CachyOS Adds Limine Bootloader, Easier Samba Integration & NTSYNC Wine
The Arch Linux powered CachyOS is out with its March 2025 update that delivers a number of new features for this OS that is popular with open-source enthusiasts and power users for its out-of-the-box performance optimizations and extensive tuning… ⌘ Read more

Chromium Web Browser Lands Support For Wayland XDG-Session-Management
Google’s Ozone Wayland support continues to improve for benefiting the Chrome/Chromium web browser. The newest addition merged this past week is support for the xdg-session-management protocol… ⌘ Read more

IO_uring Network Zero-Copy Receive Lands In Linux 6.15
IO_uring continues maturing while being one of the greatest innovations within the Linux kernel in the past number of years. With Linux 6.15, IO_uring is getting even more interesting with introducing network zero-copy receive support. With this new code a 200G link could be saturated off a single CPU core in a recent demonstration… ⌘ Read more

Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30 Watchdog Driver Coming For Linux 6.15
The watchdog subsystem changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.15 merge window that is now at the mid-way point… ⌘ Read more

IO_uring Network Zero-Copy Receive Lands In Linux 6.15
IO_uring continues maturing while being one of the greatest innovations within the Linux kernel in the past number of years. With Linux 6.15, IO_uring is getting even more interesting with introducing network zero-copy receive support… ⌘ Read more

MIPS Lands Multi-Cluster Support In Linux 6.15 For The EyeQ6 SoC
While the upstream MIPS architecture is at a dead-end due to RISC-V, the Linux kernel code for the MIPS CPU architecture continues to improve for all the existing MIPS-based platforms out there. With Linux 6.15 there is new work for enhancing the Mobileye EyeQ6 SoC support… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 25.03 Open-Source, Cross-Platform Video Editor Released
Shotcut 25.03 is now available for this open-source and cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s 2025-Q1 Linux Excitement With Battlemage, AVX10 & Other Kernel Improvements
With the first quarter quickly drawing to a close, here’s a look back at the most popular Intel Linux news of the quarter. There’s been excitement with the Battlemage discrete graphics cards with their open-source driver, early work on Xe3 graphics, AVX10.2 dropping the optional 512-bit features to make it mandatory now (thankfully!), and a lot of exciting upstream Linux kernel improvements… ⌘ Read more

Firmware Loader Makes It Possible To Use Old Samsung TV Cameras On Linux
Samsung used to sell web cameras for their smart TVs for use with living room video chatting with the likes of Skype. Samsung no longer supports Skype on their TVs (goodbye Skype!) or these devices but if you happen to have one laying around or buy one used for cheap, it’s now possible to use these Samsung TV cameras as a standard web camera under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 PCI Brings New Drivers For Agilex PCIe Controller & AMD Multimedia DMA Bridge
All of the PCI subsystem feature updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. This includes some new drivers from AMD and Intel-Altera as well as various other PCI changes… ⌘ Read more

Xiph.Org’s Theora libtheora 1.2 Officially Released: 16 Years After v1.0
Earlier this month brought the Theora 1.2 beta release coming 16 years after Theora’s libtheora 1.0 release for this video codec designed by Xiph.Org for use with Ogg audio. Theora is derived from the now rather ancient VP3 video codec, but for those continuing to enjoy content in Theora format, today brings the version 1.2 library… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.3.4 To Fix The “Most Common” Crash, Other Crash Fixes Coming Too
Within This Week in Plasma, KDE developer Nate Graham notes the great excitement in KDE bug fixing this week/ KDE developers have lowered their HI/VHI priority bug counts down to “their lowest numbers ever numbers” in addition to working on new Plasma 6.4 features over the past few days… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13 “Trixie” Freeze Process Begins
The Debian release team announced that the Debian 13 “Trixie” transition and toolchain freeze began on-schedule this month… ⌘ Read more

Torvalds Frustrated Over “Disgusting” Testing “Turd” DRM Code Landing In Linux 6.15
The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he’s unhappy with some new “hdrtest” testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the “turds” it leaves behind and this code “needs to die” at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers… ⌘ Read more

Torvalds Frustrated Over “Disgusting” Testing “Turd” DRM Code Landing In Linux 6.15
The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he’s unhappy with some new “hdrtest” testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the “turds” it leaves behind and this code “needs to die” at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Builder IDE Adds Arduino Integration, New Remote Desktop Software For VMs
While fresh off the GNOME 48 release, GNOME desktop developers aren’t slowing down and there’s been some interesting activity to report this week… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Graphics Drivers: NOVA Core, Apple Touch Bar, Lots For AMD + Intel GPUs
The big pull request was sent out today of the numerous Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. There are new drivers, a lot as usual for the AMD Radeon and Intel kernel graphics drivers, and a lot of other changes throughout for advancing these open-source kernel graphics/display drivers… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 48 & KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivering Great Wayland Desktop Experience On Ubuntu 25.04 For Linux Gaming
While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday’s Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today’s article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops. ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Landing Backlight Driver For Various Apple iPhones & iPads
Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Networking Delivers Many Nice Performance Optimizations & New Hardware
The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets… ⌘ Read more

Linux Flips Around Its Behavior For Spectre-BHB Handling On ARM64
All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support… ⌘ Read more

Two Years In The Making, Intel Linux Driver Enables CPS Compression For Alchemist GPUs
A two year old Intel Mesa merge request was finally merged for Mesa 25.1 today for enabling functionality on DG2/Alchemist GPUs and newer… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Better Handles PS5 Controllers, AMD Human Presence Detection Off By Default
All of the HID subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Nova DRM Skeleton Patches Further Flesh Out This Open-Source NVIDIA Kernel Driver
Set to be merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel is the very initial NOVA driver core code that will be incrementally built up over time in succeeding kernel versions. For Linux 6.15, this open-source NVIDIA kernel driver isn’t of any use for end-users as it’s just the very preliminary pieces to begin crafting the foundation for the driver that is leveraging the NVIDIA GSP found with Turing and newer hardware. In preparation for fut … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 SoC/DT Additions: Arm Morello, Versal NET, Apple T2, MNT Reform 2 & More
The many SoC and DeviceTree updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There’s a lot on the ARM hardware side plus some additions for RISC-V and various interesting new device/board additions… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 Beta Officially Released
The Ubuntu 25.04 “Plucky Puffin” beta is now available for testing ahead of the official release set for 17 April… ⌘ Read more

EXT4 Better Hardened Against Maliciously-Fuzzed File-Systems
Ted Ts’o at Google has sent out the EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 Beta Delivering Some Nice Performance Improvements Over Ubuntu 24.10
Ubuntu 25.04 beta is set to be released today and thus this week I’ve begun testing out the latest Ubuntu 25.04 builds on different systems for seeing how this six-month Ubuntu Linux update is looking compared to the prior Ubuntu 24.10 release. In this first Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarking article is a look at the performance using an AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics. ⌘ Read more

Akamai Now Providing The Hosting Infrastructure For Kernel.org
It’s not only FreeDesktop.org that has been transitioning to new infrastructure this month but separately, Kernel.org is now receiving hosting and CDN needs provided by Akamai… ⌘ Read more

Zstd 1.5.7 Lands In Linux 6.15 For Better Performance & APIs For Intel QAT Acceleration
Linux 6.15 keeps getting more exciting… The big Zstd update has landed! The in-kernel Zstandard compression code is finally re-based against the newer upstream state that brings better performance as well as new APIs for allowing Intel QAT acceleration by Intel hardware offering QuickAssist Technology. This Zstd code is relied upon by Btrfs transparent file-system compression and other in-kernel users for compression/decompr … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 To Gain New Option For Those Building The Kernel Without Virtual Terminal
The printk changes submitted for the Linux 6.15 kernel introduce a new “NULL_TTY_DEFAULT_CONSOLE” Kconfig build-time option for allowing the null TTY to be the default for those building the Linux kernel without virtual terminal (VT) support… ⌘ Read more

PostgreSQL Database Lands Initial Support For IO_uring: “Can Be Considerably Faster”
As a very exciting improvement for the open-source PostgreSQL database server, it has merged initial support for making use of IO_uring on Linux servers for asynchronous I/O and can provide for some nice performance improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Brings Support For New Sound Hardware, Continued SoundWire Improvements
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has submitted all the feature updates slated for Linux 6.15. There is a lot of new audio hardware support and other enhancements that are now merged for this next kernel release… ⌘ Read more

RadeonSI Goes Rusticl-Only, Clearing Out Support For Old Clover OpenCL
Earlier this month Mesa deprecated the Clover OpenCL driver in favor of the modern Rust-written Rusticl Gallium3D state tracker. Clover is expected to be removed in Q3’s Mesa 25.2 release while today the RadeonSI driver has decided to preemptively remove its Clover support… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver Introduces BFloat16 Support
NVIDIA has published new Vulkan beta driver builds for Windows and Linux that introduce VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for BFloat16 “BF16” support within shaders… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Adds Support For The New AMD Versal NET SoC
Submitted today for upstreaming into the Linux 6.15 kernel is support for the Versal NET SoC, an addition to the AMD/Xilinx Versal family that doesn’t appear to have been talked about much publicly yet but should be an interesting addition to their product line-up… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Announces Open-Source “Hyperlight Wasm” Project
Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Adds AMD Zen 5 SRSO Mitigation For KVM, Preps For Attack Vector Controls
While there is a lot of exciting new x86_64 CPU features coming with Linux 6.15, there is also some of the not so fun changes too: namely the “x86/bugs” pull request to bring the latest CPU security mitigation work to the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Continues Improving Laptop Support
The x86 platform drivers co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen sent out the pull request today of all the feature additions set for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. As usual, most of the platform-drivers-x86 material is around improvements to benefit modern Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Adds Raptor Lake-S Support To Intel EDAC Driver
The Linux Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2025.03 Released Following Rebrand From Serpent OS
AerynOS 2025.03 is now available for this Linux distribution that began life as Serpent OS as a new original distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame… ⌘ Read more

KDE Developers Begin Working On A New Login Manager
KDE developer David Edmundson has published a lengthy blog post today outlining the long-standing challenges they have with the SDDM display manager, unimplemented features they want out of a log-in manager, and acknowledging GNOME’s GDM as a “gold standard” for display managers. While not yet an official project, they have begun working on a new KDE Login Manager for improving the situation… ⌘ Read more

IBM Says Goodbye To Cell Blade Servers With Linux 6.15
The Linux 6.15 kernel is set to remove support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those server platforms from around two decades ago that used the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture processors. IBM Cell Blades at the time powered a few supercomputers but these IBM QS20 / QS21 / QS22 platforms are no longer relevant and the IBM Linux kernel maintainers no longer even have these platforms available/running. With no apparent users remaining, it’s time to say … ⌘ Read more

Intel Low Power Mode Daemon 0.0.9 Released For Linux Users
Intel engineers today released LPMD 0.0.9, the newest version of their open-source Low Power Mode Daemon for Linux systems to optimize active idle power consumption on Intel Core processors… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Brings Two More Features To Hyper-V With Linux 6.15
With the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel there are two new features worth mentioning… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Goes Very Heavy On Intel & AMD x86_64 CPU Changes
Merged today for the recently-opened Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the “x86/core” changes that are particularly heavy on new feature work for both Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 processors. This is easily quite one of the most significant Intel/AMD CPU set of updates in a given kernel cycle in quite some time… ⌘ Read more

XZ 5.8 Debuts As First Major Feature Release Since The Backdoor Disaster
XZ 5.8 is out today as the first notable feature release since last year’s malicious backdoor in XZ 5.6 inserted by a then-co-maintainer of the project. XZ 5.6.2 was out last May while XZ 5.8.0 is now stable today for bringing new features to this lossless data compressor project… ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.40 Media Player Released With Wayland HDR Support
MPV 0.40 was just released as the newest version of this open-source media player derived from MPlayer/MPlayer2. With the MPV 0.40 release there is support for HDR videos on Wayland using the new color management protocol along with a variety of other new features… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.7 Released With New Plug-Ins & Additional Hardware Support
Fwupd 2.0.7 brings the newest plug-ins and expanded hardware support for being able to update a variety of system and device/peripheral firmware under Linux… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux Gaming/Graphics Performance
Earlier this month for launch-day there were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU compute benchmarks. The graphics/gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 5070 on Linux were held up by waiting for a new R570 Linux driver release with proper support for this new Blackwell graphics card. Last week that new Linux driver arrived in the form of the NVIDIA 570.133.07 Linux build. That new NVIDIA Linux driver is working out great with the GeForce RTX 5070 Founder’ … ⌘ Read more

Latest Batch Of Rust Compiler Updates For GCC 15.1 Lands Support For… For Loops
Over the past week a lot of new Rust “gccrs” code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality… ⌘ Read more

Intel Engineer Posts Cache-Aware Load Balancing For Linux - May Be Very Useful For AMD
An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing… Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors… ⌘ Read more

F2FS Sees Nice Set Of Enhancements For Linux 6.15
In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version… ⌘ Read more

GCC & LLVM Clang Merge Support For The NVIDIA Olympus Cores With The Vera CPU
The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA’s Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell… ⌘ Read more

AMD INVLPGB Merged For Linux 6.15 To Provide Another Performance Advantage
The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD’s INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores… ⌘ Read more

Flowblade 2.20 Open-Source Video Editor Leveraging SDL2, Other Improvements
Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu Deals With New Firmware Blobs From AMDXDNA & Other Drivers
Building off yesterday’s Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code… ⌘ Read more

GRUB Bootloader Received 73 Patches To Fix A Variety Of Recent Security Issues
The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.0.2 Released To Fix Early Bugs From GIMP 3.0
GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we’re not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Aims For “Soft Frozen” On-Disk Format With Linux 6.15 Along With New Features
Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today’s Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it’s now being treated as “soft frozen” and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Adding Fast/Realtime Zstd Compression & Other Performance Optimizations
David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15… ⌘ Read more

New FWCTL Subsystem Submitted For Linux 6.15
Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl… ⌘ Read more

AMD Lands LLVM Flang Fortran Runtime Support For Compiling Directly On The GPU
An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM’s modern Fortran “Flang” compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 Released With Working NTSYNC Driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support
There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise… Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what’s set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s AVX10.2 Patches Merged For GCC 15 To Drop 256-bit Rounding & AVX10.2-256 Options
What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today t … ⌘ Read more

Faster Intel/AMD Crypto Performance & Initial Intel APX Enablement Slated For Linux 6.15
Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.42 Updates Cursor Shape & Tablet Protocols
With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors… ⌘ Read more

Libinput 1.28 Released With Three-Finger Drag
Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat’s input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector Launches For $25 USD
Raspberry Pi’s brisk pace of new hardware and software the past few months continues today… The Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector was announced today at the $25 USD price point… ⌘ Read more

EROFS Being Extended To Handle Massive Amounts Of Data For AI Model Training
The EROFS open-source, read-only Linux file-system is set to be extended with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle to support massive amounts of data to support AI model training… ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.48 Adds A “Application Not Responding” Dialog, Better Color Management
Just days after marking the third birthday of the open-source project, Hyprland 0.48 released today as the newest version of this popular Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

LLVM/Clang Compiler Being Adapted For AVX10.2 Now Making 512-bit Support Mandatory
Coming out this week was an updated AVX10 whitepaper from Intel with the surprising decision that 512-bit floating point and integer support is no longer considered optional for AVX10.2. AVX10.2 now mandates 128 / 256 / 512-bit support and in turn also dropped the 256-bit embedded rounding support with the focus on 512-bit. The LLVM/Clang compiler had seen its AVX10 support designed around Intel’s original AVX10 design assumpt … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Iris Video Decode Driver & DesignWare HDMI Input Support Ready For Linux 6.15
Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common “uvcvideo” web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Rust Additions For GCC 15 Bring Support For if-let Statements, Other Improvements
This past week a lot of new code for the Rust “gccrs” front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release… The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features… ⌘ Read more

Sched_Ext Changes Submitted For Linux 6.15
The sched_ext code for extensible scheduler support and being able to quickly prototype new Linux kernel scheduling improvements continues evolving nicely since its much anticipated merging to the mainline kernel in 2024. Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window, the sched_ext feature updates were sent out today for this next kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

FreeDesktop.org GitLab Transitions To New Server Infrastructure
Last weekend FreeDesktop.org began transitioning to their new server/cloud infrastructure after recently finding out their sponsored Equinix Metal services were shutting down. Following the complex migration process this past week, FreeDesktop.org GitLab is up and running on the Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Plans To Drop Support For A Useless CRC-32 Checksum In The Kernel Image
Ingo Molnar began sending out the pull requests today for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window of code areas he oversees for the Linux kernel. Among those early pulls are of the x86/build updates, which includes removing some seemingly useless CRC-32 checksum code from the kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD RDNA 3.5 Cleaner Shader Support Prepped For Linux 6.15
Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin next week, a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD Radeon kernel driver updates were sent out on Friday for this next kernel cycle. It’s mostly about bug fixes but does container cleaner shader support for AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics… ⌘ Read more

KDE KWin Lands FIFO v1 Wayland Support, GNOME 48 Squeezed In XDG Toplevel Drag v1
There is some new Wayland protocol support activity this week worth mentioning for both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops… ⌘ Read more

Code Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15 For Enabling Block Sizes Greater Than Page Size
Ahead of the Linux v6.14 kernel expected for release tomorrow and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft began sending out his pull requests today of new code he’s hoping to see merged for this next cycle. One of those interesting pulls is the work for block devices to allow for block sizes to be greater than the page size… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA’s Open-Source Kernel Driver Ported To Haiku OS, Mesa NVK Adapted To Run On Top
Haiku OS developer X512 has managed a rather impressive feat: porting NVIDIA’s open-source kernel modules to Haiku. Not only did he get NVIDIA’s official Linux kernel modules running on Haiku but he also ported the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver to be able to run atop the NVIDIA kernel driver interface… ⌘ Read more

KDE Continues Prepping More Features For Plasma 6.4
KDE developers continue pushing ahead with new feature development on the Plasma 6.4 desktop to further refine Plasma 6… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.4 Brings More Direct3D To Vulkan Video Handling, Continued Bluetooth Driver Work
Wine 10.4 is out tonight as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces AITER For ROCm To Help Boost AI Performance
AMD has been on a software / container / documentation spree recently around ROCm and today are announcing another software addition to the ROCm portfolio: AITER… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Proposes “Hornet” Security Module For The Linux Kernel
Microsoft’s newest open-source contribution to the Linux kernel being proposed is… Hornet, a Linux security module (LSM) for providing signature verification of eBPF programs… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS 0.4.15 Released For This “Open-Source Windows” OS With Tons Of Enhancements
It’s been over three years since the last ReactOS open-source operating system release for this platform working on API/ABI compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Today ReactOS 0.4.15 was finally published… ⌘ Read more

Linux Security Hardening Fix As Cache Randomization Was Inadvertently Using The Same Seed
Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle a few early pull requests have already been sent in to Linus Torvalds in advance of the anticipated v6.14 release on Sunday. Among those early changes for Linux 6.15 are the SLAB allocator updates that include a fix for cache randomization with kvmalloc inadvertently being inadequate due to accidentally using the same randomization seed… ⌘ Read more

New Intel/AMD GPU Features, Apple Touch Bar Drivers & Other Likely Changes For Linux 6.15
With the Linux 6.14 stable kernel likely debuting on Sunday, the Linux 6.15 merge window will then open for kicking off the next development cycle. There’s a lot of exciting changes and new features building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Announces rpi-image-gen To Help Craft Custom Software Images
Following a slew of hardware announcements in the past few months like the RP2350 shipping, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, Raspberry Pi Monitor, and Raspberry Pi 500, today they have a new software announcement. Today they formally announced “rpi-image-gen” as a new tool to help customers in crafting customized software OS images… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 Sees Last Minute Fix For A Two Year Old Regression Causing A 30% Performance Drop
Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces Open-Source “GAIA” For GenAI But Currently Windows-Only
AMD on Thursday announced GAIA for “Generative AI Is Awesome” as a means of easily running local large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI PCs with the XDNA NPU. GAIA provides an easy software demonstration for Ryzen AI capabilities but sadly for the moment is limited to Microsoft Windows platforms… ⌘ Read more

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 Improvements For Linux, RGB Controls For The ROG Ally
A set of eleven patches being worked on for the ASUS HID and platform drivers work to enhance the support for the AMD Strix Halo powered ROG Flow Z13 (2025) laptop as well as adding RGB control support for the ROG Ally gaming handheld… ⌘ Read more

Dynamic EPP & Raw EPP Features Coming To AMD P-State Driver
The AMD P-State Linux kernel driver for CPU frequency scaling with modern Ryzen processors has been working out quite well and proving very effective over the prior ACPI CPUFreq generic driver use. Beyond recently being extended to becoming the default for EPYC 9005 “Turin” processrs, AMD P-State has recently been seeing some patches for additional feature work… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.311 Released With New Extension For BFloat16
The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions… ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates Advanced Performance Extensions “APX” Code For The Linux Kernel
In addition to Intel software engineers this week being busy doing a late restructuring of AVX10 support in moving away from possible 256-bit maximum vector register size (a great move and still so excited to see this materialize!), there are also Intel engineers continuing work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on the Linux kernel side… ⌘ Read more

The Most Interesting Linux 6.14 Features From NTSYNC To AMD Ryzen AI & Rust Abstractions
Barring any last minute issues or hesitation by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.14 kernel is aiming for releasing as stable this coming Sunday on 23 March. Here’s a reminder about some of the most interesting changes to find with Linux 6.14… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.0.2 Changes Range From Fixing Soft FP64 For Old AMD GPUs To RX 9070 Fixes
Even amid the ongoing FreeDesktop.org GitLab cloud/server migration, Eric Engestrom has managed to release Mesa 25.0.2 on schedule as the newest stable release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Performance For The AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series
With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company’s official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are co … ⌘ Read more

Arm Bringing Up Support For Newer Mali GPUs With The Open-Source Panthor Driver
Arm engineer Karunika Choo today sent out the latest patches developing a new GPU-specific initialization framework for the Panthor open-source kernel graphics driver as part of bringing up support for newer Mali GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Google Developing “Live Update Orchestrator” As New Means Of Live Linux Kernel Updates
While there is Kpatch, Ksplice, and other live patching solutions already in use for patching a running Linux kernel for deploying security updates without downtime, Google engineers are developing the Live Update Orchestrator as a new means of transitioning to a new updated kernel with minimal downtime… ⌘ Read more