System76 developers just released COSMIC Epoch 1.11 as the newest point release to their Rust-written open-source desktop environment catering to their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Among the many VFS pull requests merged as the initial material for the in-development Linux 7.4, the VFS IOmap pull introduced lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads. This improvement is benefiting checksumming on XFS with improved performance and lower resource usage...

Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN...

For those running a Star Labs StarFighter Ultra or other Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake laptop, the recent Ubuntu 26.10 release is providing some nice performance gains over the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Here is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 26.10 performs with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H over dozens of different benchmarks.

The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop...

Added to the Linux kernel last year was Coredump support via Unix domain sockets as an alternative to the pipe-based Coredumps. With code now merged for Linux 7.4, the core dumps via sockets has the potential of being much smaller thanks to sparse support. In extreme cases they can be 1% of the size without sparse support...

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel -- as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel...

Following last week's release of Plasma 6.8, the Plasma 6.8.1 point release is out today with dozens of bug fixes...

The Omarchy Linux distribution to date has been centered on x86_64 support for this Arch Linux distribution. Released today was Omarchy 4.5-RC1 and with this new version there is initial AArch64 support centered around Snapdragon X and NVIDIA N1X laptop support...

Linux 7.4 is seeing a new emulation function added for cmpxchg() for compare and exchange. This is being done so that two-byte cmpxchg() can be used in common Linux kernel code that is already natively supported on newer CPU architectures. The pull request notes though that some old systems might no longer be supported by the Linux kernel moving ahead...

Miguel Ojeda sent out his pull request of the new Rust kernel code slated for introduction in Linux 7.4. It's a big one this round due to updating the Zerocopy vendored library plus updating other Rust crates for the kernel...

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 8.0 today as the 61st release of this BSD operating system...

AMD GAIA 0.25 is out this week as the latest feature release for this open-source project that began as "Generative AI Is Awesome" and is now going on a tag line of "AMD's open-source agent factory" in building/using local AI agents on AMD Ryzen AI hardware...

In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers...

With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system...

An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve's Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK...

Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results...

The Motorola 68000 "m68k" CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models...

Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well...

GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday's Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals...