ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

KVM Guest VMs Using Intel AMX Can Cause The Linux Host To Kernel Panic

([Intel] 23 December 08:35 PM EST Using AMX To Cause A Panic)

An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers... It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic.



Linux's sched_ext Has Plans For GPU Awareness, Energy-Aware Abstractions

([Linux Kernel] 23 December 08:16 PM EST sched_ext future plans)

Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026.



Open-Source Linux Driver Christmas Surprise For 20~23 Year Old Radeon GPUs

([Radeon] 23 December 03:24 PM EST R300g Driver Work)

If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn't nostalgic enough for you, here's something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors.



LibreOffice 26.2 Gets Rid Of The "Community" Edition Branding

([LibreOffice] 23 December 02:15 PM EST LibreOffice Community Edition)

With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the "Community Edition" branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite.



Micro QuickJS Engine Compiles & Runs JavaScript With As Little As 10kB Of RAM

([Free Software] 23 December 12:51 PM EST Micro QuickJS)

Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM.



Intel NPU Firmware Published For Panther Lake - Completing The Linux Driver Support

([Intel] 23 December 12:35 PM EST Intel Panther Lake NPU Firmware)

Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository.



AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months

([Software] 23 December 10:30 AM EST 10 Comments)

As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.



GCC 16 Lands Armv9.6-A Target Support

([GNU] 23 December 06:03 AM EST Armv9.6-A)

Merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 16.1 stable release of the GCC 16 compiler is initial support for the Armv9.6-A target.



PowerVR Open-Source Vulkan Driver Preparing For New GPU Support

([Mesa] 23 December 07:36 AM EST PowerVR New GPUs)

The open-source Mesa PowerVR "PVR" Vulkan driver has merged multi-architecture support as part of preparing to add support for newer Imagination GPUs.



LLVM Considering An AI Tool Policy, AI Bot For Fixing Build System Breakage Proposed

([LLVM] 23 December 06:35 AM EST LLVM + AI)

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy. The proposed policy would allow AI-assisted contributions to be made to this open-source compiler codebase but that there would need to be a "human in the loop" and the contributor versed enough to be able to answer questions during code review. Separately, yesterday a proposal was sent out for creating an AI-assisted fixer bot to help with Bazel build system breakage.



Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers

([Linux Kernel] 23 December 06:10 AM EST SCX LAVD)

An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.



Linux Sensor Monitoring For ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO, Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A

([Hardware] 23 December 05:59 AM EST Linux HWMON)

For those currently owning an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO or ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A motherboard, Linux sensor monitoring support will be in place for the next kernel release.



Intel Linux Driver Preps For Up To 13 Different Panther Lake H SoCs

([Intel] 22 December 08:15 PM EST Panther Lake H)

It looks like the upcoming Intel Panther Lake H SoCs for the next-gen premium/high-end performance laptop market there could be quite a few different SKUs. A new patch for an Intel open-source driver expands the Panther Lake H line-up from three to 13 different IDs.



Google Taps More Performance Out Of AMD Zen CPUs With BPF-CCX Scheduling

([Google] 22 December 04:06 PM EST BPF CCX For AMD Chiplet CPUs)

For helping with thread placement on modern AMD Zen systems with multiple CPU core complexes, Google has been developing "BPF CCX" that leverages the Linux kernel's eBPF capabilities paired with a user-space agent for fine-grained thread control. Google has found very positive performance results out of their use of this alternative means of high performance scheduling for achieving even greater performance on AMD processors under Linux.



RADV Adds Support For New Performance Counters To Help Game Developers

([Radeon] 22 December 03:34 PM EST Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6)

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics team has landed improvements for the Mesa 260 RADV driver to support new performance counters in conjunction with AMD's Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release.



Elementary OS 8.1 Switches Over To Wayland Session By Default

([Operating Systems] 22 December 01:38 PM EST Elementary OS 8.1)

Thirteen months after the release of Elementary OS 8.0, Elementary OS 8.1 is now available for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and usability. With Elementary OS 8.1 they have transitioned to using the Wayland session by default.



Lua 5.5 Released With Declarations For Global Variables, Garbage Collection Improvements

([Programming] 22 December 12:25 PM EST Lua 5.5)

Five years after releasing Lua 5.4, Lua 5.5 debuted today as the newest version of this lightweight and embeddable scripting language.



Linux 6.19's Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs

([Display Drivers] 22 December 10:14 AM EST 27 Comments)

For those still using old AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" or GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is a wonderful holiday gift. With Linux 6.19, the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are now defaulting to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver in place of the legacy "Radeon" DRM driver that has been the default for GCN 1.1/1.0 and other ATI/AMD graphics processors of the past 2+ decades. In this article is a look at the performance benefit of now AMDGPU being the default as well as now enabling RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box.



Rex: Proposed Safe Rust Kernel Extensions For The Linux Kernel, In Place Of eBPF

([Linux Kernel] 22 December 09:18 AM EST Rust Rex)

University researchers presented Rex at this month's Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 in Tokyo. Rex is designed for "safe and usable" Rust-based kernel extensions that could serve in place of eBPF programs for extending the Linux kernel functionality.



Linux 7.0 To Remove Support For AMD's Never-Released Ryzen AI NPU2

([AMD] 22 December 08:55 AM EST AMD NPU2)

The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products.



More

Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
Time passed, unheeded.
Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
-- Wayfarer