Svobodný software

Back in April PostgreSQL added AVX-512 support for CRC32 computations. At the time the gains for CRC32 computations with this popular open-source database server were reported to be 50% to 3x faster for x86_64 CPUs able to leverage AVX-512. That AVX-512 support is found with PostgreSQL 18.0 that released in September and now Intel is praising this addition to PostgreSQL for which their developers also had a part in along with AWS and others...

Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.2.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release for this stable set of open-source (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library...

Valve just sent over the press release announcing three new Steam Hardware devices...

With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path...

Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware.

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has reached general availability with a number of enhancements to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. As with so many things in 2025, AI is a big focus for RHEL 10.1...

Back in August with the Vulkan 1.4.327 spec update was the introduction of VK_VALVE_video_encode_rgb_conversion as a Valve vendor extension. The open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has now merged support for this extension that is being used now by Steam Link VR...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who developed the open-source and reverse-engineered "Rocket" accel driver for the Rockchip NPU and also worked on the Etnaviv/Vivante NPU support and other related code like Mesa's Teflon is teasing new NPU drivers coming in the new year...

Webmin continues serving as one of the best open-source, web-based server management control panels for Linux and other Unix-like platforms. Webmin 2.600 is out today with yet more features and a refined theme...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has published their October 2025 status report...

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel...

The Ubuntu 25.10 transition to using some Rust system utilities continues proving quite rocky. Beyond some early performance issues with Rust Coreutils, breakage for some executables, and broken unattended upgrades due to a Rust Coreutils bug, it's also sudo-rs now causing Ubuntu developers some headaches. There are two moderate security issues affecting sudo-rs, the Rust version of sudo being used by Ubuntu 25.10...

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it's bringing its flagship Kaspersky anti-virus software for home users over to Linux. Kaspersky software was previously available for Linux just for business/enterprise deployments...

Sent out today and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is the latest batch of 64-bit ARM "ARM64" architecture fixes. Most notable is a fix for addressing a "catastrophic performance issue" that was uncovered...

It's "Patch Tuesday" and Intel is out with new CPU microcode for Linux users in addition to making public 30 new security advisories that affect a range of Intel products...

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation...

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.

While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...