Linux NewsLinux 7.1 Merges AMD Dynamic EPP Fixes, Intel Bartlett Lake Scaling Fix
Merged today for Linux 7.1 was this week's power management fixes with a few notable fixes for both AMD and Intel platforms...
[$] Custom page-cache policies with BPF
The kernel's page cache is charged with maintaining pages (or, more correctly, folios) containing copies of data from files in the filesystem; its performance has a big effect on the performance of the system as a whole. One of the key decisions the kernel must make is when to evict folios from the page cache. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Tal Zussman ran a memory-management-track session on how the page cache could be better customized for specific workloads. It will not be much of a spoiler to say that it involves BPF.
[$] Toward better handling of major page faults
A major page fault occurs when a process attempts to access a page that is not currently present in RAM; satisfying such faults usually involves I/O, and can thus take some time. When many threads sharing an address space are generating page faults, the result can be significant lock contention while that I/O takes place. During the memory-management track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Barry Song led a session to try, yet again, to find an enduring solution to this problem.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox), Debian (chromium, nss, openvpn, and thunderbird), Fedora (cockpit, kernel, and linux-firmware), Oracle (gdk-pixbuf2, kernel, and libsndfile), SUSE (container-suseconnect, cpp-httplib, dnsmasq, firefox, glibc, GraphicsMagick, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, mozjs115, php8, python-urllib3, rekor, rootlesskit, rsync, tiff, ucode-intel, util-linux, and xz), and Ubuntu (bind9, bubblewrap, libarchive, linux-intel-iot-realtime, postgresql-14, postgresql-16, postgresql-17, postgresql-18, and xdg-desktop-portal).
Wine’s VKD3D 2.0 Brings Direct3D 12 to Vulkan Updates
VKD3D 2.0 open-source 3D library updates Wine’s Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer with HLSL, DXIL, and debugging improvements.
OpenCL 3.1.1 Released To Address A Possible Performance Regression
Released earlier this month was the OpenCL 3.1 specification with a focus on enhancing AI and HPC workloads for this long-time Khronos specification. Out today is OpenCL 3.1.1 as a point release with an emphasis on addressing a possible performance regression of OpenCL 3.1...
Good News! After Lenovo and Dell, Now HP Pledges to Support Linux Vendor Firmware Service
More major vendors supporting LVFS is a good sign for the desktop Linux community.
systemd 261-rc1 Released With OS Installer, IMDS Subsystem & New storagectl
The first release candidate of systemd 261 is out today and it includes yet more features for this Linux init system and service manager...
Linux Provides Better Performance With The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Over Windows 11
Last month with the new AMD Zen 5 "Dual Edition" 3D V-Cache CPU, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition showed great performance on Linux across a range of workloads. Curious if the operating system was playing into the greater benefit of Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 versus just the workloads tested, this article is looking at both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 on Microsoft Windows 11 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Linux across a range of native benchmarks.
HP Panther Lake Systems Now Have Intel ISH Firmware For Linux
For those with a new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop from HP or considering one of these new systems, the Intel ISH firmware has now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for enhancing the out-of-the-box support...
AMD PMC Linux Driver Preps For Zen 6 CPUs
The AMD SoC Power Management Controller Driver is the latest seeing patch activity now in preparing for next-gen Zen 6 processors...
Proposed Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" For LLVM Is Great News
A new proposal volleyed today among LLVM developers is for Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" for the ThinLTO link-time optimization code. This is great news for today's high core count CPUs when looking to compile very large LLVM modules...
Expanded Reset Support Coming For AMDGPU To Recover From More GPU Compute Hangs
A set of 42 patches were posted on Thursday for the AMDGPU kernel driver and associated AMDKFD compute driver code for enabling pipe reset capabilities for compute workloads...
Linux Sound Subsystem Also Seeing Many Fixes Driven By AI/LLMs
It's not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing -- including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues -- leading to "craziness" from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many "assisted-by" patches coming about in recent weeks...
ONLYOFFICE 9.4 brings new features – and a stricter licence
A new version of ONLYOFFICE, the open-source productivity suite, is out with a small set of improvements. The new release lands nearly two months after ONLYOFFICE suspended its eight-year Nextcloud partnership over Euro-Office, a fork by a European consortium that ONLYOFFICE says violates its AGPLv3 licence terms. Totally unrelated (yes, sarcasm), ONLYOFFICE 9.4 updates its licensing to tighten language around attribution, copyright notices and the labelling of modified versions. Viva le fork; it still permits modifications, but is more sniffy about use of its trademarks. Features-wise, ONLYOFFICE 9.4.0 adds Croatian language translations across all editors and shuffles chart settings out […]