For those on an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" system, the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel is looking to be in better shape for those newest Intel SoCs. In testing carried out using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura edition laptop, there are performance gains in some areas with the Linux 6.16 development kernel.

A nice improvement was merged today to the X.Org Server for benefiting the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code when using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

Linux 6.17 is expected to clear out some final remnants of the OpenMoko Neo 1973 and Neo FreeRunner smartphone support from that Linux smartphone effort from two decades ago...

The Linux support for the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld continues to be improved upon thanks to the option of having Steam OS on this alternative to the Steam Deck...

Sent out today was the newest drm-misc-next pull request of changes built up over the past week for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. The drm-misc-next material is the usual random assortment of DRM display/graphics driver changes and core improvements, which this week includes some TTM eviction work...

Libreboot 25.06 released this week as the newest version of this Coreboot downstream focused on shipping only with free and open-source components. But due to the strict open-source nature of Libreboot, it continues to primarily see support for long outdated platforms...

Steam Survey issues prevented the survey results from being posted on the evening of the 1st as is traditionally done, but the results were just uploaded now to the Steam website. Steam on Linux usage dipped slightly but overall remains healthy with much excitement still around the Steam Deck and SteamOS efforts...

Following last month's release of Debian Installer Trixie RC1 as the installer for the upcoming Debian 13.0 release, a second release candidate was issued today for testing...

The ZLUDA open-source effort that started off a half-decade ago as a drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs and then for several years was funded by AMD as a CUDA implementation for Radeon GPUs atop ROCm and then open-sourced but then reverted has been continuing to push along a new path since last year. The current take on ZLUDA is a multi-vendor CUDA implementation for non-NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads and more. More progress was made during Q2 on this effort...

Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs, AMD software engineers today posted patches for review on the "amd-ai-engine" accelerator driver. This new AMD AI Engine driver is for supporting the IP found on their Versal adaptive SoCs...

For those curious about the direction of Mozilla Firefox web browser performance over the past year and a half, here are web browser benchmarks for every Firefox release from Firefox 120 in November 2023 through the newest Firefox 140 stable and Firefox 140 beta releases from a few days ago. Every major Firefox release was benchmarked on the same Ubuntu Linux system with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X for evaluating the performance and memory usage of this open-source web browser.

A few days ago Wayback was announced as an X11 compatibility layer for X11 desktops environments leveraging a rootful XWayland server. While currently experimental, the hope is that it will be production-ready next year and Alpine Linux is looking at using it by default for its X11 environment...

Prior to the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel there was the DG1 graphics processor that served primarily as the initial developer vehicle for facilitating Intel's modern discrete GPU push. DG1 ended up being in the Intel Xe MAX GPU for a small number of laptops and then there's also been a select number of DG1 graphics cards surfacing on eBay in the years since. Only now in 2025 is the upstream Linux kernel driver set to enable Intel DG1 graphics out-of-the-box for modern Linux distributions...

GNOME Papers has been in development as a modern GTK4-based document viewer. There have been many improvements made to Papers and now ahead of the GNOME 49 release in September, it's been approved to replace Evince as the official document viewer of the GNOME desktop...

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API. A new merge request is further enhancing OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability by supporting the GL_NV_timeline_semaphore extension...

The newest Arm SoC seeing Linux kernel patches working their way toward the mainline kernel is the Axiado AX3000 as a security processor designed for cloud data center, network gear, and more...

AMD today submitted their initial batch of "new stuff" for queuing into DRM-Next of their kernel graphics/compute driver changes they have prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle opening in a few weeks...

For those on very long server upgrade cycles, typically just running the hardware until failure or consider buying second-hand servers that are generations old for lower up-front cost, today's unique article is for you with quantifying a first-generation EPYC server compared to today's entry-level EPYC processors in performance and power efficiency. With the fascinating AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" budget-friendly server processors I was curious how well they would stack up against AMD's original flagship EPYC processor, the AMD EPYC 7601 "Naples" processor from the Zen 1 era. Can an entry-level brand new Grado server processor with dual channel DDR5 memory outpace an original EPYC server with twice the core/thread counts and eight channel DDR4 server memory? Yes, with huge gains in performance and power efficiency.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has decided to "double down" their investment in OpenJDK Java for Ubuntu Linux...

The Gentoo Linux project ended the month of June by releasing new install media...

The Mesa 25.2 release that will likely be out as stable in August should have nice initial support for the newest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, namely used by the GeForce RTX 50 series, with the NVK open-source driver for Vulkan usage...

NVIDIA previously warned CUDA users that CUDA 12.x is the last for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs. NVIDIA overnight now officially confirmed that the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPU support is going to end in their Linux driver with the upcoming NVIDIA R580 Linux driver series...

Over the course of last month on Phoronix were 240 original news articles written by your's truly as well as another 24 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. On top of that last month also marked the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com...

The digiKam 8.7 professional photo management software has been released for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source solution for digital photography...

Coincidentally after writing this morning wondering about what's going on with AerynOS (formerly known as Serpent OS), contributors "NomadicCore" and "Ermo" have issued a new project update outlining what's been going on the past few months...

While Q2 is drawing to an end in the coming hours, Intel software engineers this evening just released the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2025Q1 update that provides all of their latest patches around Intel GPU/video acceleration for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library that have yet to be upstreamed into FFmpeg proper...

Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical today publicly announced the formation of their "Debcrafters" global team to help ensure the health of the Ubuntu Archive...

AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux remain two of the most popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives that are maintained by the open-source community. With the recent Rocky Linux 10 GA release that followed the recent AlmaLinux 10 release for re-basing against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these popular downstreams compared to RHEL 10.

KDE developers are improving its clock "KClock" app with leveraging the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol support...

Too much vRAM and too many Instinct accelerators per server is causing system hibernation to fail on some high-end AMD AI Linux-powered servers. Having eight accelerators each with 192GB of device memory can in turn cause system hibernation to run into problems if the Linux server has only 2TB of system RAM... But a new patch series was posted today in working to address this problem with the Linux kernel for high-end systems failing to hibernate. A similar issue is that when thawing the system the process can take nearly one hour due to the amount of memory...

Released three months ago was the first AerynOS ISO release for that Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty and from there plans were laid to provide "accelerated delivery of milestone ISOs." But now Q2 is ending without any further announcements from this interesting Linux distribution formerly known as SerpentOS...

It looks like Linux 6.17 could end up enabling experimental support for large data folios that could help with bringing some performance improvements under real-world workloads for this copy-on-write file-system...

A proposal raised last week for Fedora 44 was to drop i686 support with ending multi-lib and x86 32-bit packages support. But following a fair amount of opposition to the idea, this matter isn't going to be pursued for next spring's Fedora 44 release...

The newest product in the Raspberry Pi family launching today is the Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.16-rc4 as we prepare to close out the first half of 2025 and hitting roughly one month until the Linux 6.16 stable release...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 10.11 for running Windows games and applications on Linux is now Hangover 10.11 for this Wine-based software used for running Windows games/applications cross-architecture such as on AArch64/ARM64 systems...

It looks like AMD is preparing to introduce some new APUs/SoCs still relying on RDNA1-based graphics with open-source GPU driver patches posted this week extending the "Cyan Skillfish" support to some new APU devices...

Wayback is a new open-source project working on providing an X11 compatibility layer for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components with a rootful XWayland server...

Released earlier this month were various GNOME 49 Alpha 0 packages including for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor while out this weekend are the "Alpha 1" releases...

With Q2 quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other Linux/open-source news for the quarter...