Intel Posts Fourth Version Of Cache Aware Scheduling For Linux
Just over one year ago Intel Linux engineers began working on cache-aware load balancing for Linux or more commonly referred to as Cache Aware Scheduling. The functionality for helping modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors especially hasn’t yet been upstreamed to the Linux kernel but yesterday the fourth version of these patches were posted for review… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% In March
Valve’s March 2026 Steam Survey shows Linux gaming usage jumping to a record 5.33% share – more than double macOS’s 2.35%. Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software
With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here’s a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryz … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software
With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here’s a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryz … ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
If Valve’s latest Steam Survey monthly figures are accurate, Steam on Linux enjoyed a very wild month of March. Steam on Linux is now above the 5% threshold and more than twice the size of the Steam on macOS marketshare… ⌘ Read more

AMD GPU Driver Sees DC Idle Manager & Multi-SDMA Engine Optimization For Linux 7.1
With Linux 7.0-rc6 having released on Sunday, we are hitting the point of the cut-off of new feature material being allowed into the Direct Rendering Manager’s DRM-Next tree of queuing new graphics/display/accelerator feature code ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. As presumably the last AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature pull ahead of Linux 7.1, today’s pull request from AMD contains some noteworthy final enhancements… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Provides Preview Driver With DRM Color Pipeline API Support
Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions… ⌘ Read more

April 1 Linux Patches: Verified Birth Date For File Creation, Block Emacs From Running
What’s more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools’ Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual… ⌘ Read more

KDE Linux Hardening Their OS Against Updates Making Systems Unbootable
KDE Linux as the in-house, leading-edge Linux distribution for showcasing the latest KDE Plasma innovations has promoted itself as being an atomically updated Linux distribution. But these atomic updates didn’t quite work out as planned recently with some users finding their system(s) unbootable. But improvements are being made now for better robustness moving forward… ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel’s Minimum Rust Version Supported Prepares For Rust 1.85 Baseline
The Rust-For-Linux crew is preparing to raise the minimum supported Rust version for building the Linux kernel and and similarly also bumping the minimum supported version of bindgen, the tool for generating Rust FFI bindings for C code in the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon Elite Laptop Sees New EC Linux Driver To Improve Support
Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop. This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Allow Building Linux IPv6-Only, Option To Deprecate “Legacy” IPv4
Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to “deprecate legacy IP” support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing “legacy” IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build… ⌘ Read more

Gaim 3 Is In Development For Restoring The Original Gaim Instant Messaging App In GTK4
Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the lates … ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2026.03 Brings GNOME 50, Other Wayland Compositor Updates
AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month’s update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements… ⌘ Read more

New Rust-Based BUS1 In-Kernel IPC In Development For The Linux Kernel
After KDBUS failed to make it into the mainline Linux kernel more than one decade ago as an in-kernel version of D-Bus, BUS1 was proposed as a clean sheet design for in-kernel, capability-based inter-process communication (IPC). BUS1 didn’t gain enough traction to make it to the mainline kernel and then many of the same developers devised Dbus-Broker as a more performant D-Bus user-space implementation. Well, as a big surprise now, a new version of BUS1 … ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Rust Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.1, NVIDIA Nova Driver Additions
Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable… ⌘ Read more

Intel Panther Lake & Linux AI/LLM Debates Dominated Q1 For Linux Users
With Q1 wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter that excited Linux readers the most. During this quarter on Phoronix were 881 original news articles thus far and 61 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles… ⌘ Read more

Meta Optimizing /proc/interrupts Reading As It’s Too Costly At Scale: 29% Speedup
One of the latest Linux kernel optimizations being worked on by Meta’s large kernel engineering team is making reading of /proc/interrupts less costly. Due to monitoring of their servers frequently reading /proc/interrupts, it’s actually become a noticeable cost over time with their massive fleet of systems… ⌘ Read more

The Integrated ROCm Story For Ubuntu 26.04 Still Playing Out
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is just three weeks out for release with many great features in tow from the GNOME 50 desktop to the very leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel and many other package updates. One feature that many had been looking forward to is Canonical’s plans to ship AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu archive for a much cleaner experience for those wanting to make use of AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack. As a common question in recent weeks from readers, it … ⌘ Read more

The Next LVFS Actions Begin Tomorrow To Encourage More Hardware Vendors To Step Up
Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow … ⌘ Read more

MediaTek MT7927 “Filogic 380” WiFi Support Coming Together For Linux
In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Archinstall 4.0 Released For Improved Arch Linux Installer Using Textual UI
Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library… ⌘ Read more

AMD Improves GPU Support Under WSL With Production Open-Source ROCDXG
For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD’s ROCDXG “librocdxg” library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL… ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends Out Linux Patches For Their Next-Gen AIE4 NPU
Hitting the mailing list today are patches providing initial support for AMD’s next-gen NPU “AIE4” platform, complete with SR-IOV support… ⌘ Read more

Intel FRED Appears Ready To Enable By Default With Linux 7.1
Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to en … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu MATE Leader Stepping Down, Seeking New Contributors
After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he’s looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He’s hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver For Linux 7.1 Preps Workaround For Dell XPS Panther Lake Laptop
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week’s drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling… ⌘ Read more

AMD Revives Linux Kernel Patches For Hardware-Accelerated vIOMMU
Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc6 Released With The Fixes Still Coming In Heavy
Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Linux Ham Radio KISS Serial Driver Being Modernized In 2026
Here’s something that wasn’t on my bingo card for this year of the “MKISS” driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn’t seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago… ⌘ Read more

Intel Prepares Wireless Mode Support For QAT Gen6 Hardware
Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware… ⌘ Read more

Many EXT4 Fixes Lined Up For Linux 7.0-rc6
Ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due to be released later today, quite a number of EXT4 file-system fixes were sent out this morning… ⌘ Read more

RadeonSI Driver Lands Fixes For EDuke32 For Those Wanting To Enjoy Duke Nukem 3D In 2026
It’s fairly rare for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to hit OpenGL rendering game bugs these days as besides more games going opting for Vulkan API use, RadeonSI is rather robust and very mature at this stage. Recently though a Linux gamer that upgraded to a Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card noticed that the open-source EDuke32 Duke Nukem 3D build and its derivatives were failing to render properly with the RadeonSI driver… ⌘ Read more

SystemD Contributor Harassed Over Optional Age Verification Field, Suggests Installer-Level Disabling
It’s FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But “a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight” after he’d added the optiona … ⌘ Read more

Linux Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman Says AI Tools Now Useful, Finding Real Bugs
Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has “really jumped” for Linux. “There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools…”

“Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports.” It’s not just Linux, he continued. “All … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc6 Bringing A Lot Of Audio Quirks / Fixes
The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Fish 4.6 Shell Brings Support For Recent systemd Environment Variables
Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

DRBD Driver Working To Land ~15 Years Worth Of Changes Into The Linux Kernel
Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device “DRBD” for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It’s a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver
Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6’s performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver. ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver Improves Memory Pressure / Out-Of-Memory Behavior For vRAM With Linux 7.1
Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM… ⌘ Read more

BPF-Based I/O Scheduler For Linux Demonstrated
With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Posted To Fix ~2x Performance Drop For CPU Workloads On NVIDIA Vera Rubin
An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU Driver For Linux 7.1 Preps Debug Improvements, New Hardware IP
Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta Released: Powered By Linux 7.0 + GNOME 50 + Mesa 26.0
Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver
As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing aga … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Will Switch To ntpd-rs As Its Next Rust System Component
Canonical engineers are planning a switch to ntpd-rs as the newest Rust-based system component for Ubuntu Linux for handling time synchronization… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver In Linux 7.1 Enabling THP For Device Pages As A Big SVM Win
Sent out today was a new batch of “drm-xe-next” material of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ready for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Standing out in this pull is enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support for drm_pagemap as a big win for those making use of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for GPU compute and the like… ⌘ Read more

NXP Neutron NPU Kernel Driver Blocked For Now By A Closed-Source User-Space Blob
Last month NXP posted open-source Linux kernel driver patches for their Neutron NPU accelerator. The NXP Neutron NPU aims to help with edge AI applications and this neural processing unit is found in their different SoCs. Unfortunately, their GitHub repository for the user-space software ends up containing a binary-only blob that will end up delaying plans on getting this driver into the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

An Enticing Optimization For Linux Memory Reclaim On Today’s Multi-Core Platforms
A new set of Linux kernel patches for batch TLB flushing for dirty folios within the kernel’s vmscan path were recently floated on the Linux kernel mailing list. This batch TLB flushing optimization for dirty folios during memory reclaim can be a significant performance win with today’s multi-core hardware… ⌘ Read more

ASUS Armoury & HP WMI Drivers Add More Laptops Ahead Of Linux 7.0-rc6
Merged today was another round of platform-drivers-x86 changes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. There are bug fixes plus some new hardware support additions that make this merge notable. Due to the new hardware support amounting to just device IDs and not risking existing hardware support, it’s fine for merging at this late stage of Linux 7.0 development… ⌘ Read more