On top of the big features for the Intel graphics driver code and new AMD hardware support coming for Linux 6.15 along with the initial NOVA driver stub, the smaller Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have also been lining up their changes for this next kernel version. With the Mediatek DRM driver for Linux 6.15 it's set to add MT8365 SoC support, perhaps better known as the Genio 350...

In addition to the COBOL language front-end being merged this week for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release, another notable change also landed this week... Deprecating ESA/390 architecture support in preparation for its eventual removal...

Arm software engineer Peter Waller has shared some insightful benchmarks of the impact of PGO, Context Sensitive PGO (CSPGO), and BOLT optimizations across various classes of Neoverse processor designs...

The GNU C Library's tanh and other hyperbolic functions are now as much as 14~17% faster on modern Intel and AMD CPUs with the FMA instruction support for fused multiply-add operations...

Landing in Mesa 25.1 today for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers is Radeon GPU Profiler "RGP" integration for RDNA4/GFX12 GPUs with the newly-launched Radeon RX 9070 series...

While ReactOS is widely known as the open-source operating system working on maintaining software and driver compatibility with Microsoft Windows, there's another new one in the field and it's Free95. The Free95 project is working to become an open-source, Windows-compatible operating system. Version 0.2 Alpha of Free95 was released today for testing...

IGT GPU Tools began as a set of tools by Intel for working on their Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver but with time has been broadened by the open-source community to support non-Intel drivers/hardware. IGT GPU Tools 2.0 was released on Thursday with new enhancements for these tests and other tools incorporated into the project...

The Zstandard (Zstd) compression code sadly hasn't been regularly synced with the latest upstream Linux kernel sources but a patch posted this evening goes ahead and syncs the in-kernel Zstd code against the Zstd 1.5.7 state...

Shotcut 25.03 Beta is out today as the newest test release for this open-source video editing solution...

Released today ahead of a potential Proton 10.0 release for re-basing Valve's Steam Play tech atop the recent Wine 10.0 release, DXVK 2.6 is out today as the newest iteration of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for enhancing the Linux gaming experience...

Microsoft is out today with their newest monthly update to their in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux, with all available package and security updates through this month's Patch Tuesday...

With today's Mesa 25.1-devel Git code, the "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker is officially deprecated. Clover will be eventually removed with the Rust-written Rusticl OpenCL driver being modern, much more actively maintained, and all-around a better option than the aging Clover code...

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering classic games with a variety of visual enhancements reached version 1.0 today with some additional big improvements...

AMD today released AMDVLK 2025.Q1.3 as their official open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems. With this update is support for the Navi48 GPU with the recently-launched Radeon RX 9070 RDNA4 graphics cards...

A lot of Linux 6.15 intended patches by Intel for their kernel graphics driver have accumulated like enabling Xe3 "dirty rect" mode, SVM for the Xe driver, EU stall sampling, GuC power profile tuning, and more. Yesterday another drm-intel-gt-next pull request was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window...

The Zed Editor as a modern IDE-focused text editor for programmers and developed by some of the Atom editor creators continues on quite a roll. Over the past year Zed has rolled out native Linux builds, added various AI features and also began open-sourcing its own edit prediction model. For enhancing the developer experience in more basic form, Zed has now added native Git integration...

A new set of Gallium3D video acceleration front-end patches by AMD contractor David Rosca allow for the Google Chromium/Chrome browser code to enjoy working VA-API accelerated video decoding with the open-source Mesa drivers...

A set of patches from IBM would introduce a C extension module for the Linux kernel's libperf code to allow usage from the Python programming language...

It's been a while since a new Stratis feature release for this Red Hat led effort to enhance local storage management on Linux systems. Stratis was born out of a desire to provide Btrfs/ZFS-style features atop the mature XFS file-system and the Device Mapper (DM) subsystem and they have continued pushing that goal for RHEL and other Linux environments...

Intel announced a short time ago that Lip-Bu Tan has been named as the company's next CEO...

Plans have been drafted to begin using more Rust-rewritten Linux system components within the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year and ahead of next year's all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Among the Rust components being planned for use in Ubuntu 25.10 is the Rust Coreutils "uutils" software...

Merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel was the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for being able to influence the kernel's scheduling decisions on AMD processors where only a subset of CCDs have the larger 3D V-Cache. With this new driver users can communicate their cache vs. frequency preference for influencing where new tasks are first placed if on the CCD with the larger L3 cache or with the higher frequency potential. Here is a look at the impact of using the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver with the new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

OpenSSL 3.5 Alpha 1 is out today as the first development milestone on the path to releasing OpenSSL 3.5.0 in April...

Today marks the retail availability of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors. At the top of the hour when the new AMD Zen 5 3D V-Cache processors went on sale, I found both the 9900X3D and 9950X3D in-stock and at MSRP pricing... Less than a half hour later, the 9950X3D is now out of stock while as of writing the 9900X3D remains in-stock at major Internet retailers at its $599 price point...

A set of patches from Intel for utilizing the CPU type for CPU matching as part of the x86 mitigation handling is likely to be part of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel. These patches are intended for helping with CPU security mitigations on Intel Core hybrid processors where there are security vulnerabilities affecting only P cores or only E cores but not both sets of CPU cores present in the system...

Yesterday marked the milestone of KWin's kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland code being split up. The Wayland and X11 code for the KWin compositor is now separate from each other but can be co-installable for systems wanting to support both X11 and Wayland environments...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project is out with a new monthly progress report to highlight its latest development accomplishments...

With the newly-released LLVM 20.1 compiler stack among the many changes throughout the massive codebase is renaming the "flang-new" compiler just to "flang". This new Flang compiler front-end has matured quite well over the years to providing robust and reliable Fortran language support within the confines of the LLVM toolchain...

Longtime KDE developer who has served with Plasma release management duties, KDE Neon operating system development, and former Kubuntu release manager, among other roles, announced he will be stepping down from his Plasma release management duties...

GStreamer 1.26 is out today as the newest major feature release for this widely-used open-source multimedia framework...

An unexpected patch on the Linux kernel mailing list today by a Siemens engineer is implementing a driver for the Intel Over-Clocking Watchdog...

As a sign of the times for both the NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa and the generic Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code, with next quarter's Mesa 25.1 release when using a NVIDIA Turing GPU or newer with the Nouveau driver stack it will now default to using Zink atop NVK for OpenGL rather than the existing NVC0 Gallium3D driver...

CodeWeavers that continues to be the largest patron to the development of the open-source Wine software announced today CrossOver 25.0 as the newest version of their commercial downstream...

Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPUs in retail channels, today the embargo lifts on being able to deliver Ryzen 9 9950X3D reviews and performance benchmarks. Simply put, for Linux creators, developers, enthusiasts, and others running technical computing workloads and other similar tasks on their desktop, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads and 144MB total cache makes for an excellent desktop CPU. In this review are around 400 Linux benchmarks looking at the captivating performance and competitive power efficiency of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

The GNOME Dash To Panel extension that allows moving the dash into the GNOME main panel has proven popular with GNOME desktop users for an integrated icon taskbar and status panel on GNOME Shell. Unfortunately though one of the main developers to Charles Gagnon is "passing on" development of the extension moving forward...

A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler... The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!..

Patches were posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List this morning for wiring up the ESWIN EIC7700 RISC-V SoC support and the most notable board using this SoC so far, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550...

The Servo open-source web engine is out with its February 2025 status update to highlight work on the engine itself as well as its demo browser and embed API capabilities for using Servo by other applications...

Since last year we have continued to be impressed by the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors while today they are announcing the EPYC Embedded 9005 line-up. The AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 Series processors are much like the EPYC 9005 series processors but with a few differences...

FreeBSD 13.5 is out today as the final update to the FreeBSD 13 series. Users should begin making plans for upgrading to the current FreeBSD 14 stable series or eyeing the future FreeBSD 15.0 release...

Building off the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release from January, OpenZFS 2.3.1 is out today with Linux 6.13 kernel compatibility as well as various bug fixes...

Mir 2.20 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-developed Wayland compositor and set of libraries for developing Wayland-based shells...

Box64 0.3.4 is out today as the newest version of this open-source Linux x86_64 user-space emulator that runs on ARM64 as well as RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems...

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan drivers continue to be developed within mainline Mesa for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan with Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs, the necessary Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver has yet to be upstreamed. But hitting the mailing list today is a patch getting the user-space API (UAPI) with more eyes on as the precursor to the actual kernel driver that is currently held up by waiting on Rust kernel abstractions to be upstreamed...

With the new AMD EPYC 9005 processors there are SKUs up to 500 Watt with the likes of the EPYC 9965 flagship at 192 cores for Turin Dense cores or 128 Turin classic cores with the EPYC 9755. But for those looking at upgrading from an existing EPYC 9004 series server and bound by the motherboard BIOS support and/or cooling/power capacity, 400 Watts is a sweet spot. Many of the existing platforms designed for EPYC 9004 Bergamo/Genoa(X) and now extended for EPYC 9005 Turin are limited to a 400 Watt TDP. With the prior AMD EPYC 9655 testing I have already shown off the great Zen 5 uplift when maintaining the same core counts as Zen 4, but even sticking to 400 Watts at the top-end is room for more. The EPYC 9845 is AMD's top-end SKU for 400 Watts or less that allows for 160 dense cores (320 threads) per socket compared to the 128 core EPYC 9754 Bergamo. Effectively the same power level and 25% more -- and better (Zen 5C) -- cores. Plus with EPYC Turin supporting the new AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver there is greater headroom in optimizing for power efficiency if so desired. Here is a look at how the AMD EPYC 9845 delivers a great leap to performance and power efficiency for those looking at a surprisingly robust upgrade from prior generation EPYC 9004.

Fedora 42 isn't even releasing until next month but a number of early change proposals have been filed for the upcoming Fedora 43 development cycle that will be released this autumn...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates are building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening up later this month. Here is a look at a few of the HWMON changes worth mentioning to be found in this next version of the Linux kernel...

Along with other exciting Intel kernel graphics driver updates submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window, another batch of drm-intel-next code was sent out today to DRM-Next. This pull request is mostly around bug fixing and other low-level work but it does provide a new "dirty rect" feature being introduced with next-gen Intel Xe3 graphics...

In hopefully helping Asahi Linux reduce their downstream patch burden and helping to enhance the overall flow of new Apple Silicon related code into the mainline Linux kernel, another developer has agreed to serve as an official code reviewer over the ARM Apple bits within the Linux kernel...

For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn't too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau's extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.14-rc6 a few minutes ago as we work toward the stable Linux 6.14 kernel release later in March...

On Friday AMD sent out another batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature patches destined for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. One notable feature in this late pull request is introducing a new "high precision" mode to be found with the GFX950 target, which is believed to be the upcoming Instinct MI350X series...

Intel's new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) feature is a hardware-based solution to manage skin and/or board temperatures of a device. Platform Temperature Control will adjust the SoC power/performance if the temperature thresholds are exceeded, which are programmed by the device manufacturer. But new Linux patches posted allow controlling the Intel Platform Temperature Control feature found with new Core Ultra Lunar Lake laptops and upcoming Panther Lake hardware...

Already queued ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening later this month are DeviceTree support for Apple's T2 SoCs as well as other DeviceTree additions set to be mainlined. A third round of DeviceTree patches were sent out on Sunday morning to the Linux kernel mailing list for the upcoming v6.15 cycle...

ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that's more than a half-century old and went on to inspire and influence other programming languages. It has its place in programming language history but a recently published compiler front-end for ALGOL 68 has been decided for now at least not to be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that's part of the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository...

Last year Microsoft donated the Mono Project to Wine for its stewardship under the WineHQ umbrella. Today marks the Framework Mono 6.14 release as the first major Mono release in five years and the first under the WineHQ organization...

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.30 as the newest version of this GNU Coreutils rewrite within the Rust programming language. Uutils developers will also be targeting more common Unix tools to port over to Rust too...

In addition to Friday's very exciting GNOME 48 release candidate with some last minute features, there have also been some other GNOME-related changes this week to call out...

Mesa's Venus driver that allows for 3D graphics acceleration within virtual machines is now able to make use of the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions when using Mesa 25.1-devel along with updated Venus Protocol and Virglrenderer code...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 10.3 is now Wine-Staging 10.3 for this more experimental version of Wine that is presently shipping 347 experimental/testing patches atop the upstream state...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting KDE Plasma improvements merged for the week...

Wine 10.3 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms...

The GNOME 48 release candidate "48.rc" is out this evening as we approach the stable release of the GNOME 48 desktop in two weeks...

At the Vulkanised 2025 conference a few weeks back in Cambridge (UK) there were a few presentations concerning Vulkan Video for this cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode/decode interface...

Canonical engineer Matthieu Clemenceau has posted a status update on the behalf of the Ubuntu Foundations engineers now half-way through the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle. A number of notable package updates have landed as well as continued work on better ARM64 support and coming to a decision over "-O3" optimized packages...

Back in January at CES was the Ryzen 9 9000X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D announcement while today AMD officially confirmed the release date and pricing on these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache...

The GCC "-fschedule-insns" option allows for reordering of instructions to eliminate execution stalls when required data is unavailable. This early scheduling option can be beneficial for systems with slow floating point performance or costly memory load instructions. With the upcoming GCC 15 release, AArch64 will be enabling this early scheduling optimization at the -O3 optimization level and higher...

The community-based ROCm SDK Builder is an unofficial project leveraging the open-source AMD ROCm code and making it easy to build machine learning and GPU compute software across a range of environments and helping ensure proper integration with other machine learning tools and models. The ROCm SDK Builder takes special focus on the consumer Radeon iGPUs and dGPUs that typically aren't as much of a focus for the upstream AMD ROCm stack...

Intel engineers today sent out their final drm-xe-next feature pull request to DRM-Next of the remaining features they are ready to land for the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle. It's a big one...

Well known AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has been at it again working on some further performance optimizations to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code...

The latest bit of increased driver code unification and decreasing code duplication among Mesa's OpenGL and Vulkan drivers is finally introducing a common shader statistic framework...

Sent out today was a batch of platform-drivers-x86 fixes for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Notable among these fixes is introducing Intel Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support to the Intel VSEC driver...

A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016...

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is expected to merge two new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display drivers for supporting the Apple Touch Bar displays on older Intel x86 Macs and a newer "ADP" driver for handling the Apple Touch Bar displays on the newer Apple M1/M2-powered MacBooks...

For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default...

Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta’s top services...

SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.

Wim Taymans of Red Hat today released PipeWire 1.4 as the newest major update for this leading open-source software to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other solutions on the modern Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams in a very excellent way...

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness...