Intel IFS For Clearwater Forest & VSEC For Panther Lake Land In Linux 6.13
Merged yesterday as part of “fixes” to the Linux 6.13 were new Intel support additions for their next-generation Core Ultra and Xeon processors… ⌘ Read more

Qt 6.9 Beta Released With New Toolkit Features
Qt 6.9 beta is out today as the first test release for this updated Qt6 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux Grappling With New vs. Old Intel Hardware Support For Compute Stack
Fedora is among the Linux distributions that package up the Intel Compute Runtime stack to make it easy to run OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero workloads on Intel graphics hardware via the distribution package manager and without having to jump through any extra hoops. But now with upstream Intel Compute Runtime dropping support for Ice Lake and older leaves the Fedora support in a pickle. Currently they are focusing on the “legac … ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.46 Wayland Compositor Brings Several New Features
Hyprland 0.46 is out today as the newest update to this Wayland compositor that is packing in many new features ahead of the holidays… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.48-rc0 Released With git-fsck Warning Over “Curiously Formatted” Ref Contents
Git maintainer Junio Hamano today announced Git 2.48-rc0 as the first test release toward the Git 2.48 distributed version control system release… ⌘ Read more

Jumbo Data Packet Transmission & RACK-TLP Coming To Linux 6.14 Network Stack
Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel’s networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta Performance Looks Great - Initial RHEL 9 vs. RHEL 10 Benchmarks
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server. ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 Looks To Support AMD’s Zen 5 RMPREAD Instruction & Segmented RMP Mode
For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5’s new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP)… ⌘ Read more

Blaize BLZP1600 SoC Support Coming To Linux 6.14 For AI Edge Processing
The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 To Introduce New DRM Boot Logger For Kernel Messages
Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages… ⌘ Read more

Better Linux Support For The Samsung Galaxy Book Laptops With New Driver Coming
For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new “samsung-galaxybook” driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Last Minute AMD GFX12 Changes For RadeonSI Driver Enable ACO For RDNA4
Ahead of AMD’s approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13-rc3 Released With KVM Caching For “Wildly Expensive” Intel CPUID Handling
Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January… ⌘ Read more

Java Throughput/Latency & Power Efficiency Tuning For AMD EPYC Turin
Last month I looked at the impact of AMD’s BIOS tuning guide on AI / machine learning workloads for new 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” processors. In today’s article I am looking at the performance and power efficiency impact of AMD EPYC 9005 series processors with AMD’s BIOS tuning recommendations for Java workloads on Linux. ⌘ Read more

Linux Fixing A “Hilarious/Revolting Performance Regression” Around Intel KVM Virtualization
It’s not too often that “fixes” to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a “hilarious/revolting” performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won’t be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there i … ⌘ Read more

Xfce 4.20 Desktop Released With Wayland Improvements & New Features
After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Working On RAID1 Round-Robin Read Balancing
It’s been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system’s built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 To Add Sensor Monitoring For A ~$180 ASRock AM5 Motherboard
In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.6.66 LTS Kernel Released With New Hardware Support & Many Fixes
Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions… ⌘ Read more

Some Qualcomm CPUs Left Exposed To Spectre Vulnerabilities On Mainline Linux
Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn’t upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order… ⌘ Read more

Intel P-State Energy Aware Scheduling Patches Updated For Lunar Lake
As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra “Lunar Lake” processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.0 Introduces Standard Library For Driver OpenCL C
An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code… ⌘ Read more

NTSYNC Linux Driver Updated With API Design Improvements
After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those “v6” patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Preps Cloud AI 200 “AIC200” Accelerator Support
While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 “AIC200” wares are on the way… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivers Much Better Fractional Scaling, Clipboard Using SQLite
KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.0-rc2 Released With 21 Fixes For The Week
Building off last week’s release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January… ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands “Round Robin Strict” Driver Optimization For Helping Battlemage/Xe2
Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new “Round Robin Strict” optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 Released With Linux 6.12 LTS Support
Following the OpenZFS 2.2.7 stable point release earlier this week that brought Linux 6.12 LTS kernel compatibility along with various fixes, OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 is out today as the latest step toward the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release… ⌘ Read more

Patches Posted For Review Adding COBOL Frontend To GCC Compiler
The COBOL programming language may be 65 years old since its original release but the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in 2025 might finally see upstream support for it… ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Linux Workstation Graphics Performance
Yesterday I shared the Linux gaming performance and OpenCL / GPU compute performance for the new Intel Arc B580 Battlemage graphics card. Today the focus is a look at how well the Linux workstation graphics performance for Battlemage is looking relative to the existing Alchemist hardware with the Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards. ⌘ Read more

VKD3D-Proton 2.14 Released With New Features For D3D12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valvej ust released VKD3D-Proton 2.14 as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 implementation built atop the Vulkan API for Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 Planning To Ship With The Linux 6.14 Kernel
This shouldn’t be too surprising especially after Canonical’s commitment last year to always ship the latest upstream kernel version for Ubuntu releases moving forward, but the plan was confirmed today that Ubuntu 25.04 intends to ship with the Linux 6.14 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Intel Looking To Raise SPIR-V Backend To Becoming An Official LLVM Target
The SPIR-V target within the LLVM compiler for outputting to this common IR used across different accelerator/device types, different APIs from Vulkan and SYCL to GLSL / OpenCL / HLSL, and adapted for a variety of innovative use-cases could soon become an official target within LLVM… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 48 Mutter To Enjoy Improved Cursor Scaling For Wine Wayland & More
Merged this week to GNOME’s Mutter compositor for the GNOME 48 release is support for the wp_viewport protocol for cursor surfaces in order to provide a nicer experience on cursor scaling… ⌘ Read more

Intel Panther Lake & Clearwater Forest Power Management Patches For Linux 6.14
Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki queued up several power management related patches this week for Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra “Panther Lake” processors as well as the next-gen Xeon Clearwater Forest processors… ⌘ Read more

CentOS Stream 10 Reaches GA With Linux 6.12, Python 3.12 & No X.Org Server
Following the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta, CentOS Stream 10 has now reached general availability status. CentOS Stream 10 defines the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 that the RHEL 10 minor versions are created from and ultimately a preview of what’s coming down the pipe for future RHEL 10 releases. CentOS Stream 10 had been available in a preview phase since earlier this year while now is considered GA… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs SIG Established For Advancing Btrfs Interests On Fedora
While Fedora Workstation has defaulted to using the Btrfs file-system for the past four years, only this past summer was the idea raised of creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) around Btrfs to help advance efforts around this CoW file-system for Fedora Linux integration. This week marks the Fedora Btrfs SIG officially being established… ⌘ Read more

LibreOffice 25.2 Beta 1 Office Suite Ready For Testing
Building off last month’s release of the LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha release for this free software office suite, out today is the first beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 25.2… ⌘ Read more

Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Proposed For Fedora 42
A new “Fedora COSMIC” spin of Fedora Linux has been proposed that would feature the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment currently being developed by Linux PC vendor System76… ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B580 Graphics Open-Source Driver Linux Gaming Performance
Last week Intel announced the Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards as their first Xe2 discrete GPUs. Ahead of the Arc B580 graphics card hitting Internet retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on the Intel Arc B580. Here is what to expect from the Linux driver support at launch for the Intel Battlemage graphics cards and how the Arc B580 is performing for Linux gaming/graphics workloads. ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential For Battlemage
Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential… Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux. ⌘ Read more

**Linux Developers Consider Ending 32-bit KVM Host Virtualization Support** Earlier this month as part of patches for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel code for x86\_64 systems, there was a patch to drop support for 32-bit x86 KVM host support. That patch has now been split off into its own patch series with also now raising the prospects of ending 32-bit KVM host support across all CPU architectures rather than being just an x86-only change... ⌘ [Read more](https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Questions-32-bit-KVM-Host)

Intel Begins Readying Graphics Driver Changes For The Linux 6.14 Kernel
While the Linux 6.13 merge window only recently ended and that kernel won’t be out until around the end of January followed by the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window, Intel software engineers on Wednesday sent out their first two pull requests to DRM-Next of new kernel graphics driver features they are readying for this next version of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD GFX 11.5.3 Graphics Support Added To Mesa 25.0
AMD has added support for another RDNA 3.5 refresh variant to the Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

KDE Gear 24.12 Released With Many Improvements To KDE Apps
Right ahead of the holidays, KDE Gear 24.12 is out to deliver four months worth of refinements to the KDE desktop applications… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint 22.1 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.4 Desktop, Updated Apt Code
The beta release of Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” is now available for testing of this desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS releases and known for its Cinnamon desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

Linux Fixes Regression That Broke File Names With ❤️ & Other Special Characters
Linus Torvalds took to reverting some code tonight within the mainline Linux kernel that inadvertently had broken support having filenames with ❤️ and other special Unicode characters in filenames when on file-systems with case-folding (optional case insensitive file/folder name) support… ⌘ Read more

Linux Fixes Regression That Broke File Names With ❤️ & Other Special Characters
Linus Torvalds took to reverting some code tonight within the mainline Linux kernel that inadvertently had broken support having filenames with ❤️ and other special Unicode characters in filenames when on file-systems with case-folding (optional case insensitive file/folder name) support… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.2.7 Released With Linux 6.12 Support, Many Fixes
While we are awaiting the release of OpenZFS 2.3 that has been seeing release candidates since early October, OpenZFS 2.2.7 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems… ⌘ Read more

Proton 9.0-4 Released To Improve More Windows Games On Linux
Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 9.0-4 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running an incredible number of modern Windows games on Linux… ⌘ Read more