https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Adopts-LLM-Policy https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Adopts-LLM-Policy The Mesa RADV driver that provides Vulkan API support for AMD Radeon GPUs on Linux has adopted its own policy around AI / large language models (LLMs) for code contributions... Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:16:22 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeRDP-3.33 https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeRDP-3.33 The FreeRDP 3.33 software released today as the newest version of this open-source Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation... Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:07:14 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Linux-October-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Linux-October-2026 KDE developer Nate Graham published his monthly blog post on Sunday to outline the current state of KDE Linux and some of the changes made to this in-house Linux distribution over the course of October. Additionally, KDE Linux is nearing its beta milestone after beinbg in development for over one year as a reference Linux distribution for KDE... Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:39:21 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-16GB-385 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-16GB-385 Raspberry Pi announced their latest round of price hikes as a result of the RAM shortages and increased pricing continuing to affect the industry... Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:27:17 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Survey-October-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Survey-October-2026 Valve just published their Steam Survey results for October and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use on a relative basis... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 20:47:46 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-rc1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-rc1 Even with Linus Torvalds having been on holiday, Linux 7.4-rc1 is out today on-schedule for capping off the Linux 7.4 merge window... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 16:51:34 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Kwi-Terminal-Emulator https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Kwi-Terminal-Emulator A new KDE terminal emulator is in development as a modern alternative to Konsole. Kwi is this new terminal app being built atop the Ghostty library... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 08:41:39 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Massive-Window https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Massive-Window After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel's source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 07:00:11 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OverlayFS-Many-Fixes https://www.phoronix.com/news/OverlayFS-Many-Fixes Merged this weekend for Linux 7.4 and also marked for back-porting to current stable kernel versions are a number of fixes to the OverlayFS union mount file-system... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 06:37:07 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/October-2026-Highlights https://www.phoronix.com/news/October-2026-Highlights October brought the releases of Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 26.10, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop, and a wealth of other open-source software releases. The expanding use of AI/LLMs within Linux kernel development also made for interesting discussions in October. Microsoft bringing their Defender software to the Linux desktop was perhaps the biggest surprise out of October. Here is a look back at the past month... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 05:54:04 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Perf-Tools https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Perf-Tools Merged this weekend to Linux 7.4 Git were all of the perf subsystem tooling updates. Most notable to these tooling updates for dealing with performance counters and more on Linux is an overhaul to the Python code... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 05:38:55 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Merge-Window https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Merge-Window Linux 7.3 started out just under 41 million lines in total in the kernel source tree. In the end the Linux v7.3 tag came in at 41,019,555 lines as measured by cloc while now with Linux 7.4 we are inching ever closer to 42 million lines. On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record... Sun, 01 Nov 2026 05:28:22 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/RAID-Drive-Replacement-Tonight https://www.phoronix.com/news/RAID-Drive-Replacement-Tonight Just a friendly heads up that Phoronix.com and associated sites will be down briefly at around midnight PST / 3AM EST on 1 November for a failed drive in the NVMe SSD RAID array... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 20:32:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenShot-4.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenShot-4.1-Released OpenShot is closing out the month of October by releasing OpenShot 4.1 as the latest major feature release for this useful open-source video editing solution... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 19:28:50 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Enlightenment-0.28 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Enlightenment-0.28 Enlightenment 0.27 released at the beginning of 2025 and since then there's been no major feature update, falling off their roughly 12 month release cadence. But out this Halloween is Enlightenment 0.28 now with the better part of two years worth of changes... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 10:46:26 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-October-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-October-2026 Linux Mint is out with their October 2026 status report to outline various initiatives they have underway in their lead-up to the Linux Mint 27 stable release happening on/around Christmas... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 10:36:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Drops-Taint-Bind https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Drops-Taint-Bind A new feature merged last week for Linux 7.4 to help reduce AI/LLM generated noise from invalid/irrelevant testing configurations is now reverted due to a "crazy beast" in the VFIO subsystem... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 08:15:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.9-More-Performance https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.9-More-Performance I love a good performance optimization and there are several this week in the KDE space with Plasma 6.9 development heating up... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:51:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Ceph https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Ceph The Ceph kernel client changes have been submitted for Linux 7.4 ahead of its merge window expected to wrap up on Sunday... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Establishes-RFC https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Establishes-RFC In recent weeks GNOME developers have been discussing a formal Request For Comments "RFC" process for solving major technical questions and changes to GNOME. This formalized process for succeeding their ad-hoc processes up to now has reached consensus... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:10:19 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-NVAPI-0.9.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-NVAPI-0.9.3 DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.3 is out this weekend as a new feature update to this NVIDIA NVAPI implementation used by Valve as part of Steam Play with Proton for nicely integrating NVIDIA technologies into various Windows games running on Linux... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/CUDA-Oxide-0.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/CUDA-Oxide-0.3 NVIDIA software engineers released CUDA Oxide 0.3 for closing out October. CUDA Oxide as a reminder is their experimental Rust to CUDA compiler that has been seeing a lot of activity in recent months... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 05:50:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sculpt-OS-26.10 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sculpt-OS-26.10 Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system project born out of the Genode initiative is now using the project's own microkernel rather than a third-party microkernel... Sat, 31 Oct 2026 05:37:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.21-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.21-Released Wine 11.21 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and as we near Wine 12.0 stable release happenings getting underway in about one month with the official v12.0 release expected early in the new year... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:29:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/PostgreSQL-19-Late https://www.phoronix.com/news/PostgreSQL-19-Late The PostgreSQL database server typically sees its annual feature release every September~October, but it's not coming until at least November if not longer this year. Due to the increased developer burden due to increased bug reporting and patches via AI/LLM activity, the PostgreSQL developers have been overwhelmed... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 14:06:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-27.04-Opens-For-Dev https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-27.04-Opens-For-Dev Following this month's release of Ubuntu 26.10, Ubuntu 27.04 development formally got underway today... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:32:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-x86-Platform-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-x86-Platform-Driver The x86 platform driver changes were merged this week to the Linux 7.4 kernel ahead of the merge window closing this weekend... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:24:46 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NULLos https://www.phoronix.com/news/NULLos With today's AI/LLM capabilities, there is almost a new operating system heard about each week "coded from scratch" predominantly via AI agents. This week was no exception with another project hitting our email inbox. Though most of them are open-source, this one is closed-source in the name of security... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:23:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-IOMMU https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-IOMMU As anticipated, the AMD PerfOpt feature was picked up for the Linux 7.4 kernel. As shown already in multiple Phoronix benchmarks, AMD PerfOpt makes for a nice performance boost for AMD integrated graphics, especially for AI workloads... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 06:21:54 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Patches-Intel-macsmc https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Patches-Intel-macsmc The Linux kernel's "macsmc" driver was developed for supporting the system management controller (SMC) on Apple Silicon Macs for supporting the light sensor, fan control, and other sensors. That macsmc driver now is seeing work to extend it for better supporting older Intel-powered Macs... Fri, 30 Oct 2026 06:05:47 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-1p-2p https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-1p-2p For those curious how NVIDIA Vera is scaling between single and dual socket deployments, here are some benchmarks I carried out a while back exploring the power and performance from one to two Vera CPUs. Thu, 29 Oct 2026 09:36:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu2610-fedora45 https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu2610-fedora45 With the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 and the nearly-released Fedora Workstation 45, Phoronix readers have begun inquiring about fresh benchmarks looking at how they stack up against the performance-optimized, Arch Linux based CachyOS. Up today are our first CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D2 desktop system. Wed, 28 Oct 2026 10:46:46 -0400 Michael Larabel