NTFSPLUS Linux Driver Renamed To Just “NTFS” With Latest Code Restructuring
One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft’s NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the “NTFS3” kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is s … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Cache Aware Scheduling On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 3D V-Cache
One of the many interesting Linux kernel innovations I have closely been following this year has been the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling support. I have shown the Cache Aware Scheduling performance on AMD EPYC as well as the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids performance, but what about desktops? In this article is a quick look at Cache Aware Scheduling with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D… ⌘ Read more

Updated Linux Drivers Posted For Legion Go & Legion Go S Configuration
Open-source developer Derek J. Clark continues leading the efforts on improving the Lenovo Legion Go series hardware support under Linux. Posted today was the second iteration of the HID driver work for the Legion Go and Legion Go S for configuration support with the built-in controller HID interfaces… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Expected To Bring IO_uring IOPOLL Polling Improvements
The next Linux kernel cycle, which will be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0, is expected to land some IO_uring improvements for better IOPOLL polling… ⌘ Read more

SuperTux 0.7 Reaches Beta For Reviving An Open-Source Classic
Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn’t been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc3 Released With A Holiday’s Week Of Fixes
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week’s fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.1 Released With An Experimental Direct3D 6 Frontend
Between the DXVK and VKD3D(-Proton) projects there is good support for Direct3D 8 through Direct3D 12 implementations atop the Vulkan API for Linux gaming usage. For those preferring more retro classic gaming, D7VK came about more recently for Direct3D 7 as a DXVK fork. Out today is D7VK 1.1 and besides delivering fixes for its D3D7 implementation has also now tacked on an experimental D3D6 front-end… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe vs. i915 Driver Performance On Linux 6.19 For Arc Alchemist GPUs
Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series “Alchenist” graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel’s modern open-source … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world… ⌘ Read more

New Intel Xe3_LPD Firmware Binaries For Linux Ahead Of Panther Lake Laptops Launching
Ahead of Intel Core Ultra “Panther Lake” laptops expected to be showcased in just over one week at CES in Las Vegas, new Xe3_LPD firmware binaries were upstreamed today to linux-firmware.git in getting ready that production-ready support for Intel Panther Lake on Linux… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Bring Linux Driver Support To 25+ SteelSeries Arctis Gaming Headsets
Within the mainline Linux kernel already is the SteelSeries HID driver for supporting basic battery monitoring on the Arctis 1 and Arctis 9 gaming headsets. But a new patch series posted this morning to the Linux kernel mailing list overhaul this SteelSeries HID driver support. The patches take the support to 25+ different Arctis headset models and provide more comprehensive driver support… ⌘ Read more

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows’ ‘Modern Standby’
Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”

Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain co … ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux
NVIDIA has been “gradually dropping support for older videocards,” notes Hackaday, “with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed.”

“What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?”

On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Ma … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Highlights For 2025: Schedulers, Rust & Torvalds’ Commentary
With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For ARM64 EFI Systems Crashing On Boot
Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow… ⌘ Read more

AMD RDNA3/RDNA4 Go Down Hard On Linux 6.19, But Here’s How The Older AMD GPUs End Out 2025
As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s Rust Infatuation, New Optimizations & Other Ubuntu Linux 2025 Highlights
It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop supp … ⌘ Read more

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed For Linux Akin To Microsoft Windows’ “Modern Standby”
An exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list this morning is proposing a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the “Modern Standby” functionality found with Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more

Nova Driver Progress & Other NVIDIA Linux News From 2025
This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix… ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patches Improve exFAT Read Performance Via Multi-Cluster Mapping
For those using Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also heaving lower overhead… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Powered CachyOS To Develop A Server Edition
The Arch Linux based CachyOS has been quite popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for offering leading out-of-the-box performance, especially following the shutdown of Intel’s Clear Linux. CachyOS has developed quite a following on the Linux desktop while looking ahead to 2026 they will be working on a server edition… ⌘ Read more

Final Benchmarks Of AMDVLK vs. RADV AMD Radeon Vulkan Drivers
One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMD … ⌘ Read more

Fix On The Way For One Of The Linux 6.19 Regressions: 52.4% Scheduler Regression
The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout… ⌘ Read more

The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest… ⌘ Read more

Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus SoC Support Being Worked On For Mainline Linux Kernel
The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

QEMU 10.2 Released With IO_uring Support For Helping Allow For Greater Performance
As a wonderful gift to open-source Linux virtualization users this Christmas Eve is the release of the QEMU 10.2 emulator… ⌘ Read more

Snadragon X Elite Laptop Performance On Linux Ends 2025 Disappointing
As part of my various end-of-year benchmarking comparison articles for looking at the performance evolution of Linux is a fresh look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience when using Ubuntu 25.10 with the latest X1E Concept packages, which includes taking the X1 Elite optimized kernel to the latest Linux 6.18 stable series. Unfortunately, there are significant performance regressions observed compared to a few months ago … ⌘ Read more

Wayback 0.3 Released For Advancing This X11 Compatibility Layer
One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available… ⌘ Read more

A Recap Of The Top AMD Linux News Of 2025: Strix Halo, AI, Kernel Improvements
As part of our various “year end” articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.20~7.0 To Bring Prep Changes For CXL Soft Reserve Recovery & Accelerator Memory
The next kernel cycle that will be known as either Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0 depending upon how Linus Torvalds handles the versioning for this next x.20 milestone. More than likely it will be Linux 7.0 given his historical versioning scheme, but whatever the case, ahead of this next kernel cycle some initialization changes for the CXL subsystem are building up… ⌘ Read more

KVM Guest VMs Using Intel AMX Can Cause The Linux Host To Kernel Panic
An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers… It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic/.. ⌘ Read more

Linux’s sched_ext Has Plans For GPU Awareness, Energy-Aware Abstractions
Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026… ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve’s Steam Deck… On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on t … ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Linux Driver Christmas Surprise For 20~23 Year Old Radeon GPUs
If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn’t nostalgic enough for you, here’s something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

Intel NPU Firmware Published For Panther Lake - Completing The Linux Driver Support
Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen “50xx” NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository… ⌘ Read more

AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months
As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it’s typically done on the higher-end hardware. That’s done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more … ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers
An interesting anecdote from this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve’s Steam Deck… On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler’s large servers… ⌘ Read more

Linux Sensor Monitoring For ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO, Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A
For those currently owning an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO or ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A motherboard, Linux sensor monitoring support will be in place for the next kernel release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Linux Driver Preps For Up To 13 Different Panther Lake H SoCs
It looks like the upcoming Intel Panther Lake H SoCs for the next-gen premium/high-end performance laptop market there could be quite a few different SKUs. A new patch for an Intel open-source driver expands the Panther Lake H line-up from three to 13 different IDs… ⌘ Read more

Google Taps More Performance Out Of AMD Zen CPUs With BPF-CCX Scheduling
For helping with thread placement on modern AMD Zen systems with multiple CPU core complexes, Google has been developing “BPF CCX” that leverages the Linux kernel’s eBPF capabilities paired with a user-space agent for fine-grained thread control. Google has found very positive performance results out of their use of this alternative means of high performance scheduling for achieving even greater performance on AMD processors under Linux… ⌘ Read more

RADV Adds Support For New Performance Counters To Help Game Developers
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team has landed improvements for the Mesa 260 RADV driver to support new performance counters in conjunction with AMD’s Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net the EU side of wherever my main server is located remained same as ever, but I did go through some kind of outage on the secondary server, itself located in the US (and it was a Linux problem, to boot)

What the Linux Desktop Really Needs To Challenge Windows
Linux’s share of the desktop market has climbed to as much as 11% by one count, but that figure includes Chromebooks, and the traditional Linux desktop remains hamstrung by the same fragmentation that killed Unix decades ago. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in The Register, argues that the proliferation of Linux desktops – more than a dozen significant inte … ⌘ Read more

Elementary OS 8.1 Switches Over To Wayland Session By Default
Thirteen months after the release of Elementary OS 8.0, Elementary OS 8.1 is now available for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and usability. With Elementary OS 8.1 they have transitioned to using the Wayland session by default… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19’s Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs
For those still using old AMD GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” or GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” graphics cards, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is a wonderful holiday gift. With Linux 6.19, the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are now defaulting to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver in place of the legacy “Radeon” DRM driver that has been the default for GCN 1.1/1.0 and other ATI/AMD graphics processors of the past 2+ decades. In this article is a look at the performance ben … ⌘ Read more

Rex: Proposed Safe Rust Kernel Extensions For The Linux Kernel, In Place Of eBPF
University researchers presented Rex at this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 in Tokyo. Rex is designed for “safe and usable” Rust-based kernel extensions that could serve in place of eBPF programs for extending the Linux kernel functionality… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 To Remove Support For AMD’s Never-Released Ryzen AI NPU2
The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA’s Quest For A “Safe” Linux Kernel For Automobiles, Robotics
NVIDIA engineer Igor Stoppa presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) earlier this month around using Linux in safety-critical environments like automobiles and the current shortcomings of the upstream Linux kernel and the challenges on achieving Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) certifications around the Linux kernel. It’s an interesting read/watch around the safety of Linux (or not) for such strict safety environments… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc2 Released Following A Quiet Week
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.19 is now available for testing in leading up to the stable release in early February… ⌘ Read more