Linux NewsIntel Talks Up Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" & Arc B390 Graphics
Intel just hosted their CES keynote where they formally launched Panther Lake as the Core Ultra Series 3 SoCs...
Radeon Linux Driver Patches For Next-Gen Hardware Point To New NPU Integration
Back in November AMD began posting open-source Linux graphics driver patches for some next-gen graphics IP. Those IP block patches were for MMHUB, PSP, and other blocks making up modern AMD GPUs. The GFXHUB patch pointed it to being part of the GFX12 / RDNA4 family. Out today are new patches for enabling the SMU15 IP and an interesting takeaway there is some apparent NPU integration for future Radeon graphics...
GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire"
Both the GNOME desktop and Mozilla Firefox browser projects are considering disabling middle-click-paste functionality by default...
Valve & AMD Developers Delivered The Most Code Contributions To Mesa In 2025
A developer from Valve working on the RADV Vulkan driver was once again the most prolific contributor to Mesa in 2025 followed by AMD's Marek Olลกรกk with continued improvements around RadeonSI and Gallium3D...
Radeon RADV Driver Lands Another Ray-Tracing Improvement: 30% Faster On RDNA2
Konstantin Seurer as one of the open-source developers working on the RADV driver for Valve has landed another ray-tracing performance optimization for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release...
Apple SMC Power Driver Posted For Linux Kernel To Finally Expose Battery Stats
The newest open-source Apple Silicon driver being submitted for review in working toward its inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel is the Apple Silicon SMC power driver for being able to expose MacBook battery power metrics as well as AC power adapter status reporting under Linux...
Patches Posted Seeking To Mainline Support For The Acer Swift SFA14-11 Snapdragon Laptop
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC...
Intel Xe Driver Preps THP Support For "Significant" SVM Performance Gains
Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding "significant" performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads...
Linux Kernel AES Library Seeing Improvements For Better Performance & More
A set of 36 patches sent out overnight is making big improvements to the Linux kernel's AES library. The patches allow for making use of the kernel's existing architecture-optimized AES code for better performance, that code is also constant-time, lower memory use, and all-around a nice improvement over the status quo...
There Is No One Left On Debian's Data Protection Team
Besides Debian's aging bug tracker interface, another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters...
AMD RDNA4 With RADV Now Support New Performance Counters For Better Profiling
Merged back in December for Mesa 26.0 was RADV now supporting some new performance counters to help game developers and open-source driver developers. That new performance counter support aligned with the AMD GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release. At first those new performance counters were wired up for RDNA1 through RDNA3.5 GPUs while now the support has arrived for the latest RDNA4 GPUs...
GCC 16 Lands Support For Using Picolibc
While veteran open-source developer Keith Packard is known for his X.Org Server contributions over many years, another more recent open-source creation of his is Picolibc as a C library for embedded systems. As the latest achievement on that front, merged this weekend to the GCC 16 compiler codebase is support for using Picolibc...
Linux 6.19-rc4 Released Following A Quiet Holiday Week, 6.19-rc8 Already Planned
Following the holidays, Linux 6.19-rc4 was released today in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable kernel release in early February...
GNU ddrescue 1.30 "Orders of Magnitude" Better In Recovery From Drives With A Dead Head
GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by "orders of magnitude" for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head...
Manjaro Linux 26.0 Rolling Out - Xfce Edition Recommended If Wanting To Use X11
Package updates for the Arch Linux powered Manjaro Linux distribution have been pushed out for Manjaro 26.0 "Anh-Linh" while updated ISOs are expected to soon become available. The Manjaro 26.0 milestone brings KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 but with both of those you may lose X11 session support so they are recommending their Xfce Edition for wanting wanting to continue using an X.Org desktop session...