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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
317 stories archived
Linux 7.1-rc7 Adding More AMD Zen 6 CPU Models
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc7 test kernel release due out later today, a pull request has been submitted of some "x86 fixes" for this kernel release. Most notable with this pull request is acknowledging some additional AMD Zen 6 CPU models...
Some Broadcom V3D Graphics Support On Path For Removed Over Lack Of Testing
Broadcom V3D 3.3 and V3D 4.1 graphics IP is set to be deprecated and removed from the V3D kernel graphics/display driver after the Mesa driver support was removed two years ago already. The situation in both cases amount to lack of hardware by developers for testing and with that likely no other known users of these particular Broadcom graphics in selects SoCs...
FreeBSD 15.1 Delayed To Mid-June Due To Critical x86 Bug Fixes
FreeBSD 15.1 was supposed to be out at the start of June but a second release candidate pushed it back by a week and now a third needed release candidate has pushed out the stable release by an additional week...
GNOME File Previewer Finally Switches TO GTK4, Adds Dark Mode
GNOME Sushi as the file previewer component for the GNOME Files (Nautilus) file manager has now been adapted to make use of GTK4 as well as delivering other enhancements for a nicer file previewing experience on GNOME...
OpenCV 5.0 Released With Rewritten DNN Engine, Built-In LLM & VLM Support
OpenCV 5.0 released today as a major update to this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library...
Valve Developer Posts New AMD Anti-Lag Implementation For RADV Driver
Daniel Schürmann of Valve's Linux team has posted a new VK_AMD_anti_lag implementation for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...
Ape: A New Vulkan Driver Written In The Zig Programming Language
Ape is a new open-source Vulkan driver written in the Zig programming language and not dependent upon any Mesa code...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Make Sure You Don't Miss Your Low Battery Notifications While Gaming
KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series...
GNU Gets Back Into Nutrition Software After 14 Year Hiatus
For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU's GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years...
Linux DRM Ioctl Developed By AMD Being Disabled Following Ongoing Security Issue
It's unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week's DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year...
Ubuntu 26.10 To Begin Laying Foundation For Context-Aware Desktop, Other New Features
Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team today posted a roadmap of many development items they are hoping to tackle for Ubuntu 26.10 due out in October. Some of these desktop plans are more ambitious and will take multiple release cycles to fully realize, but it goes to show their continued investment into the Ubuntu desktop...
CUDA-Oxide 0.2 Brings Early Improvements To Pure Rust CUDA Kernels
Last month CUDA-Oxide was introduced as an experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler. From pure Rust programming language code, one can write CUDA GPU kernels in a "safe(ish)" manner with the CUDA-Oxide compiler emitting NVIDIA PTX output directly. Out today is the second update to CUDA-Oxide...
[$] Moving beyond fork() + exec()
Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system calls have been fork() , which creates a child process as a copy of the parent, and exec() , which runs a new program in the place of the current one. In Linux kernels, those system calls are better known as clone() and execve() , but the core functionality remains the same. While there is elegance to this process-creation model, there are shortcomings as well. A recent proposal from Li Chen to add "spawn templates" to the kernel will not be accepted in its current form, but it may point the way toward a new process-creation primitive in the future.
ARM Linux Server Performance Up More Than 7x Geo Mean In 8 Years, As Much As 15x With NVIDIA Vera CPU
NVIDIA's Vera CPU is delivering the fastest ARM performance I have ever seen. For putting it into perspective how far the ARM server CPU hardware has come in just the last decade and for some "fun" benchmarks as part of Phoronix marking 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, here are some benchmarks showing the Ampere eMAG from September 2018 to the performance now with NVIDIA Vera. Not even factoring in the many software optimizations across the stack over the period, from simply the hardware side the ARM server CPU performance has advanced by more than 7x in eight years and in some workloads nearly 15x faster.
Vulkan 1.4.353 Released With Three New Extensions
After three weeks without any Vulkan API spec updates, Vulkan 1.4.353 was released today to deliver the latest documentation updates for this high performance graphics/compute API as well as introducing three new extensions...
Ruby's Bundler adds a cooldown feature
Version 4.0.13 of Ruby's Bundler package-manager has added dependency cooldowns in order to help mitigate the effect of supply-chain attacks: Most supply-chain attacks against RubyGems exploit a narrow window: an account is compromised, a malicious version ships, and any bundle install in the minutes that follow resolves straight to it. Bundler 4.0.13 introduces cooldown, a time-based filter that refuses to resolve to a version until it has been public for at least N days. Releases too new to have been scrutinized are passed over in favor of ones that have aged past the window. The feature was designed in the open , drawing on how other ecosystems approach the same problem . It is opt-in, and complements rather than replaces existing defenses like mandatory 2FA and trusted publishing. LWN covered dependency cooldowns in April, and the takeover of RubyGems and Bundler in October 2025.
Proton Drive is Now Faster (And Getting a Linux Client Soon)
The overhaul is part of a broader SDK rebuild that has been in the works throughout 2026.
New options added to (slick) Dynamic Music Pill GNOME extension
Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […] You're reading New options added to (slick) Dynamic Music Pill GNOME extension , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
More SpacemiT K3 & K1 Support Landing In Upstream Linux 7.2
In addition to Apple M3 Device Trees for Linux 7.2, the SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs are seeing some notable Device Tree improvements with this next version of the Linux kernel...
NVIDIA's Nova Driver Continues Being Built Up In Linux 7.2 Along With Other DRM Rust Code
Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape...
Linux 7.2 Continues Improving AMDGPU Support On POWER, ARM
In addition to AMDGPU finally seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL support in Linux 7.2, another change worth noting in this week's AMDGPU pull request is the continued work on enhancing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver support for non-4K page size kernel builds. In particular this helps out with AMD graphics and ROCm for the likes of ARM and POWER...
GNOME 51 Retires Legacy NVIDIA Driver Support With Removing EGLStreams
EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter...
Today Marks 22 Years Of Phoronix For Linux Hardware Testing & Benchmarking
Today marks 22 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. It's been quite a journey from the early state of Linux hardware support.....
Benchmarking The BORE Scheduler Performance With CachyOS Linux
Earlier this week I ran benchmarks of different CachyOS Linux kernel flavors that proved interesting from the performance overhead of their hardened kernel build to various other interesting performancr takeaways. One kernel flavor I hadn't tested though was their build with the BORE scheduler. Given the interest and feedback from Phoronix readers, here is an article focused on looking at the performance of the BORE scheduler for the Linux kernel on CachyOS.