KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta Released With Plasma Big Screen, Union Modules
In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7...
New AMDGPU Driver Pull Request For Linux 7.2 Preps For HDML 2.1 FRL
Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge...
Linux's KVM With CET Virtualization Is Causing Some Hosts To Hang
Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature...
Older AMD GPUs Score Another Open-Source Driver Win From Valve: DRM Format Modifiers
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers...
Arm Mali G1 Pro Now Working With Open-Source PanVK & Panfrost Drivers
The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported...
Linux Driver Posted For Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface "ISSEI"
Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI)...
Fragnesia Made Public As Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability...
GCC 16 Produces Faster Binaries Than GCC 15, Competitive Race With LLVM Clang 22
GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM/Clang open-source compiler, which is the focus of today's benchmarking showdown.
Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware...
Discord Touts "Year Of The Linux Desktop" With Linux Client Improvements
Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client...
NetBSD 11.0-RC4 Comes As Hopefully The Last Release Candidate
In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate...
KDE Receiving Over 1.2 Million EUR Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack...
Arm Preparing The Linux Kernel For 128-bit Page Table Entries "FEAT_D128"
A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later...
Wine Wayland Driver Merges Pointer Warp Support
Wine's Wayland native driver has taken another step forward with now supporting the pointer warp "wp_pointer_warp_v1" protocol...
OpenZFS 2.4.2 Released With Linux 7.0 Kernel Support, Many Bug Fixes
For those making use of OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD, OpenZFS 2.4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation...
FreeBSD 15.2 Will Aim For The Nice KDE Desktop Installation Experience
FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn't end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2...
AMD & Intel Roll Out New Linux Updates For Today's Patch Tuesday
Today's Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don't appear to be too widespread or impactful...
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 Further Improves NVIDIA Integration For Steam Play Linux Gaming
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support...
IBM s390 Is The Latest Architecture Seeing Rust Linux Kernel Support
An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture...
Running Four Intel Graphics Cards Under Linux On Ubuntu 26.04
It's been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GPU state of the Arc (Pro) graphics cards on Linux with their open-source driver code.
ARCTIC Fan Controller Driver Expected To Land In Linux 7.2
A new driver expected to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is the ARCTIC Fan Controller driver to allow fan speed monitoring and PWM controls for this upcoming ARCTIC product. Making this new driver all the more exciting is that it was worked on by ARCTIC directly compared to the typical workflow for such desktop/consumer hardware peripherals often being left up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community...
Linux Scheduler Work Helping Boost Gaming Performance On Old "Potato" Hardware
Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a "potato" -- an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too...
Fwupd 2.1.3 Brings Firmware Updating To Modular Smartphones
Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems...
Intel Looking To Move Their Low-Power Mode Daemon Into The Linux Kernel Source Tree
For years Intel has been developing the Low Power Mode Daemon "LPMD" to help their hybrid laptop and desktop CPUs deliver optimal power efficiency under Linux. Intel LPMD leverages hardware hints and other features for optimizing active idle power of the processor and putting the system into lower power modes where possible. This tool could soon call the Linux kernel source tree its new home...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku Finally Sees Initial ARM64 SMP Support
The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April...
Open-Source Radeon Driver For R300 Through R500 GPUs Sees Big Code Cleanup In 2026
The open-source Radeon "R300g" driver living within the Mesa codebase for supporting the aging ATI (AMD) Radeon 9500 "R300" through Radeon X1000 "R500" series graphics processors is going through a big code restructuring as part of a big undertaking in 2026... Yes, 24 years after the ATI R300 GPUs first released, thanks to a devoted open-source developer fan, there is a significant improvement in the works...
Vulkan 1.4.351 Brings Six New Extensions, Including A Ray-Tracing Improvement
Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API...
HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression "DSC" Also Ready For AMDGPU Linux Driver
At the beginning of the month was the surprise milestone of AMD posting AMDGPU kernel driver patches for HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support. The HDMI FRL patches have since been updated to also enable HDMI 2.1's Display Stream Compression (DSC) functionality for higher resolutions and higher refresh rates with the open-source AMDGPU driver...
Redesigned Thelio Major Elevates System76's All-AMD, Open-Source Linux Workstation
A few weeks back we reviewed the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics for delivering a very powerful, all-AMD and open-source high-end Linux workstation.
GNOME's Help Viewer Updated Due To Flatpak Sandbox Escape Vulnerability
GNOME's help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There's a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector...
Intel IGC 2.34.4 Compiler Brings Many Improvements
The Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows...
F2FS Preparing FSERROR Reporting Support
Introduced in Linux 7.0 was FSERROR as generic I/O error reporting infrastructure. Linux to that point had no standardized mechanism for reporting metadata corruption or file I/O errors to user-space with each file-system doing its own thing. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now the latest Linux file-system preparing for FSERROR usage...