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...
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 in user-space focused on the Mesa 3D driver code...
Linaro engineer Vincent Guittot sent out a set of patches on Friday working on scheduling latency improvements, especially when multiple short slice tasks are running concurrently on the same system...
Beyond the various local AI agent/chat options not catering to a specific desktop environment, the GNOME desktop has seen Newelle as an AI app catering to GNOME/GTK4. There's now another local AI option for the GNOME desktop with Moose...
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.9, 6.18.55, 6.12.112, 6.6.158, 6.1.189, 5.15.222, and 5.10.271 stable kernels. Each contains a large number of important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
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...
Coming with Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc6 kernel release is support added for the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race, a high-end $649~700 USD racing wheel and pedal system...
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...
We are nearing the point of the Wine 12.0 stable release coming up in early 2027 while for now the Wine 11.xx bi-weekly development releases continue. Out today is Wine 11.19 with a few new features and plenty of fixes...
Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter today sent out the pull requests of the Apple SoC Device Tree changes they are ready to upstream for the Linux 7.4 merge window happening later this month. Most notable is the initial Device Tree for Apple systems using the base M4 SoC model as well as for the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro SoC...
Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely...
Ubuntu developer Gianpiero Carpinelli at Canonical has been working on introducing SHA3-256 and SHA3-384 support for Debian's APT packaging tool in preparing for if/when that SHA2 is broken...
With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn't just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice software updates...
The Linux Test Project has announced its latest stable release for September 2026. There have been 382 patches from 41 authors since the May 2026 release. See the announcement for a list of new tests, changes, and more.
The newest systemd component being worked on and drafted for an initial pull request is systemd-appd as a new mechanism to centralizing the tracking of user's apps...
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...
As a follow-up to the news one month ago of Intel Nova Lake P's graphics introducing a new 64-bit GPU mode, the latest driver-side enablement has now landed for Intel's Iris Gallium3D OpenGL driver for supporting efficient 64-bit addressing...
Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP...
Apex Compute is the company started in California in 2024 that aims to produce high-efficiency AI accelerators for real-time edge AI inferencing. So far they have an FPGA prototype for licensing and deployment and carries the bold claim of being "20x faster than the NVIDIA Jetson" and at under 10W and one fifth the cost. Making Apex Compute much more interesting to us now is that they are developing an open-source, Mesa-based Vulkan driver for their hardware...
Coreboot 26.09 released yesterday as the latest quarterly feature release to this open-source software for replacing proprietary BIOS and system firmware on a growing selection of devices...
KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image...
Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results are now in and it's clocking in just above 3%...
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.
Back in 2021 the Direct3D 10 User-Mode Driver "d3d10umd" was introduced as a new Gallium3D state tracker to work as a Windows WDDM UMD driver similar to Windows WARP while leveraging LLVMpipe for better performance. Now five years later the poorly maintained code is removed from the Mesa codebase...
During the past month on Phoronix were 284 original news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews/multi-page benchmark articles. A lot of exciting happenings both on the hardware and software fronts while October is sure to be another interesting month with the releases of Ubuntu 26.10, Fedora 45, and some more hardware fun...
With the vast array of wired and wireless networking drivers within the Linux kernel and range of protocols and other networking features, it's a big expanse of code for AI/LLM agents to analyze and critique. The Linux networking developers have acknowledged being "complete overwhelmed" by the AI/LLM-driven patch activity and bug reports as well as battling against AI slop patches. Even though Linux 7.3 stable won't be out for another three weeks, some networking fixes are already being diverted to the next kernel version...
In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version...
Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it's on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge...
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: PostgreSQL and the kernel; Rust on the GPU; KDE Plasma; C and memory safety; Rust radio; KDE funding; Chromium development. Briefs: File-notification attacks; Kernel report; TAB election; F-Droid 2.0; Firefox 157.0; GDB 18.1; Git v2.56.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
A lot has happened in the KDE Plasma desktop environment in the last year. Marco Martin, a KDE contributor who spends most of his time working on Plasma, took the stage at Akademy 2026 in Graz, Austria to give an update on Plasma's major new features, some of the minor-but-interesting ones, and a preview of what's coming soon. The biggest upcoming change, dropping X11 support from Plasma, has been well-advertised; but there are also plans afoot to further improve remote-desktop support and more.
The full set of videos from the recently concluded Kernel Recipes conference has been posted. Also noteworthy are the associated caricature drawings, by Frank Tizzoni, of attendees and the speakers.
The election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board will be held electronically after the close of the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference. The call for candidates is open, with a nomination deadline of October 7. There are five seats to fill this time, including the one vacated by the unfortunate passing of Dan Williams. Serving on the TAB is a good way to help the kernel-development community. Please see this article from last year for an overview of what the TAB does and why membership is rewarding, then consider putting in your nomination.