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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
668 stories archived
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Linux Performance
Today the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D goes on sale as the lowest-price AMD 3D V-Cache processor being marketed for gamers. This 8-core / 16-thread processor features a 4.5GHz boost clock and a total of 104MB of cache while being based on the older Zen 4 architecture and coming in at about $329 USD. Here is a look at how the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D is performing on Linux.
Linux Floppy Driver For Apple's Super Woz Integrated Machine "SWIM" In Old Macs Improved
This is quite unexpected and was not on my bingo card for this year or even decade... The Linux driver for the floppy disk controller in Apple's legacy Super Woz Integrated Machine (SWIM) saw a large set of patches today for improving its performance and delivering various fixes...
New Linux Driver Improving Support For GETAC Rugged Laptops
GETAC manufactures a line of rugged/semi-rugged laptops for use in the public safety, defense, industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, and other industries. While shipping with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new driver has been proposed as GETAC MPMD as a minimal ACPI driver for improving support for these GETAC rugged laptops. In particular, the driver will allow the various programmable buttons on these laptops to work under Linux...
Ubuntu Kernel Team Warns Of Temporary AMD GPU Performance Regression Up To 42x
The Ubuntu Kernel Team issued a statement this morning to proactively warn Ubuntu Linux users on Ubuntu 26.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS HWE users that the next kernel point release will contain a performance regression for AMD GPUs in compute-heavy workloads with up to a 42x performance hit. The positive news is that due to this being an upstream regression in a Linux 7.0 point release, upstream stakeholders and other Linux distributions that more quickly shipped the problematic code already have a fix coming down the pipe...
Imagination PowerVR BXM-4-64 GPU Firmware Upstreamed For The T-Head TH1520
Now in the upstream linux-firmware.git centralized repository is the firmware binary needed for enabling the Imagination Tech PowerVR BXM-4-64 Rogue GPU found with the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC...
Turns Out Wayland Isn't the Input Lag Disaster Everyone Says it is
A DIY click-to-photon tester puts X11, Wayland, VRR, and a DXVK fork to the test, with some surprising results.
AMD ROCm 7.14 Announced As New Production Release, Ryzen AI 400 Series Support
As a follow-up to the article over ROCm 7.14 being tagged, AMD has formally announced the availability of ROCm 7.14 and it's their new production release rather than being a tech preview...
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 16, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Fighting scraper bots; io_uring queues; Filesystem testing; BPF shielding; Sending packets from BPF; Kitty; QBE. Briefs : Shim security; seunshare vulnerability; Debian bookworm; Rust 1.97.0; Linux.org; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
AMD ROCm 7.14 "TheRock" Tech Preview Tagged For Latest AMD GPU Compute Stack
AMD's software team appears to be busy getting ready for next week's Advancing AI event happening next week in San Francisco. In addition to the release today of the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, TheRock 7.14 was also tagged as the modern build system for ROCm working on the latest tech preview releases of this open-source AMD GPU compute stack...
Mesa 26.2-rc1 Released In Ending Feature Work For This Quarter's 3D Graphics Stack
Mesa 26.2 was branched today from Mesa Git and in turn Mesa 26.3-devel is now open on mainline...
AMD Releases Lemonade 11.0 Local AI Server With Text-To-Speech, Other New Features
Ahead of the AMD Advancing AI event next week, today AMD released Lemonade 11.0 as the latest feature release of their local AI server supporting AMD Ryzen CPUs, AMD Radeon GPUs, and AMD Ryzen AI NPU acceleration...
Firefox is getting updates twice as fast from September
Mozilla is changing Firefox’s release schedule from September, with new stable versions planned every two weeks instead of once a month. The company says the new release cadence is designed to make releases more predictable and allow improvements to reach users more often. But in a message to developers, Mozilla described the changes as an experiment and said it will review the impact before deciding whether to continue. Firefox 154, due for release on 18 August, will be the final stable version released under the current schedule. Firefox 155 is then planned for 1 September, after which new stable releases […] You're reading Firefox is getting updates twice as fast from September , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
[$] Topics in filesystem testing
It should come as no surprise that a gathering of filesystem developers would discuss filesystem testing; it has been a mainstay of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit over the years and the 2026 summit was no exception. Ted Ts'o led the discussion this time; he had a few different topics to raise, including his perception of increasing regressions for ext4 in the stable kernels and what can be done to help reduce them. As with other similar sessions at the summit over the years, there is a lot of interest in collaborating on test inputs and outputs, but finding a way to centralize that information has so far eluded the filesystem community.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 vs. CachyOS Performance On A $5399 Laptop
Earlier this month on Phoronix I reviewed the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 as the first laptop Razer is certifying for Linux use via Canonical's hardware certification program for Linux. It offered very nice performance with the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics albeit costly with a configured price of $5399 USD. That review featured benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but for those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu against Windows 11 on this gaming/AI developer laptop, here are comparison benchmarks plus also tossing in the rolling-release CachyOS distribution.
Local DoS attack vectors in seunshare 3.10 (SUSE Security Team Blog)
The SUSE Security Team Blog has a post with an analysis of seunshare , which is used by SELinux to confine untrusted programs. During a review of version 3.10 of the program, the team identified two local Denial-of-Service (DoS) vectors. Since seunshare is supposed to run on SELinux-enabled systems, it is important to understand what kind of privilege escalation can be achieved when vulnerabilities are exploited in a setuid-root binary like this. Many SELinux-enabled systems, such as Fedora and openSUSE, ship with the "targeted" SELinux policy by default. This policy is focused on confining well-known system services, but assigns an unconfined SELinux context to interactive users by default to achieve a balance between security and usability. There is currently no domain transition from the unconfined domain to the more restricted seunshare_t defined in the SELinux policy for seunshare . This means the execution of seunshare continues in the unconfined domain. Thus in the context of attacks carried out by interactive users, the impact of the vulnerabilities below will be a root-like privilege escalation despite the system running in SELinux enforced mode. See the post for the full write-up of the team's discoveries and timeline. The vulnerabilities have been fixed in version 3.11 .
[$] Lockless MPSC FIFO queues for io_uring
Processes that use io_uring tend to keep a lot of balls in the air; being able to have many operations underway at any given time is part of the point of that API in the first place. The io_uring subsystem must, as a result, keep track of a lot of tasks that have to be performed at the right time. In current kernels, io_uring uses a standard kernel linked-list primitive to track those work items. As of the 7.2 kernel release, though, io_uring will, instead, use a new lockless, multi-producer, single-consumer (MPSC) queue, resulting in some notable performance gains. Lockless algorithms tend to be tricky, but the one used here is relatively approachable and shows how these algorithms can work.
Linux Patches Finally Allow Apple Magic Keyboard/Mouse Battery Monitoring Via Bluetooth
Besides the ongoing challenges of enabling newer Apple Silicon SoC support on Linux, Apple peripheral support on Linux remains a mixed bag depending on the product as well. The latest functionality now being addressed is for having battery reporting work for the Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard when connected via Bluetooth...
Many old shim versions are still accepted by secure boot
The CMU CERT Coordination Center has put out an advisory that many exploitable versions of the shim binary, used to boot Linux on systems with UEFI secure boot enabled, were never added to the revocation list. An attacker with administrative privileges or the ability to modify the boot process could use one of the vulnerable shim bootloaders to bypass Secure Boot protections and execute arbitrary code before the operating system loads. Code executed during this early boot phase may achieve persistent compromise of the platform, including the ability to load unsigned or malicious kernel components that can survive system reboots and, in some cases, operating system reinstallation. The advisory contains a list of vulnerable shims.
Linus Torvalds Reaffirms That Linux Is Not "Anti-AI" & Not A "Social Warrior" Project
Overnight Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote another well crafted message that reaffirms the Linux kernel position of not being against AI and lashing back against some kernel developers that are against AI/LLM usage within the kernel project...
Vocalinux 0.14 Beta Released For Offline Voice Dictation / Speech-To-Text On Linux
Ubuntu 26.10 is notably working on laying the foundation for a context-aware desktop and their initial deliverable being worked on is Myna as a speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop. Interestingly there is already a promising voice dictation / speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop called Vocalinux that continues advancing and is usable right now for those looking at their own speech-to-text desktop solution...
Cursor AI's Silence on a Critical Flaw Jeopardizes Millions of Users
The flaw lets any repository auto-execute code on Cursor for Windows, and researchers say the company ignored it.
FreeBSD Laptop Support Continues Improving With WiFi, GPU & Audio Driver Work
The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too...
Mesa's Native Vulkan-To-Metal Driver Now Advertises Vulkan 1.4
KosmicKrisp as the Vulkan API driver built atop Apple's Metal API in Mesa for macOS and iOS systems is now advertising Vulkan 1.4 compatibility...
Khronos Lists First Conformant OpenCL 3.1 Implementation: Apple M1/M2 On Asahi Linux With Rusticl
Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 now has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver...