Phoronix

Over the past year the FreeBSD project has been making much progress on making it more viable to run this BSD operating system on laptop hardware. They have worked on better graphics driver support, improved power management / suspend, making sure audio is working, and even rolling out a KDE desktop option from the FreeBSD OS installer to ease the deployment on desktops. While that engineering work continues, they are also working now to make it easier to summarize laptop hardware working or not on FreeBSD...

A small but convenient feature is coming with the Linux 7.1 that will be useful in debugging AMD Zen system problems and information reporting/transparency purposes...

For the better part of the past year NetBSD developers have been preparing for the NetBSD 11.0 release and in February NetBSD 11.0-RC1 released followed by 11.0-RC2 and now a third release candidate was announced today...

Following Friday's release of Wine 11.6 with reviving the Android driver and improving game mod support as part of DLL loader updates, Wine-Staging 11.6 is out today with extra patches atop...

Separate from the recently discussed work on MediaTek MT7927 "Filogic 380" support being worked on for the MT76 Linux driver (still undergoing review), a number of other MediaTek MT76 wireless driver improvements are queued up ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening as soon as next week...

Google engineers have been developing JSIR as a high-level intermediate representation (JSIR) for JavaScript that they are already using in production at the company code code analysis and transforming other code/bytecode to JavaScript as well as for deobfuscating JavaScript code...

Open-source friendly company Tiny Corp that is behind the Tinygrad MIT-licensed neural network framework and developing a "sovereign" AMD GPU driver stack with their Tinybox hardware offerings has their sights on shipping the Exabox next year. The Tiny Corp's Exabox is expected to retail for around $10M USD but offer immense AI compute power...

Timed for Easter this year is the seventh weekly release candidate for the Linux 7.0 kernel. If all goes well, Linux 7.0 stable will be out next week...

It's finally time: a patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from the Linux kernel. Anyone still using an i486 CPU with an upstream Linux kernel would be incredibly rare and no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support, but in case you are, you can continue to be running one of the existing Linux LTS kernel versions...

A nice Easter surprise are some last minute updates submitted to DRM-Next of the final planned AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature changes for the upcoming Linux 7.1 feature cycle...

For helping with the increase of AI tools scouring the Linux kernel source tree and sending security bug reports, a pull request sent today ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc7 improves the documentation to better guide AI agents -- and anyone reading the documentation -- how to send better quality bug reports...

Zubeyr Almaho has been leading work on a new HID driver named hid-omg-detect with an intent on passive monitoring to watch out for any malicious HID devices being connected to the system...

Seeing new Linux patches for benefiting Sega Dreamcast devices wasn't on my bingo card for 2026. A patch series was sent out today for fixing the Linux kernel's GD-ROM driver for accessing media using the drivers on "real" Sega Dreamcast devices...

As a small but interesting addition coming for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 release is making it easy to simulate a GPU reset with the LLVMpipe software driver. While seemingly mundane, this can be quite handy for compositor developers and other app/software developers wanting to more easily test how their code behaves when encountering a GPU reset...

With age verification/attestation laws down to the OS level enacted by California and being decided upon by other US states, it's been a hot topic of discussion in the open-source world. For the Debian project that is strictly volunteer/community-driven unlike various commercial Linux platforms, they are figuring out how such laws will impact them...

Ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.0-rc7 kernel release, this week's batch of input fixes were sent in and merged. Besides a few small input fixes are also some new device IDs and quirks for hardware now to be handled by Linux 7.0...

A small but important patch that looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is for enumerating AVX-512 BMM support for KVM virtualized guests. AVX-512 BMM is one of the exciting ISA additions with next-gen AMD Zen 6 processors...

An Amazon/AWS engineer raised the alarms on Friday over the current Linux 7.0 development kernel leading to the throughput for the PostgreSQL database server being around half that of prior kernel versions. The culprit halving the PostgreSQL performance is known but a revert looks like it may not happen and currently suggesting that PostgreSQL may need to be adapted...

In addition to 3mdeb firmware engineers porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte EPYC Turin server motherboard, the staff at this firmware consulting company are also porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a modern Ryzen AM5 desktop motherboard. They continue making good strides with that quest for the first readily-available Ryzen desktop motherboard with open-source system firmware...

In the past few days was the release of FreeCAD 1.1 and SolveSpace 3.2 for open-source computer aided design (CAD) while now joining the party is Design 50 Alpha as a GNOME-aligned 2D CAD design tool...