the system will attempt to power-off automatically if encountering any fatal ACPI errors. Up to now the Linux kernel has just logged ACPI fatal errors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Shows Off Nice Performance Gains For Databases In Small AMD EPYC Servers
Last week with my ongoing testing of the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel I found nice performance improvements for PostgreSQL and other workloads when testing on a 128-core AMD EPYC 9755 “Turin” server. Curious if those wins were due to optimizations focused on better scalability with today’s “big” servers, I also ran some comparison Linux 7.0 benchmarks on the smaller AMD EPYC 4005 class servers too. Some nice wins carried over.. … ⌘ Read more

Framework 16 Gen1 Seeing Coreboot + AMD openSIL Port, Framework 13 AMD Gen1 To Follow
Work is underway by 9elements on porting Coreboot plus AMD openSIL to the first-generation Ryzen 7000 series Framework 16 laptop and is expected to be followed by a similar port to the Framework 13 Gen1 laptop too… ⌘ Read more

New Zlib-rs Delivers More Performance With AVX-512 VNNI Adler32 Implementation
Zlib-rs as the Rust programming language implementation of Zlib from the Trifetca Tech Foundation is out with a shiny new release (actually, releases) today… ⌘ Read more

Armbian 26.02 Released: New Boards, Powered By Linux 6.18 LTS & RISC-V Xfce Desktop
Armbian 26.02 has been released released for this Debian-derived Linux distribution primarily focused on supporting a range of Arm and RISC-V platforms. With Armbian 26.02 there is yet more new boards added while moving to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and also adding a RISC-V Xfce desktop install option… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases llm-scaler-vllm 0.14.0-b8, Talks Up 1.49x Performance With BMG-G31
Intel kicked off the new month by releasing the latest version of LLM Scaler vLLM (llm-scaler-vllm) as their Docker-based solution for running vLLM on Intel Battlemage GPUs for AI inferencing… ⌘ Read more

Steam Survey Results Published For February 2026
Valve just published the latest Steam Survey monthly figures to provide insight on various software and hardware trends across this dominant gaming ecosystem. One of the most interesting measurements is the monthly changes in the size of the Linux gaming marketshare… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series Desktop CPUs For AI-Focused Computing
AMD is using Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week to announce new Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series products, including Ryzen AI PRO 400 desktop processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc2 Released: “So I’m Not Super-Happy With How Big This Is”
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.0 is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Expected To See Nice Improvements For Reducing HRTICK Timer Overhead
A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

ASUS Linux HID Driver Preparing To See Support For Newer Devices
There’s been a recent lull in activity around the open-source Linux driver for ASUS devices with the HID interface used for supporting various features. But developer Denis Benato who has worked on the ASUS Armoury Linux driver and the like is working on advancing the ASUS HID driver for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Development & Intel Panther Lake Proved Most Popular In February
During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing… ⌘ Read more

GNU Hurd On Guix Is Ready With 64-bit Support, SMP Multi-Processor Support “Soon”
After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is “almost there” with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline “The 64-bit Hurd is Here!” GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2026.02 Brings More Wayland Compositor Options, Other Improvements
AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

AMD Prepares Linux For Instruction-Based Sampling Improvements With Zen 6
A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

Verisilicon DC8200 & Coreboot Framebuffer Drivers Sent To DRM-Next For Linux 7.1
The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers… ⌘ Read more

Servo Browser Engine Starts 2026 With Many Notable Improvements
The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.4-RC1 Adds Emacs, Vim & More To DVD Images
For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps Rounded Style UI Enhancement For QtWidgets-Based Apps
KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month… ⌘ Read more

GNOME GitLab Redirecting Some Git Traffic To GitHub For Reducing Costs
If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME’s infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Updated CPU Microcode For Xeon 6 SoCs “Granite Rapids D”
Catching me by surprise today was a new Intel CPU microcode drop “20260227” for Linux users/administrators outside of their typical Patch Tuesday alignment for CPU microcode releases… ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.54 Released As A “Massive” Update To This Wayland Compositor
Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what’s described as a “a massive update with no understatement” to this Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

SilverStone RM4A: 4U Rackmount Server/Workstation Chassis That’s Great For Liquid Cooling
For those looking to build a rackmount-ready server or workstation that can handle up to an SSI-EEB motherboard and capable of fitting a large liquid cooling setup, the RM4A is a new option from SilverStone that can fit up to a 360mm radiator while still fitting an SSI-EEB motherboard and up to eight expansion slots within 4U size constraints. ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver Update Brings Nova Lake S Support, AV1 Improvements
While at the end of February, today Intel released the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release as well as the latest VPL GPU Runtime for their media stack… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Talks Up RISC-V This Year With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
Canonical put out a new blog post today highlighting their RISC-V work over 2025 that included switching to the RVA23 profile baseline for Ubuntu 25.10 and moving forward. Now with RVA23-compatible RISC-V hardware coming to market this year, Canonical is talking up the RISC-V possibilities when paired with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Developers Trying To Reach A Consensus On AI Policy
If all goes well, Mesa developers are hoping to reach a consensus or at least some common ground on an AI policy in March. Mesa is the latest open-source project making considerations around the growing activity around AI coding agents and the like and how to deal with them for this project that is crucial to the Linux desktop and open-source 3D graphics drivers at large… ⌘ Read more

Numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver Fixes For Linux 7.0-rc2
Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Genode OS 26.02 Halfway Done Migrating From GitHub To Codeberg
Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS… ⌘ Read more

LXD 6.7 Released With AMD GPU Passthrough Support
Canonical today released LXD 6.7 as the latest feature update to this system container and virtual machine manager commonly used in Ubuntu Linux environments… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 4 Released
The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes… ⌘ Read more

sudo-rs Breaks Historical Norms With Now Enabling Password Feedback By Default
On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improv … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Updates DirectX Shader Compiler With Improved Vulkan Driver Interoperability
Microsoft has published a new version of its open-source DirectX Shader Compiler. Besides adding Shader Model 6.9 production support, making this DX Compiler update interesting to us are the SPIR-V back-end improvements and enhancing interoperability with Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn
For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 “Penryn” was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support … ⌘ Read more