Open-Source RADV Driver Begins Working To Improve AMD RDNA4 Ray-Tracing Performance
While the Radeon RX 9070 series as the first of the AMD RDNA4 graphics cards do perform well on Linux, the one area the performance has been less enticing remains with Vulkan ray-tracing while using the Mesa RADV driver. For example, AMDVLK vs. RADV on the RX 9070 series shows the Mesa driver struggling with ray-tracing compared to the official AMD driver. But the good news is there’s a concerted effort now to improve the AMD R … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15 Extending Thermal Control Support To More Alienware & Dell Systems
Upstreamed to the Linux kernel last year was the alienware-wmi-wmax driver for enabling thermal control support on various Alienware and Dell G-Series systems. Being merged today as a “fix” for Linux 6.15 is extending that thermal control support to a number of additional Dell/Alienware systems… ⌘ Read more

Framework 13 With AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series “Strix Point” Makes For A Great Linux Laptop
Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I’ve spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it’s been terrific. Framework 13’s modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics. If you … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 Now Available For Download With GNOME 48 + Linux 6.14, Better Performance
Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images are now available for download along with the various flavors of this newest six-month, non-LTS Linux distribution update… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Is The Latest Distribution Replacing Redis With Valkey
Arch Linux is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork… ⌘ Read more

GCC 15 Compiler Branched Ahead Of GCC 15.1 Stable Release
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) code was branched today to the releases/gcc-15 branch and GCC 16.0.0 is now the version on the main development branch… ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 Advertises Experimental Support For Panther Lake
In addition to this week’s updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel’s software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors… ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.2 Desktop Released With Better Wayland Support
LXQt 2.2 was christened today as the newest stable update to this lightweight, open-source Qt desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Compiler 2.10.8 Brings More Improvements For Xe2 & Xe3
Released on Wednesday was IGC 2.10.8 as the newest update to the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their Compute Runtime OpenCL/Level-Zero stack on Windows and Linux as well as being used as their graphics shader compiler under their Windows driver… ⌘ Read more

KDE Gear 25.04 Delivers Many Improvements To KDE’s Applications
Following the recent Plasma 6.3 desktop release, KDE Gear 25.04 is now available for shipping all of the latest and greatest KDE applications… ⌘ Read more

Intel Continues Exploring Energy Aware Scheduling For Hybrid CPUs Without SMT
While Intel’s Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” SoCs with on-package memory has been reported to be a one-off design, besides the integrated memory it was also notable for being a hybrid core design while lacking Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support. The notion of hybrid P/E core CPUs without SMT looks like it will continue with Intel software engineers still exploring Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) around such layouts… ⌘ Read more

TurnkeyML 6.2 Released With AMD Ryzen AI NPU Improvements
Released at the end of 2023 was TurnkeyML as an open-source collaboration between ONNX and AMD developers. TurnkeyML has evolved into focusing on making it easy to use the most important tools within the ONNX ecosystem and their Lemonade SDK to deploy large language models on various devices/accelerators Out today is TurnkeyML 6.2 with a focus on delivering better AMD Ryzen AI NPU support… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 43 Looking To Make It Easier To Deploy Intel TDX Confidential VMs
While Fedora 42 was just released yesterday, already Red Hat developers and the Fedora development community have been busy thinking about Fedora 43 that will debut this autumn. Among the early change proposals this week is one for better supporting Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with this next Fedora Linux release… ⌘ Read more

Mesa’s Old OpenCL “Clover” Driver Removed For Mesa 25.2
Now that Mesa 25.1 is branched for this quarter’s Mesa 3D feature release, Mesa 25.2 has entered development on the main Git branch. One of the first merged changes for Mesa 25.2 is removing the old OpenCL Gallium3D “Clover” driver… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Newest Linux Driver Being Worked On For The Kernel: iXD
Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.1-rc1 Released With AMD RDNA4 Improvements, Lots Of RADV & Intel ANV Additions
Eric Engestrom is once again stepping up to manage the next quarterly Mesa driver feature release and thus today we have the on-time branching of Mesa 25.1 from Mesa Git and already the release of Mesa 25.1-rc1. This release brings many improvements to the collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers that should be ready for their stable debut in May… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 575.51.02 Linux Driver Beta Released With Smooth Motion Support
With today’s launch of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA has also introduced their first Linux driver beta in the R575 driver series… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Linux GPU Compute Benchmarks
Yesterday NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 5060 “Blackwell” graphics cards as their new, most affordable offering of the RTX 50 series. While the $299 GeForce RTX 5060 isn’t shipping until next month, today the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB goes on sale for $379 USD and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is also hitting Internet retailers today and starting out at $429 USD. I’ve been testing out the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB the past several days under Linux and h … ⌘ Read more

Fedora 42 RISC-V Released - Builds For SiFive HiFive Premier P550 & Milk-V Megrez
Following yesterday’s official Fedora 42 release, Fedora 42 for RISC-V is now available. The delay in the Fedora 42 RISC-V builds is due to RISC-V not yet being a primary architecture and the RISC-V builds being unofficial and produced by the Fedora community… ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg’s FFV1 Vulkan Decoder Now 3x Faster On AMD GPUs
Merged last month to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was an initial Vulkan-based decoder for FFV1 for the FF Video 1 lossless video coding format. Should you be interested in using this FFV1 decoder on AMD GPUs, there’s a reported 3x performance improvement with the newest code… ⌘ Read more

More Radeon RX 9000 “RDNA4” Open-Source Driver Improvements Merged For Mesa 25.1
Additional improvements for AMD GFX12 as the graphics engine IP of RDNA4 graphics with the Radeon RX 9000 series have been merged ahead of this quarter’s Mesa 25.1 feature release… ⌘ Read more

Qt Ramps Up Its AI Coding Assistant Capabilities
Over the past two years Qt has been working to embrace generative AI for enhanced coding capabilities within Qt Creator for Qt/QML/C++ applications. It started with GitHub Copilot integration and has been continuing well beyond that and today marks the debut of the Qt AI Assistant v0.9… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Help Browser Affected By A Serious Security Issue For Arbitrary File Reads
The GNOME Help Browser “Yelp” for viewing HTML / man page / DocBook and other documentation formats from the GNOME desktop is subject to a yet-to-be-patched-upstream security vulnerability that is now public and can allow for arbitrary file reads and could be funneled through your web browser… ⌘ Read more

GCC 15 Squeezes In Some Last Minute Adjustments For AMD Zen 5 “znver5”
The GCC 15.1 compiler release is expected in the coming weeks as the first stable version of GCC 15 as this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. As we approach the finish line, some last minute changes were merged for the AMD Zen 5 “znver5” CPU target… ⌘ Read more

TrueNAS 25.04 Released For Unifying SCALE & CORE Offerings
Adding to the busy week of Linux distribution releases from Ubuntu 25.04 to Manjaro 25.04 and Fedora 42, TrueNAS 25.04 debuted today as a major step forward for this open enterprise storage platform… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Server 42 Is Performing Well On 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin”
Following the recent benchmarking of Ubuntu Server 25.04 in its near final state compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases, I turned my attention to Fedora Server 42. On the same AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Fedora Server 42 compared to the prior Fedora Server 41 and other Linux distribution releases for seeing how Fedora 42 is competing with other Linux distributions on this 5th Gen AMD EPYC dual socket serve … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.1 Panfrost & PanVK Begin Supporting Newer Arm Mali 5th Gen Graphics
With the newest Mesa 25.1-devel Git code merged today the Panfrost Gallium3D and PanVK Vulkan drivers for Arm Mali open-source graphics are supporting Mali 5th Gen gen 1 (v12) and gen 2 (v13) devices… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 42 Released As A Fantastic Update To This Leading-Edge Linux Distribution
Fedora 42 is out today as a fabulous update to this prominent leading-edge Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. I’ve been running Fedora 42 on several systems already – including upgrading my main production system to it – and it’s been working out very well. Fedora 42 is packed full of new features and software updates making it a great H1’2025 Linux operating system release… ⌘ Read more

Linux Might Drop The Apple HFS / HFS+ File-System Kernel Driver Support
There’s the possibility raised that the mainline Linux kernel might remove its file-system kernel drivers for Apple HFS and HFS+ this year… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s VPL GPU Runtime Preparing To Drop The Media SDK With Pre-Tigerlake Support
The Intel Video Processing Library GPU Runtime “VPL-GPU-RT” as the run-time component to the Intel VPL API for video processing with a variety of video encoders/decoders and filters is preparing to end mainline support for Intel graphics prior to Tiger Lake… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Expected To Remove Datagram Congestion Control Protocol “DCCP” Networking
The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle… ⌘ Read more

Manjaro 25.0 Released With Upgrades To Linux 6.12 Plus GNOME 48 & KDE Plasma 6.3
In addition to yesterday’s alpha release of the semi-immutable Majaro Summit distribution, Manjaro Linux has now resolved Manjaro 25.0 as the newest version of this (non-immutable) Arch Linux based desktop operating system… ⌘ Read more

Oracle Releases Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 Powered By Linux 6.12 LTS
Oracle today debuted the newest version of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel “UEK” designed to be paired with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system as a heavily-patched version of the Linux kernel. With today’s release of UEK 8 they have rebased atop the current Linux 6.12 long-term support codebase… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Shell Frippery Makes It Into Debian Unstable For A GNOME2-Like Experience
After nearly one and a half decades after the packaging request was made, GNOME Shell Frippery extensions have finally worked their way into Debian via the unstable archive for offering a GNOME2-like desktop experience… ⌘ Read more

Manjaro Summit Now In Alpha For Semi-Immutable, Atomically Updated Arch Linux Distro
For fans of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, the distribution team announced the public alpha release of Manjaro Summit: a new semi-immutable flavor along similar lines to Fedora Silverblue, Nitrux, Aeryn OS, openSUSE Aeon, and others… ⌘ Read more

Intel Engineer Preparing To Land Change For Cleaning Up 32-bit x86 Linux Kernel Code
The work talked about back in January for improving the 32-bit PAE Linux kernel code for Physical Address Extensions to better jive with the code around Page Table Isolation (PTI) for mitigating the Meltdown vulnerability could soon be merged… ⌘ Read more

Intel Lunar Lake On Linux Can Roughly Match Windows 11 Xe2 Graphics - When Not Stuck At 400MHz
Earlier this month I looked at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics with Strix Point between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 Linux. The testing showed the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics on the open-source Linux driver up to around 96% the performance of Radeon Software on Windows. The most frequent question that came up from that most recent round of benchmarking was wondering how the Intel Xe2 graphics on Core Ultra Series 2 “Lunar … ⌘ Read more

Kexec HandOver “KHO” Looks Like It Might Be Ready For The Linux 6.16 Kernel
Being worked on for a while now by engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google has been Kexec HandOver “KHO” as a means of allowing some kernel state to be retained when Kexec’ing into a new kernel such as for maintenance/security updates. The KHO patches in recent days were queued up into Andrew Morton’s “MM” staging area leading to hope that this work is ready for mainlining with the Linux 6.16 kernel cycle this summer… ⌘ Read more

Intel Sells 51% Of Its Altera Business
A decade after Intel acquired FPGA maker Altera for $16.7 billion and recently working to make Altera an independent company, Intel announced today it has sold 51% of its Altera business in a deal that values that business at $8.75 billion… ⌘ Read more

AMD RDNA4 Paired Context Reg Feature Merged For RADV To Potentially Help Performance
After various commits to Mesa 25.1 in recent days in preparing for a new paired context registers feature of AMD RDNA4 (GFX12 graphics), the feature today is wired up for the Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” with the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release. This feature has the possibility of helping performance for new AMD RDNA4 hardware but the performance benefits at this time aren’t clear… ⌘ Read more

Linux PCACHE Proposed For Persistent Memory Cache For Block Devices
Sent out as a request for comments today is a patch series implementing PCACHE, a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of code originally designed for the CXL block device driver but ultimately is useful outside the context of Compute Express Link as well… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Open-Sources The ELD Linker Embedded Linker
While LLVM LLD and Mold are two popular linkers on Linux systems with the latter being known for its impressive speed and much faster than GNU LD and Gold, this past week Qualcomm open-sourced a new linker: ELD… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.15-rc2 Released With An Assortment Of Fixes
One week after the Linux 6.15 merge window was capped off, the Linux 6.15-rc2 release is now available in rolling up all of the early fixes that were collected over the past week… ⌘ Read more

Amarok 3.3 Beta Released For Qt6-Powered KDE Music Player
Last year work on KDE’s Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support… ⌘ Read more

Intel TDX Support For KVM Finally Expected To Debut In Mainline Linux 6.16
While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a “next” branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined… ⌘ Read more

Pinta 3.0 Image Editing Program Released With Port To GTK4
One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita… ⌘ Read more

DragonFlyBSD Lands “Next-Gen” Disk Encryption Code
It’s been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.6 After Going Through 38 Revisions
Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support… ⌘ Read more

SDL Merges Wayland Multi-Seat Support
An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve’s Linux graphics efforts… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.16 Could See AMD SEV-SNP SVSM vTPM Driver Merged For EPYC CPUs
The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more