Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago
Mesa's Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Driver Lands Mesh Shader Support
In development for around the past year was the cross-vendor mesh shading extension for OpenGL. Last week GL_EXT_mesh_shader was merged to the OpenGL Registry for this mesh shader support and first new GL extension in a while...
Basic HDR Support For AMD Radeon Accelerated Video Processing On Linux
David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead...
Linux Gains Tool For Defragmenting exFAT Filesystems
A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support...
Valve Developer Gets Initial DLSS Support Working On Open-Source NVIDIA "NVK" Driver
Autumn Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn't ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone...
FSF Announces The LibrePhone Project
The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary...
Path Cleared For Nix Package Manager On Fedora With /nix Approved
There's been work to get the Nix functional package manager available on Fedora Linux for those wanting to leverage its available packages or features like supporting side-by-side packages of different versions, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, non-root user for installing software, and other features. One of the hurdles though is that the Nix package manager relies by default on the /nix directory, which goes against Fedora's default directory requirements. Now though the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted permission for using the /nix directory hierarchy...
Intel Announces "Crescent Island" Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card With 160GB vRAM
Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering.
Intel Begins Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Enablement For Xe3P With Nova Lake
Intel Linux engineers have begun posting patches for enabling the Xe3P architecture. While Xe3P is also expected to be found with next-generation Intel discrete GPUs, the initial focus is on enabling support for Nova Lake...
Yet Another Longtime Linux Driver Maintainer At Intel Has Left
Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel...
Firefox 145 Beta Released With 32-bit Linux Support Dropped
Firefox 144.0 is now available but it's not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support...
Amazon AWS Working On Linux "PCSC" To Help With Dense SR-IOV Deployments
A low-level Linux kernel improvement being worked on by engineers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is for introducing a PCI Configuration Space Cache "PCSC" to help with dense SR-IOV deployments that can end up hitting significant overhead with the current Linux kernel...
Linux Mint LMDE 7 Officially Released - Based On Debian 13
Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...
Linux 6.19 Will Continue With More Rust Graphics Driver Preparations
Even prior to the recent ending of the Linux 6.18 merge window and its many new features, the first "drm-misc-next" pull request of new material intended for Linux 6.19 was already submitted for inclusion to DRM-Next...
Ubuntu 26.04 Looks To Retire Its ISO Tracker: "Held Together With Duct Tape & Goodwill"
Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread...
Arm Posts Initial Open-Source Driver Patches For New Mali-G1 GPUs
Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor...
Haiku OS Improves Its FreeBSD/OpenBSD Network Driver Compatibility Layer
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has published their September 2025 progress report to outline recent work on this open-source OS...
AMD & Intel Mark x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group's Anniversary: FRED, ACE, AVX10, ChkTag
It's been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group...
Intel Lands Big Linux GPU Driver Fix: Fixing Rendering Issues & Game Hangs/Crashes
Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics...
AMD Dev Proposes Dynamic Mitigations For Linux: Run-Time Toggling Of CPU Mitigations
A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU security mitigations to all be toggled at run-time...
Linux Patches Updated For Apple Silicon USB3 Support
While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that's quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux...
