Meta Developing Compressed RAM ‘CRAM’ For Linux: Better Than ZRAM and Zswap?
Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:

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 al … ⌘ Read more

KNOD Progressing For Linux In-Kernel GPU Offloading For Network Packet Processing
A while back we covered KNOD as an experimental solution for in-kernel network offloading to AMD GPUs. The open-source KNOD project allows leveraging GPUs to handle packet processing in a very performant and energy efficient manner without needing any specialized hardware. KNOD has continued and a development update was shared this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague… ⌘ Read more

Linux Networking Diverts 50+ Fixes To Next Kernel, Still Bombarded With AI Fueled Churn
Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc7 kernel due for release on Sunday, this week’s batch of networking fixes were submitted and merged. The vast networking subsystem of wired and wireless drivers plus the various other networking features continues to see a lot of activity due to AI-driven bug reports and patches… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Ready For Release Next Week, Sees Last Minute NVIDIA Fix
KDE Plasma 6.8 is gearing up for its official debut next week in coinciding with the 30th anniversary since the KDE project began… ⌘ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meta Rushed To Fix Muse ‘VM Escape’ Vulnerability Soon Before Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse’s launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company’s viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse’s intended environment and access Meta’s own sensitive databases and … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc6 Released: Normal For The New “AI Normal”
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.3-rc7 as we work toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release in two weeks… ⌘ Read more

OpenCourant: Rocky Linux Developers Create Community Fork Of OpenRadioss
This week was the surprising and unfortunate decision of Siemens shutting down the OpenRadioss project as the four year old open-source project started by Altair Engineering with their prominent Radioss finite element solver. Siemens didn’t just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it. Fortunately, there’s a new community fork of OpenRadioss … ⌘ Read more

Linux Begins Seeing Workarounds For Fujitsu MONAKA CPU Bugs
Last month Fujitsu formally announced their MONAKA CPU as a 144 core Arm-based server processor geared for AI infrastructure. This comes after two years of seeing various Monaka patches to the GCC compiler and other open-source components. Now that MONAKA is announced, we are seeing more patches surface for the Linux kernel with this week seeing several workarounds for MONAKA CPU bugs… ⌘ Read more

Arm Working On “TLBID” For Linux To Increase Performance On High Core Count CPUs
Arm sent out an initial set of patches this week working on support in the Linux kernel for TLBI Domains. This “TLBID” feature is an upcoming Arm architecture capability designed to increase performance on high core count systems… ⌘ Read more

The Amazing Work By Valve’s Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux
Over the past year Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has made multiple very nice improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver for enhancing support for old (GCN 1.0/1.1 era from a decade ago) graphics cards so that they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work that he initially began as a kernel driver development exercise after initially spending years i … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Support The Raspberry Pi 10-Inch Touch Display 2
We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material being accepted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window. But this week another round of DRM-Misc changes made it, which included some new hardware support and other last minute items… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Now Makes Tiled Windows Fit Together More Nicely
There is just over one week to go until the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop release. Some last minute fixes continue flowing into Plasma 6.8 as well as early feature work continuing for Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more

I’m back from my week-long trip 👋

Imagination Talks Up Their Open-Source Vulkan Driver, Volcanic Architecture Plans
Imagination Tech was at XDC 2026 Toronto this week to talk up their ongoing work around their PowerVR Mesa Vulkan driver (and PVR upstream DRM kernel driver) with this driver continuing to improve, plans for supporting their new Volcanic GPU architecture, and other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Beta Performance: The Satisfyingly Boring Benchmarks
While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it’s largely boring but here are some to illustrate. ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Continues Doing More For Their Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers
Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Proposal To Set ARM64 Kernel Stack Size At Boot Time To Reduce Memory Consumption
A proposal was posted this week to the Linux kernel mailing list by a Google engineer to make it easier for ARM64 Linux to adjust the kernel stack size. The motivation for doing so to configure the kernel stack size during boot time is on reducing system memory consumption… ⌘ Read more

New Ubuntu Concept ISO For Snapdragon Laptops Brings First X2 Laptop Support
It’s been a while since Canonical announced any new ISOs of their Ubuntu builds targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X series laptops. But ahead of this week’s Ubuntu 26.10 beta release, they shipped new Ubuntu 26.10 Snapdragon Concept images today with improved Snapdragon X1 laptop support as well as the initial Snapdragon X2 laptop support… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Vera SMT Performance Benchmarks
Recently I was provided remote access to a NVIDIA Vera server with the dual socket Vera CPU Superchip providing 176 Olympus cores plus with NVIDIA’s Spatial Multithreading “SMT” implementation providing 352 total threads. With this benchmarking was free rein for testing, including CPU power and frequency monitoring. Over the next few weeks will be a number of articles looking at different areas of NVIDIA Vera performance. One of the areas I was most eager to test was looking at Ver … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc5 Released: “Another Week, Another Large RC”
In working toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release hopefully on 18 October, out today is Linux 7.3-rc5 as the newest weekly test candidate… ⌘ Read more

Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82%
Waymo’s self-driving car technology “continues to outperform human benchmarks,” the company claimed this week. “It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers.”

Electrek reports:

We’ve seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That’s all well and … ⌘ Read more

New Patch Series Working Toward DRBD 9 Support In The Linux Kernel
Earlier this year developers at LINBIT began working toward a goal of upstreaming ~15 years worth of their Distributed Replicated Block Device changes into the mainline Linux kernel. That major update has yet to land but sent out this week was a new patch series in preparing the trek toward introducing DRBD 9 support in the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more

Improved GPU Reset Coming For Raspberry Pi Boards With Linux 7.4
In addition to this week’s DRM-Misc-Next pull request introducing some new HDMI 2.0 helpers for the DRM drivers, the pull request also introduced improved GPU reset support for the Broadcom V3D GPU with the VC4 kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Hey, folks. Sorry to disappear for the last couple of weeks.

Last weekend, I took the family to Atlanta, GA for a visit to the Georgia Aquarium and the Center for Puppetry Arts, both of which were fantastic (pics forthcoming). Unfortunately, amongst the souvenirs we brought home was the worst sickness my wife and I have had in years, which basically laid us both out until Thursday, and we’ve been recovering since.

On top of it, just before we left, I accidentally broke TwtStrm (my WIP TwtTxt reader), so I didn’t even have a functional way to keep up with the only “social media platform” I actually give a hoot about (nor a functional brain to try and fix it).

As of this morning, though, I’m happy to report that we’re basically all better, and TwtStrm is back to working. I’m actually hoping to get some code written this weekend (and maybe even try to get Parley running), but we’ll see how things go. 🙂

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli

AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more

MM Change Slated For Linux 7.4 Yields +22904539.81% In One Metric, More Modest Wins In Others
Queued this week into the slab/for-next Git branch ahead of next month’s Linux 7.4 merge window is a memory management change for refilling pre-filled sheaves from the barn. In some cases this yields wild improvements to specific synthetic benchmarks… ⌘ Read more

AI Bug Fixes, Crescent Island Power Brake & Nouveau Fixes For Linux 7.3-rc5 DRM
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday’s Linux 7.3-rc5 release… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Continues With Last Minute Tweaks & Fixes
Even with this week’s KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more

Redox OS Adds IO_uring-Like API, NUMA & Gets QEMU Working
The Redox OS open-source, Rust-based operating system has seen a lot of activity in recent weeks with many notable improvements landing… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size)
Raspberry Pi’s stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings “jumped 90% to $256.9 million,” reports Investing.com, “while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit be … ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts GCC Compiler Patches For AVX10V1AUX ISA Support
Following their recent AVX10_V2_AUX support for GCC as part of the bring-up for the AI Compute Extensions “ACE” in GCC 17, AMD compiler engineers this week posted the initial patches for enabling the AVX10V1AUX ISA support… ⌘ Read more

VAXEE NP-01 Ergo Wireless (8K) mouse thoughts
VAXEE sent over another mouse to take a look at with the VAXEE NP-01 Ergo Wireless (8K), so I’ve been using it for a few weeks to see what I think.

Image

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 DRM Infrastructure Better Supporting HDMI 2.0 With New Helpers
Sent out today was the latest weekly pull of drm-misc-next changes of feature material to queue in DRM-Next for Linux 7.4. Most notable in this week’s pull request are a number of patches for enhancing the HDMI 2.0 handling in the DRM core infrastructure and display helpers… ⌘ Read more

I’m off for a week on a week-long trip up north (Australia), to a place called Yeppoon. I’ll be sporactily around on Yarn/Twtxt, but probably having too much relaxing fun with my family 😅 Cya’s in a week or so 🏝️

Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Shows A Few Improvements With AMD Strix Halo
Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” with the Framework Desktop… ⌘ Read more

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.’ $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. “You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!” distributor Ketchum Entert … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Adding Logitech G502 X Lightspeed USB Support, ELECOM M-XT4DRBK
Sent out today was a new HID subsystem pull request of fixes for the week to the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides some conventional bug fixes are also supporting some additional devices via quirks and new IDs… ⌘ Read more

Promotion Reminder For Ad-Free Viewing, Multi-Page Articles On A Single Page
As a friendly reminder in case you missed it from over the weekend, the Phoronix autumn “Oktoberfest” premium sale is taking place through the rest of this week for those wishing to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, and other benefits while helping for the site to survive and continue producing daily original content… ⌘ Read more

Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Queued For Submission To Linux 7.3, Backporting To 7.2
Later this week it looks like the latest round of Cache Aware Scheduling fixes will be merged for enhancing this kernel scheduler functionality for grouping related tasks together on CPU cores that share the same last level cache (LLC). Cache Aware Scheduling can lead to better cache locality and lower latency by avoiding the costs of potential cache bouncing – that is when bugs don’t get in the way… ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon
Meta’s AI “personal agent” Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it’s still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower…

[Mu … ⌘ Read more