SQLite 3.54 Released With Faster Performance, Drops Windows XP Support
SQLite 3.54 released today for this wildly popular embedded SQL database engine used by countless applications and other software. With SQLite 3.54, support for Microsoft Windows XP and older is finally removed… ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Proton 11.0-2e Released To Fix EA App Issues
CodeWeavers working with Valve today released Proton 11.0-2e as their downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 To Include Desktop Images For RISC-V
Ubuntu Linux ISOs for RISC-V 64-bit to date have just been the server/CLI version without any desktop environment pre-seeded. But with next week’s Ubuntu 26.10 release, there will now be Ubuntu 26.10 RISC-V desktop ISOs for both Ubuntu proper and a Xubuntu minimal ISO… ⌘ Read more

Python 3.15 Released With Experimental JIT Compiler Running Faster
Python 3.15 is out today as the newest annual feature release for the Python programming language… ⌘ Read more

AMD PerfOpt Boosting Prior-Gen Ryzen APU Performance For AI
Last week I ran benchmarks of the new AMD PerfOpt feature being introduced in Linux 7.4. In those PerfOpt benchmarks on current-gen AMD Ryzen AI APUs/SoCs the AI performance improved as much as 18~23%. Several Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing how prior-gen AMD Ryzen hardware benefited or not from PerfOpt, so here are some additional benchmarks. ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Sticks To Using GCC 15 By Default
From a performance and enthusiast perspective, what I personally find most disappointing and puzzling with the imminent release of Ubuntu 26.10 comes down to its default compiler version… ⌘ Read more

Faster Zswap With Patches To Batch The Writeback I/O
For those making increased use of Linux’s Zswap as a compressed RAM cache for swap pages amid these times of sky high RAM prices, a new patch series was posted providing some incremental performance gains for Zswap by batching the writeback I/O… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Finally Make Hibernation Possible In Secure Boot / Lockdown Mode
When booting the Linux kernel using UEFI SecureBoot, the kernel is put in the lockdown mode to restrict the ability to modify the running kernel image or leaking data from kernel memory. Kernel lockdown mode can also be manually enabled by the user/administrator. Among the limitations imposed in Linux’s lockdown mode is no hibernation support. But that soon may be relieved with new patches proposed… ⌘ Read more

Boro: NVIDIA’s Open-Source Effort For AI-Assisted Linux Kernel Development
Over the past few months NVIDIA has been developing Boro as a new AI-assisted kernel development CLI written in Rust and focused on local AI for enhancing efficiency for kernel development… ⌘ Read more

AMD Caps Off Linux 7.4 Graphics Driver Development With More HDMI 2.1 Fixes
AMD on Thursday sent out a final pull request of their feature work aiming to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window. This round of “few last odds and ends” is mostly about landing some bug fixes but of which there are a few worth mentioning… ⌘ Read more

HDR Support Coming For Qualcomm MSM Driver To Benefit Snapdragon X Laptops On Linux
For those making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux, one of the features coming to the MSM DRM kernel driver is static HDR support for DisplayPort outputs and eDP panels… ⌘ Read more

New AI Agent Resources Proposed For The Linux Kernel, AI Skills To Help Developers
The latest proposal for the upstream Linux kernel is introducing infrastructure for AI agent resources. Initially these agent resources would be for a skill so AI agents can automatically add a “Fixes: ” tag on relevant patches for noting the first problematic Git commit automatically that a patch fixes… ⌘ Read more

Valve Lands VK_AMD_anti_lag Support For AMD RADV Driver In Mesa 26.3
There is yet another feature to get excited about for this quarter’s Mesa 26.3 release. Months in the making, the Valve-contributed VK_AMD_anti_lag support for the Radeon RADV driver was merged today for benefiting AMD Linux gamers as a nice improvement over the former implementation… ⌘ Read more

EXT4 Deprecates Its Journaled “data=journal” Mode
The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the “data=journal” mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.10 Released With Launcher Now Using GPU Accelerated Rendering
System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Currently Suffering From Sustained DDoS Attack
Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what’s now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Delivers Nice I/O Performance Wins Over Ubuntu 26.04 On AMD EPYC
While Ubuntu 26.10 is not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and thus will see limited enterprise deployments compared to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, for those not after that long-term deployment support and preferring to live more on the leading-edge, Ubuntu 26.10 is delivering some nice performance gains on current 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” hardware. ⌘ Read more

Secretive Rosaic Labs Hires Legendary Linux x86 Developer
The curiosity into secretive semiconductor startup Rosaic Labs builds. Earlier this year it was noted that Intel was providing Rosaic Labs with access to its Atom technology with RTL code. There have also been rather mysterious x86 additions not from Intel or AMD (or Zhaoxin / Hygon) that given the timing may pertain to Rosaic Labs. News today is that Rosaic recently hired a long-time, Linux x86 developer veteran… ⌘ Read more

Nova Driver Continues Progressing With Long-Term Goal For Official NVIDIA Linux Use
NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat’s Danilo Krummrich presented at this week’s LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Patches Updated To Begin Removing The Linux x32 ABI
Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI… ⌘ Read more

Google’s Sashiko AI Has Completed 191k Patch Reviews, Cited On Nearly 500 Kernel CVEs
Sashiko that was built by Google engineers for agentic review of the Linux kernel code changes and powered by Google’s AI models continues proving very valuable to kernel developers. In less than one year since they launched Sashiko for agentic AI code review, their results are quite fascinating… ⌘ Read more

SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs To See More Improvements With Linux 7.4
For those interested in the SpacemiT K3 as one of the few RVA23 RISC-V SoCs readily available so far and in the likes of the K3 Pico-ITX system, more improvements for its upstream kernel support are coming in Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

Google Working To Leverage More Compiler Optimizations Within The Linux Kernel
While Linus Torvalds previously shot down plans for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in the mainline Linux kernel, Google engineers are hoping still to get that out-of-tree functionality upstream. They also would like to see PGO supported for Linux kernel modules rather than just the main Linux kernel image. Additionally, they hope to see limitations overcome around AutoFDO and Propeller optimizations of kernel modules… ⌘ Read more

Steam Beta Now Defaults Non-Steam Windows Binaries To Using Proton
Valve released tonight a new Steam client beta that includes some notable improvements for Linux users… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Issues First Release Of Their LiteBox Sandboxing Library OS
Back in February we featured LiteBox as a new Microsoft open-source project building out a Rust-based sandboxing Library OS. LiteBox leverages Linux virtualization security features and Rust language inherent benefits to provide the ability for sandboxing Linux apps on Linux, Linux programs on Windows, and other security-oriented deployments. Out today is the first tagged release of LiteBox for this open-source library operating system… ⌘ Read more

AI Makes “Open-Source, Clean Room” Implementations Of Adobe Photoshop & Premier In Rust
As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created “open-source, clean-room reimplementation” versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2610 Released With Handling For AVX-VNNI, Disk Cache Improvements
FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve’s Steam Frame headset… ⌘ Read more

Star Labs StarFighter Ultra: A Modern High-End Linux Laptop With Coreboot
When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven’t had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and streamlined firmware updates via LVFS. For tho … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 615.78.08 Linux Driver Adds VK_NV_low_latency2 r3 For Improved VKD3D-Proton
NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes… ⌘ Read more

Kage: Google Experimenting With Linux Driver Isolation Using In-Kernel LFI Sandboxes
Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM’s Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts QPaCE Linux Driver Code For Faster ZRAM On Newest SoCs
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 “Hawi” SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine “QPaCE” hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device… ⌘ Read more

XMFS: Experimental File-System Being Worked On By Huawei For Modern Linux Servers
Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Updates Its WSL2 Linux Kernel With DXGKRNL Improvement, More Features Enabled
Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage… ⌘ Read more

AMD Engineer Talks Up New IBS Memory Profiler Feature Found On Zen 6
One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn’t been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6’s IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Another Dozen Vulnerabilities Found In The X.Org Server & XWayland
With the assistance of AI, another dozen security vulnerabilities affecting both the conventional X.Org Server as well as XWayland were made public this evening… ⌘ Read more

New Patches For Linux’s Zswap Show Major Improvements
Amid multiple ongoing innovations being pursued in the Linux memory management space amid sky high RAM prices, a new patch series posted on Monday aim to enhance the Zswap performance for this compressed RAM cache for swap pages… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Reaffirms Plans For Ubuntu 27.04 To Use ntpd-rs By Default
Back in March Canonical announced switching to ntpd-rs was its next target as part of transitioning more Ubuntu Linux system components to Rust-based implementations. This time synchronization package is available for testing in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release while it aims to be the default for Ubuntu 27.04… ⌘ Read more

Meta Engineer’s Linux Patches For Boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck Gaming Performance
Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Mesa. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon
While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA’s Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera’s strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos. With recently having unfettered remote access to a dual NVIDIA Vera server … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan API Improvements Coming For The AMD Polaris GPUs With Mesa RADV
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 “Polaris” graphics cards… ⌘ Read more

IBM & Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code
IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries… ⌘ Read more

The Importance Of Intel’s LPMD For Linux Gaming Performance & Power Efficiency
Intel’s LPMD project as the Low Power Mode Daemon for modern Intel Core Ultra desktops and laptops is quite important for achieving peak performance and optimal power efficiency. Here are some of Intel’s own findings on the importance of LPMD for Linux gaming.. ⌘ Read more

Blender 6.0 May End Up Removing OpenGL Support
With Blender 5.0 having nice Vulkan API support that’s now grown mature, Blender developers are contemplating on potentially removing OpenGL support in Blender 6.0… ⌘ Read more

Meta Developing Compressed RAM “CRAM” For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap
With today’s memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM “CRAM” for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM… ⌘ Read more

Windows Subsystem For Linux Can Now Run On Very Large Servers, Experimental Sparse VHD
Microsoft yesterday released WSL 3.0.2 as their latest WSL update since last week’s WSL3 release with “WSLC” for promoting Linux containers on Windows to general availability. Some notable changes in WSL 3.0.2 include automatic virtual NUMA support and experimental support for sparse VHD storage… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compiler Engineer Shares Latest Project Gains For APX
Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler… ⌘ Read more

YSERVER 1.7 Rust X11 Server Narrows Memory Usage Difference With X.Org Server
YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements… ⌘ Read more

TrueNAS 27 RC.1 Released: LInux 6.18 LTS + OpenZFS 2.4
TrueNAS 27 RC.1 released today in working toward the next major release of this Linux-based storage/NAS operating system from iXsystems… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 10.1 Released With Many Improvements
Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Land New BTB CTX Isolation Feature Of AMD Zen 6
The Linux 7.4 kernel is set to introduce support for a new AMD Zen 6 security feature… ⌘ Read more