Open-source News

Earlier this week I wrote about Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer likely coming for Linux 6.18. The sheaves patches have been queued into the "slab/for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window. Patches posted now by Google are showing the Linux Sheaves code having a massive beneficial impact for large AMD systems...

Cloud Hypervisor 48.0 is now available for this Intel-started, open-source and Rust-based VMM focused on modern cloud workloads. Cloud Hypervisor continues to tailor to Windows and Linux guests while emphasizing security and cloud-native workloads...

September 13 Tech news roundup: Apple launches iPhone 17, KDE Linux alpha released, Google hit by EU fine  FileHippo

Last month I wrote about initrd support potentially being on its way out of the Linux kernel. For years Linux developers have wanted to phase out the classic initial RAM disk support from the Linux kernel and it looks like that day may finally be near with patches having been posted for removing the support...

Ahead of the GNOME 49 stable release expected on Wednesday, libadwaita 1.8 released this week to incorporate all the enhancements made over the past six months to this GTK4 library that provides GNOME-specific widgets and features...

Following yesterday's release of the bi-weekly Wine 10.15 development release, Wine-Staging 10.15 is out with 300 patches atop the upstream Wine codebase...

Villager: The Kali Linux and DeepSeek Attack Tool That’s Alarming Experts  Red Hot Cyber

In the past few months at Intel between layoffs / corporate reorganizations and some deciding to pursue job opportunities elsewhere, there have been unfortunate impacts to their Linux engineering resources. Intel over the summer lost some prominent Linux engineering talent and in turn has even led to upstream Linux drivers being orphaned along with other driver maintainers departing and various other staffing changes. Unfortunate for Intel, another notable Linux name has left the company...

I replaced Google Drive with a self‑hosted cloud and the freedom is worth it  makeuseof.com

This free and open-source app runs any Windows app on Linux with ease  xda-developers.com

Wine 10.15 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux as well as powering Valve's Proton for Steam Play...

Wine 10.15 Released With Initial NTSYNC Usage, Unicode 17.0 Support  Phoronix

Steam Deck Owners Can Use This Free App To Play Non-Steam Games  bgr.com

Linux Mint 22.3 release will be a short cycle, immediate focus is LMDE 7  Neowin

AI-powered Pentesting Tool 'Villager' Combines Kali Linux Tools with DeepSeek AI for Automated Attacks  CybersecurityNews

Three alternative microkernels show devs don't need Linux  theregister.com

Last month I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc A-Series graphics between the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers for Linux systems. The aging i915 driver is the default for the Alchemist GPUs but there is "experimental" support with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver. There were some performance advantages for the Arc A-Series if switching over to that newer driver option. Similarly, there are advantages with Meteor Lake too when moving from the i915 to Xe Linux drivers. Here are benchmarks to quantify that advantage.

Intel i915 vs. Xe Graphics Driver Benchmarks For Meteor Lake: Extra Performance In 2025  Phoronix

A few days ago I wrote about Intel fixing some Panther Lake Xe3 graphics performance issues ahead of launch. The downside of those performance optimizations for Panther Lake was that they led to longer shader compilation times. The good news though is that some separate improvements were merged now for Mesa 25.3 to help enhance the Intel graphics shader compilation performance...

Intel Linux Graphics Driver Seeing 2~5% Faster Shader Compilation Times, Up To ~20%  Phoronix