https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-0.4.16-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-0.4.16-Released ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this "open-source Windows" project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility... Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:56:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-F2FS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-F2FS Coming in as a late pull request ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window closing this weekend were the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates that have now made it into Linux Git... Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:17:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Very-Exciting-Week https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Very-Exciting-Week This week was extremely eventful in the GNOME space with GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter now largely wrapped up and the merge request opened to facilitate the code review. There was also the announcement of the half million Euro Sovereign Tech Agency investment into Flatpak. Plus on the application side were a few more interesting advancements this week.'.. Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:02:34 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/California-AB-1856-Passes https://www.phoronix.com/news/California-AB-1856-Passes As an update to the May story about California's age verification law may end up exempting most Linux distributions, that AB-1856 bill has finally passed!.. Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:48:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/SteamOS-3.9-Preview https://www.phoronix.com/news/SteamOS-3.9-Preview In time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve last night released the first preview of SteamOS 3.9 for the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and other devices. This early preview comes with some exciting software updates... Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:35:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-UBI https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-UBI The Unsorted Block Images "UBI" layer in the Linux kernel for NAND flash memory tracking and wear leveling finally has the notion of per-device wear-leveling thresholds... Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:21:57 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use The voting is over and there is a winner now known in the much-debated Debian General Resolution voting over an AI policy for the Linux distribution... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:43:52 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Union-QtWidgets https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Union-QtWidgets Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE's fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:05:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-TPM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-TPM The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) subsystem changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are centered around code clean-ups and improvements being made as a precursor toward TrenchBoot support... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:05:56 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-3.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-3.1-Released DXVK 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop the Vulkan API as a key component to Valve's Steam Play (Proton)... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:33:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-z4-g6i https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-z4-g6i The past month I have been testing out the HP Z4 G6i workstation across many different workloads and grueling tasks. This HP workstation powered by the Intel Xeon 600 series "Granite Rapids WS" and NVIDIA RTX graphics offers a lot of compute power, but with the top-end configuration retailing for over $41k USD is quite pricey in today's environment. Windows 11 Pro is the default operating system of the HP Z4 Gi but Ubuntu LTS releases are supported and it's "Linux-ready" at large. Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:25:27 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-CVEs-Nearly-2000 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-CVEs-Nearly-2000 With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:02:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-GPU-Reset-Recovery-PR https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-GPU-Reset-Recovery-PR Google Summer of Code 2026 featured a project working on GPU reset recovery for GNOME's Mutter compositor. GSoC has now wrapped up and the project overall was largely successful although some outstanding work remains. In this last week the merge request has been opened to conduct code review on this GPU reset recovery implementation for GNOME... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:17:17 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.361 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.361 The Khronos Group is closing out the month of August with the Vulkan 1.4.361 specification update... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:52:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chris-Mason-Leaving-Meta https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chris-Mason-Leaving-Meta Longtime Linux kernel developer Chris Mason is departing Meta. In the process of doing so, he is also stepping down from his co-maintainership role of the Btrfs file-system... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:17:55 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-USB https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-USB The USB and Thunderbolt changes have been merged for Linux 7.3. Two changes stand out for me in the USB subsystem code with Linux 7.3. First, the kernel arguably being long overdue for checking USB-C cables capabilities whether they support alt-modes. Second, a new low-latency USB4STREAM option for lower latency data transfers between USB4-connected systems... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:15:13 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Old-IBM-SGI-Drivers-Linux-7.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Old-IBM-SGI-Drivers-Linux-7.3 The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches these days causing additional maintenance burden for these obsolete drivers... Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:58:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sovereign-Tech-Agency-Flatpak https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sovereign-Tech-Agency-Flatpak The latest beneficiary of Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency is Flatpak where more than half a million Euros will be invested over the next two years to help with app sandboxing and other functionality... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:38:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04.1-LTS-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04.1-LTS-Released Canonical today published Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS as their first point release in the long-term support series for the "Resolute Raccoon"... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:13:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-SAR-Driver-Orphaned https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-SAR-Driver-Orphaned Over the past year and a half a number of open-source drivers in the Linux kernel have been orphaned as a result of departures from the company. The impact has ranged from the Intel CPU "coretemp" temperature driver being orphaned without a maintainer to other lesser known Intel drivers. Another lesser known Intel driver is now being orphaned with no longer having a maintainer at the company: the Intel Specific Absorption Rate Driver... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:13:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-HDMI-2.1-FRL-Default https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-HDMI-2.1-FRL-Default It was back in May that the surprising event happened of AMD posting HDMI 2.1 FRL patches for their open-source AMDGPU Linux driver as part of their broader HDMI 2.1 bring-up. For years the open-source HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU was blocked by the HDMI Forum but whether it was due to Valve or some other event, the code was finally unblocked. While it's been part of the kernel since Linux 7.2, it's been disabled by default -- except that is now changing... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:45:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MGLRU-Executable-Mem https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MGLRU-Executable-Mem Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:20:28 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-10.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-10.0 Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump... to ROCm 10.0... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:26:53 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-73-filesystems https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-73-filesystems Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system. Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:13:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Block https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Block With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:15:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Lemonade-11.8 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Lemonade-11.8 For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:19:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/libgcrypt-1.12.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/libgcrypt-1.12.3 Werner Koch announced today the release of Libgcrypt 1.12.3 with various bug fixes and more exciting are the performance improvements... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:21:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-ANV-HuC-H265-Vulkan-Video https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-ANV-HuC-H265-Vulkan-Video Merged back in 2023 was Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for H.265 decoding. But it's been slightly out of compliant with the Vulkan spec, which is now fixed with the newest code for Mesa 26.3 by engaging the HuC firmware... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:32:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-AppArmor https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-AppArmor The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:18:39 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Improve-AMD-PDEP-PEXT https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Improve-AMD-PDEP-PEXT The LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain merged overnight better support for the nearly decade-old AMD Zen 1 processors and also helps with Zen+ and Zen 2 processors too. This latest work thanks to the open-source community is for providing more informed instruction scheduling around PDEP and PEXT that end up being quite costly for these original Zen processors... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:05:07 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-NFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-NFS The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:49:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-M3-Release-Soon https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-M3-Release-Soon The Asahi Linux crew working to bring Linux support to Apple Silicon hardware is out today with a new status update on their initiatives, largely around Apple M3 bring-up as well as some M4/M5 achievements... Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:25:51 -0400 Michael Larabel