Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 23 min 7 sec ago
Latest Proposed Guidelines For Tool-Generated / AI Submissions To The Linux Kernel
Posted to the mailing list on Friday were the latest proposed guidelines for tool-generated contributions to the Linux kernel. The coding tools in large part being focused on AI generated content...
NVIDIA Sends Out Initial Turing GPU Support For Open-Source Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the in-development and in-tree open-source Nova kernel driver for their GPUs. Sent out on Friday night were the Turing enablement patches for this Rust-written Nova-Core driver code...
AMD Releases Additional Zen 5 CPU Microcode For RDSEED Issue
Stemming from AMD's recently acknowledged Zen 5 issue with the RDSEED instruction and AMD releasing Zen 5 CPU microcode updates to address it, this week brought some additional microcode updates...
Servo Shell Improvements For macOS & Android, More Servo Browser Engine Progress
The Servo open-source and Rust-based web browser engine made a lot of progress during the month of October. The project has issued its monthly status report to outline all of the exciting new features made on the engine itself as well as its "servoshell" example web browser application...
Plasma 6.6 Will Avoid Running Out Of RAM When Something Crashes In A Loop
KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week...
Mesa 25.3 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 25.3 is out tonight as the newest quarterly feature release to this set of (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used across Linux systems. Mesa 25.3 features numerous Vulkan extensions added to the different open-source drivers, continued enhancements to the OpenGL drivers, and various other changes...
Wine 10.19 Released With More Improvements
Ahead of the Wine 11.0 code freeze beginning in early December, Wine 10.19 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux...
AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs Will Default To AMDGPU Driver In Linux 6.19, SMART POWER OLED Added
Sent out today is likely the last batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver feature updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window getting underway around the start of December. And it's an exciting one too from adding a new SMART POWER OLED feature to switching from the Radeon to AMDGPU drivers by default for aging GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs...
ollama 0.12.11 Brings Vulkan Acceleration
ollama 0.12.11 released this week as the newest feature update to this easy-to-run method of deploying OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models. Exciting with ollama 0.12.11 is that it's now supporting the Vulkan API...
Vulkan 1.4.333 Released With New Ray-Tracing Extension
Vulkan 1.4.333 is out with a handful of fixes plus two new extensions...
AMD GAIA 0.13 Released With New AI Coding & Docker Agents
AMD's GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their "Generrative AI Is Awesome" quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.13 as another step forward for this AI demonstrator...
Nouveau Driver To Support Larger Pages & Compression Support With Linux 6.19
While the "Nova" driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what's working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support...
Intel Submits Last Batch Of Xe Driver Feature Updates For Linux 6.19
Intel today sent out their last batch of planned feature patches for their Xe kernel graphics driver of material intended for Linux 6.19...
GNU C Library Adds Linux "mseal" Function For Memory Sealing
Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality...
Mainline Linux Patches For The VisionFive 2 Lite: RISC-V For As Little As $19.9 USD
Following the mainline Linux kernel support for the VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer from StarFive, Linux kernel patches are on the way for their new VisionFive 2 Lite low-cost offering. With the StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite this RISC-V board can be procured for as little as $19.9 USD as one of the cheapest yet fairly capable RISC-V SBCs...
The Headaches Supporting Content Protection With Linux GPU Drivers
Intel driver engineer Suraj Kandpal presented at the recent X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2025) on the challenges around supporting content protection on Linux such as for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and Protected Audio Video Path (PAVP)...
Fedora 44 Looking At Replacing FBCON With KMSCON As Default VT Console
Fedora 44 is looking at replacing the Linux kernel's console "FBCON" with the user-space-based KMSCON implementation. Eventually the hope remains to deprecate the FBCON/FBDEV code within the Linux kernel...
GCC Compiler Developers Begin Considering C++20 Default
Compiler engineer Marek Polacek of Red Hat recently proposed making the C++20 language specification (or rather the GNU++20 dialect) the default C++ version when not otherwise specified...
EROFS File-System Continues Attracting More Industry Players
The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019...
Proton 10.0-3 Released For Steam Play With Dozens Of Fixes, More Games Working
Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-3 as the newest stable update to this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enabling countless Windows games to run often extremely well under Linux...
