Firefox 147 Will Support The XDG Base Directory Specification
A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users’ home directory… ⌘ Read more

Rusticl Has Turned Out Remarkably Well For Open-Source OpenCL For Mesa Drivers
Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps Linux KVM For Diamond Rapids’ AVX10.2 & Expanded AMX
The latest feature enablement work happening by Intel for the Linux kernel with next-generation Diamond Rapids server processors are the adjustments to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for readying the new CPU ISA capabilities for a virtualized world… ⌘ Read more

MEMINSPECT Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Help In Memory Analysis / Debugging
A patch series sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list proposes “MEMINSPECT” as a new mechanism for helping with memory analysis… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Based Arm GPU Kernel Driver “Tyr” Begins Running GNOME & Basic Games
Initially upstreamed into the Linux 6.18 kernel is Tyr as a Rust-based GPU kernel driver for Arm Mali hardware. This is in effect a Rust alternative to the Panthor DRM kernel driver for newer Arm Mali GPUs with the Command Stream Firmware (CSF). With the latest development code for Tyr, it’s moved onto running the GNOME desktop and basic games like SuperTuxKart… ⌘ Read more

Xen 4.21 Released With AMD CPPC & Resizable BAR Support
Xen 4.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this open-source hypervisor backed by AMD, Arm, AWS, and other organizations. Plus with Xen’s use within automotive environments, Ford and Honda too… ⌘ Read more

AMD Threadripper 7980X Performance On Linux Two Years After Release
This week marks two years since the debut of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors. Given the occasion, I decided to revisit the Linux performance of the Threadripper 7980X compared to original benchmarks from November 2023 to see how the latest Linux software stack performs for these Zen 4 HEDT processors. ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Posting Open-Source Linux Patches For Their Next-Gen GPU IP
Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it’s not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it’s RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the … ⌘ Read more

Intel “imh_edac” Driver Being Developed For New Memory Controller With Diamond Rapids
Intel engineers today posted Linux kernel patches for plumbing a brand new Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” driver for the next-generation memory controller design debuting with Xeon Diamond Rapids… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Upstreaming Initial GPU Support For Snapdragon X2 Elite In Linux 6.19
Back in September the Qualcomm X2 Elite SoCs were announced for next-gen Windows 11 on Arm laptops. Since then some initial X2 Elite enablement patches for the Linux kernel have arrived and for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel more of that work will reach mainline. Excitingly, Linux 6.19 is now bringing GPU and display support for the Adreno X2-85 found within the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Announces Cobalt 200 CPU With 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 Cores
Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores… ⌘ Read more

AMD Continues Working On Xen GPU Virtualization Features - “The Best Is Yet To Come”
When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn’t seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say “the best is yet to come” in a new presen … ⌘ Read more

More NVIDIA Nova Enablement For Linux 6.19 With Other Rust Graphics Driver Code
Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA “Nova” driver continues taking shape albeit isn’t yet ready for end-user usage… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Compiler Now Ready For AVX10.2 & APX With Intel Nova Lake
Intel’s ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilit … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Receives Fixes For ELECOM M-XT3URBK & SONiX AK870 PRO Devices
Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan SER Showing Up To ~47% Performance Improvement For Ray-Tracing
Last week’s Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering “SER” is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance… ⌘ Read more

Uniwill Laptop Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.19 Kernel
For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer… ⌘ Read more

Intel LASS Feature Looks Like It Will Be Upstreamed For Linux 6.19
Intel’s LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git’s “x86/cpu” Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Released With Better Vulkan Support, HDR On Wayland
It’s the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.1 vs. RADV Vulkan For Llama.cpp With The Radeon AI PRO R9700
In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD’s ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used. ⌘ Read more

NVK Still Working Toward Ray-Tracing, Vulkan Video & More Performance
In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Updates AI Accelerator Firmware To Fix Power / Performance Issue
Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 “AIC100” firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators… ⌘ Read more

Python Developers Looking At Introducing The Rust Programming Language In CPython
A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase… ⌘ Read more

SUSE’s Agama 18 OS Installer Released - i586 Support Dropped
SUSE developers working on their modern Agama operating system installer used by SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and openSUSE is out with a new release. With Agama 18 they have officially dropped support for 32-bit / i586 processors… ⌘ Read more

The State Of The AMD RADV Vulkan Driver In Late 2025
In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compil … ⌘ Read more

MLPerf Client 1.5 Introduces Experimental Linux Support
MLPerf Client as MLCommons’ machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4 Squeezes In Some Last Minute Improvements
Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC1 Brings More UI/UX Improvements, Proper SVG Export
Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 Brings Build Fixes For Google Cloud & Azure, Base Repository Changes
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December… ⌘ Read more

Wayland-Only Budgie 10.10 Desktop Preview Released
At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support… ⌘ Read more

systemd 259-rc1 Released With Musl libc Support, New run0 “Empower” Mode
Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.52 Released With More Preparations Toward Git 3.0
Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026… ⌘ Read more

SUSE Developer Working To Reimplement SSH Using The Zig Programming Language
SUSE engineer Lucas Mülling is leading an effort to work on implementing SSH within the Zig programming language, a popular language for robust, optimal, and reusable software… ⌘ Read more

VKD3D-Proton 3.0 Released: Big Update To Direct3D 12 On Vulkan With FSR4 Support
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve just announced VKD3D-Proton 3.0 as a major update to this Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)… ⌘ Read more

Updated LLVM/Clang Compiler Enables AVX 10.2 & APX For Intel Nova Lake
Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the “-march=novalake” target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it’s official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA addition … ⌘ Read more

AMD Enterprise AI Suite Announced: End-To-End AI Solution For Kubernetes With Instinct
The AMD ROCm blog just announced a new open-source AMD AI software project: the AMD Enterprise AI Suite as well as AMD Inference Microservices (AIMs)… ⌘ Read more

systemd Lands Experimental Support For musl libc
Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option… ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Power Management Bits Prepped Ahead Of Linux 6.19
Intel engineers continue working on the Nova Lake next-gen processor enablement for the Linux kernel. In addition to the Intel Xe3P graphics and other early Nova Lake enablement work already queued in “-next” Git branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window, the initial power management code is also ready for this next kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

GCC Patch Enables Support For The Rust-Based Wild Linker
The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Losing Another Longtime & Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer
Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat… ⌘ Read more

NVK’s Cooperative Matrix Support Proving Competitive With Official NVIDIA Driver
Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver’s cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA’s official driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18-rc6 Released With Fix For ARM64 “Catastrophic Performance Issue”
Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Highlights The Shortcomings With Wayland Screencasting
In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA’s Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland… ⌘ Read more

Qt Moves Away From Direct RDRAND/RDSEED Usage For Better Performance & Less Bugs
The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU’s RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Landing Initial Display Support For Xe3P_LPD / Nova Lake
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Linux Engineer Raises Point Around Unifying DRM Driver-Side API
One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that’s happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets… ⌘ Read more

PureAudio Lotus DAC5 & Other PureAudio Hardware Supported For Linux 6.18
As part of this week’s sound subsystem fixes ahead of today’s Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware… ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.2 Released For Those Wanting To Try Out This Example Rust Web Browser
Released minutes ago was the Servo 0.0.2 web browser engine update. Along with this new Rust-based web engine release is also the “servoshell” in tow for the example implementation built around this open-source codebase… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Nautilus File Manager Finally Supporting Ctrl+Insert & Shift+Insert
GNOME’s Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE’s Dolphin and Xfce’s Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13.2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Debian 13.2 is out today as the latest maintenance update to this current stable version of Debian GNU/Linux… ⌘ Read more