New Rust Driver Aims To Improve Upstream Linux On Synology NAS Devices
A set of patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week introduce a new driver for enhancing the upstream/mainline Linux kernel support for Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices. This new driver is Synology Microp and is making use of the Linux kernel’s modern Rust programming language support… ⌘ Read more

EFF, Ubuntu and Other Distros Discuss How to Respond to Age-Verification Laws
System76 isn’t the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an “informal” look at other discussions in various Linux communities.

Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc3 Released: “Some Of The Biggest In Recent History”
Linux 7.0-rc3 is out as the latest weekly test candidate in leading up to the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April… ⌘ Read more

Steam on Linux Numbers Dropped to 2.23% in February
“In November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high of 3.2%,” reports Phoronix. And then in December Steam on Linux jumped even higher, to 3.58%.

But January’s numbers settled a little lower, at 3.38%. And last Monday the February numbers were released, showing Steam on Linux at… 2.23%?

Like with prior times where there are wild drops in Linux use, the Steam Survey sh … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Handheld Edition Switches To Wayland, CachyOS Installer Drops Bcachefs
The March 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is now available for new installations and upgrading from existing CachyOS installs… ⌘ Read more

Notable Intel & AMD CPU Changes Merged For Linux 7.0-rc3
This week’s batch of “x86/urgent” patches that were merged overnight for Linux 7.0 contain some fixes and other adjustments worth highlighting for both AMD and Intel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Adds A New Minor Performance Optimization Shown With AMD Zen 2 CPUs
The Linux event poll “epoll” code for efficient I/O multiplexing and monitoring of file descriptors for seeing when I/O is possible has a new optimization merged today for Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Budgie 10.10.2 Brings Improved Labwc Wayland Compositor Integration
Out today is Budgie 10.10.2 as the latest minor update to this open-source desktop environment that began as part of the Solus Linux project… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.1 On Track With Better Realtek WiFi & KDE Desktop Install Option
The effort around improving FreeBSD on laptops continues full speed ahead in 2026. The upcoming FreeBSD 15.1 remains on track with not only having a KDE desktop option from FreeBSD’s text-based installer UI but also improved Realtek WiFi adapter support is on the way, updating of the graphics drivers from Linux, and more… ⌘ Read more

New Maui.Gtk Project Provides A GTK4 Backend For Microsoft’s .NET MAUI
Maui.Gtk is a new open-source project providing a GTK4 Linux back-end for Microsoft’s .NET MAUI… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.4 Released With More Improvements
Wine 11.4 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) and allows for Windows games and applications to run on Linux and macOS… ⌘ Read more

New ASUS, Dell & OneXPlayer Hardware Support In Linux 7.0-rc3
A pull request sent out today and already merged to Linux Git ahead of Sunday’s Linux 7.0-rc3 has some new hardware driver support additions for the likes of ASUS, HP, Dell, and OneXPlayer… ⌘ Read more

ZimaBoard 2: An Interesting Intel-Powered Linux Home Mini Server
For those looking for a low-power, well-built small office / home office Linux server with interesting connectivity options, the ZimaBoard 2 is an interesting option that has been available for some months now and powered by the Intel N150 processor. Besides the interesting single board hardware and well built aluminum chassis, the offering is rounded out by being preloaded with ZimaOS as a Linux-based “personal cloud OS” to easily get hosting for your own SOHO … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Slab Fix On The Way For A “Severe Performance Regression”
Sent out today was this week’s batch of Slab allocator fixes for the Linux 7.0 development kernel. Making this pull notable is fixing a “severe performance regression” with a ~64% performance drop having been noted in late February… ⌘ Read more

AMD CPPC Performance Priority Being Prepared For Linux - New Zen 6 Feature
Patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for enabling a new feature called AMD CPPC Performance Priority as a new hardware feature being found with “future AMD processors”…. Which given the timing of these patches, almost certainly means the upcoming Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

System76 Comments On Recent Age Verification Laws
System76 published a statement today regarding the recent laws coming about in California and likely Colorado and New York too around requiring age verification on operating system accounts and ultimately exposing the information (or at least age brackets) to apps and websites. System76’s position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution … ⌘ Read more

Linux MAINTAINERS Cleaning For Recently Departed Intel Devs, Altera Drivers Oprhaned
The layoffs and restructuring at Intel in 2025 caused unfortunate hits to their Linux/open-source engineering including various driver maintainers leaving and even their CPU temperature driver being orphaned for lack of maintainers. Sent out today were a number of additional updates to the MAINTAINERS file for the Linux kernel to reflect other Intel departures in recent months. Plus some of the Altera drivers have also been … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 File-System Benchmarks With XFS Leading The Way
With a number of file-system improvements in Linux 6.19 and more file-system optimizations in Linux 7.0, it’s past due for running some fresh file-system benchmarks. Here is a look at how the prominent file-system contenders are performing on the latest Linux 7.0 development kernel. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver Beta Brings New Vulkan Support & DRI3 v1.2
Following the recent NVIDIA R595 driver release for Windows, NVIDIA today released the 595.45.04 driver for Linux users as a beta version in the R595 release stream… ⌘ Read more

AMD DCN 4.2 IP, GFX 12.1 Updates For AMDGPU Driver In Linux 7.1 Plus GCN 1.1 APU DC
AMD has begun staging AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver improvements for the upcoming Linux 7.1 cycle… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Prevent Intel NPUs From Being Exhausted By Single Programs
The Intel IVPU accelerator driver will be introducing limits on Intel NPU resource usage by non-root user-space programs beginning with the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Intel GMA500 “Poulsbo” Driver Still Seeing New Open-Source Activity In 2026
Approaching twenty years after Intel’s Poulsbo platform began giving Linux users nightmares due to its Imagination PowerVR SGX graphics IP that blocked open-source 3D driver support, the GMA500 driver that ended up coming about to provide open-source display support at least is still seeing occasional upstream activity for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Ready With Fix For Brand New Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 Laptop
This week at MWC 2026, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 as one of their new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” powered laptops alongside other products. With Panther Lake running rather well on Linux, the new ThinkPad T14 G7 should be in good standing on Linux and especially with a pending Xe graphics driver fix that is on the way… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2603 Released With A Partial Fix For The Steam GUI Crashing On AArch64
FEX 2603 as the Valve-sponsored open-source project allowing Linux x86/x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux – including the likes of Steam and various games as will become important with the Steam Frame – is now out with its newest monthly release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Begins Preparations For Xe3P Upstreaming To Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers
Following the mainline Linux kernel beginning to see Xe3P graphics enablement for upcoming Nova Lake integrated graphics as well as the Crescent Island AI inference accelerator, Intel’s Mesa OpenGL “Iris” and Vulkan “ANV” drivers are preparing to begin laying out their Xe3P driver support… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Achieves Performance Leadership In New OCUDU Project For 5G/6G RAN
Announced this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) by the Linux Foundation was the establishing of the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation for advancing open-source AI-RAN (Radio Access Network) innovations. OCUDU is building a reference platform and innovations around 5G and early 6G network solutions. With OCUDU being benchmark-friendly, I have been putting the early code through some performance tests on current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon serve … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Achieves 5G/6G RAN Performance Leadership With New OCUDU Project
Announced this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) by the Linux Foundation was the establishing of the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation for advancing open-source AI-RAN (Radio Access Network) innovations. OCUDU is building a reference platform and innovations around 5G and early 6G network solutions. With OCUDU being benchmark-friendly, I have been putting the early code through some performance tests on current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon server … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Ready With Its Wayland-Compatible Cinnamon Screensaver
Linux Mint developers recently outlined their work on developing a new Wayland-compatible screensaver for use with their Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint developers announced today that their new screensaver solution is ready for use… ⌘ Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Linux LTS Kernels Will Be Supported Even Longer, Announces Greg Kroah-Hartman
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blogIt’s FOSS:

Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the projected end-of-life (EOL) dates for several active longterm support kernels via a commit. The provided reasoning? It was done “based on lots of discussions with different companies and groups and the other stabl … ⌘ 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

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

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

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