Phoronix

With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release...

Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the "NTFS resurrection" with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support...

With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play...

Barco, the Europeean technology company that manufactures the AMD GPU based MXRT graphics cards for for multi-display medical imaging systems (and also MXRV for their NVIDIA based graphics cards), have to date only seen Windows drivers published for their professional-grade graphics cards even with using Radeon Pro derived GPUs. But a patch published today to the AMD graphics mailing list is opening the door for Linux support...

Systemd 261 is out as stable today with a number of new features and ready to coincide with H2'2026 Linux distributions...

It looks like AMD's next-gen SoCs not only will be exciting on the CPU side with the much anticipated Zen 6 cores but the AMD Audio Co-Processor "ACP" IP looks to be going through some significant updates...

The networking subsystem changes have been merged for Linux 7.2 with a lot happening around the core networking code as well as the many wired and wireless networking device drivers...

Raspberry Pi engineers have released their first update to Raspberry Pi OS since April. With this new version comes the upgrade to the latest Linux 6.18 LTS kernel...

Just shy of 1,000 new patches were merged on the SoC side for the Linux 7.2 kernel. Among all those patches are enabling five more SoCs to work with the mainline Linux kernel -- including the long-awaited Apple M3 support...

Just days after AMD engineers released a new Lemonade AI server with MCP server integration to make it much more useful, they have now released a new release of their GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" open-source software. With AMD GAIA 0.21.2, they have introduced a bash coding agent is their latest big ticket item in the AI space...

For those interested in Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with modern Intel Xeon processors for confidential computing but also view system uptime as critical, beginning in Linux 7.2 the TDX support is now much more practical with allowing live updates without the need to reboot the running system in the event of security updates and similar...

For those that enjoy keeping an eye on all their system vitals from temperatures to voltages, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" updates have seen many device additions for Linux 7.2...

The media subsystem changes were merged tonight for the Linux 7.2 merge window and it includes the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver now in the mainline kernel.. This ISP4 driver is what completes the loop for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops...

The Linux kernel has dropped the last of its architecture-specific optimized MD5 hashing algorithm implementations...

Godot 4.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

Last month on Phoronix was an exclusive first look at the NVIDIA Vera CPU performance compared to prior-generation NVIDIA Grace as well as the current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition. Following that was looking at how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved over the past eight years of AArch64 Linux servers. A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested wanting to see how Vera compares to Ampere Altra. While Ampere Altra has been in the marketplace now for more than five years, they are some of the most readily available ARM Linux server options for DIY/enthusiast builds given the scarcity of AmpereOne and lack of other readily available socketed ARM CPU options. This article shows how the performance compares between Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA Vera.

The EXT4 file-system improvements were merged today for Linux 7.2 with some enticing optimizations...

The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster...

A bug in the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver leading to some laptop displays freezing after periods of use may finally be close to being resolved. Given the length and quantity of bug reports and one of the problematic commits being tracked back to 2017, it's a heavy hitting issue for some Linux users. With the help of Claude Code, it looks like a fix is on the way to the Linux kernel...

The cryptographic subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window...