Coreboot 26.09 released yesterday as the latest quarterly feature release to this open-source software for replacing proprietary BIOS and system firmware on a growing selection of devices.

KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image.

As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end -- and close-up access -- to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss.

Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results are now in and it's clocking in just above 3%.

While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it's largely boring but here are some to illustrate.

Back in 2021 the Direct3D 10 User-Mode Driver "d3d10umd" was introduced as a new Gallium3D state tracker to work as a Windows WDDM UMD driver similar to Windows WARP while leveraging LLVMpipe for better performance. Now five years later the poorly maintained code is removed from the Mesa codebase.

Ubuntu 26.10 beta is now available for the official Ubuntu editions as well as the various community flavors.

During the past month on Phoronix were 284 original news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews/multi-page benchmark articles. A lot of exciting happenings both on the hardware and software fronts while October is sure to be another interesting month with the releases of Ubuntu 26.10, Fedora 45, and some more hardware fun.

With the vast array of wired and wireless networking drivers within the Linux kernel and range of protocols and other networking features, it's a big expanse of code for AI/LLM agents to analyze and critique. The Linux networking developers have acknowledged being "complete overwhelmed" by the AI/LLM-driven patch activity and bug reports as well as battling against AI slop patches. Even though Linux 7.3 stable won't be out for another three weeks, some networking fixes are already being diverted to the next kernel version.

Following yesterday's release of the Qt 6.12 LTS toolkit, The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 21 in beta form as the latest version of their integrated development environment focused on C/C++ as well as Python, JavaScript, and other programming languages.

In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version.

Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it's on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge.

Earlier this year Intel announced the "Optimization Zone" as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They've continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Intel hardware.

Back in August I wrote about NVIDIA working on Linux scheduler improvements for helping the SMT performance on their new Vera CPU with Olympus cores. That work remains ongoing but is looking fairly beneficial for performance especially for knocking it out in less than one hundred lines of code.

Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack.

The Renesas SH7305 isn't a new processor and is well known for powering various Casio graphing calculators over the past decde and a half. But finally the mainline Linux kernel may end up seeing support for this 32-bit SH-4a RISC core.

During the last round of price hikes on Raspberry Pi devices due to RAM pricing, they were able to keep the 1GB and 2GB single board computer versions steady. But Eben Upton announced today that the RAM pricing has become "unsustainable" and even the 2GB versions now are facing steep price hikes.

For ending out the month of September the OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew released OpenMandriva ROME 26.0 as their long overdue release held up by various technical issues and a reported sabotage attempt to their platform. With OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 having been their last release, this is quite a big update.

As part of Valve's work on developing the Steam Frame VR headset, they worked on foveated rendering support for the Mesa Turnip driver that supports the Qualcomm Adreno graphics with open-source Vulkan API support. Foveated rendering is the technique to more closely mimic human vision by rendering high detail at your direct gaze point and lower quality in the peripheral vision. For computer graphics, foveated rendering for headsets can be beneficial for conserving power in areas of the render frame that are less important to provide more performance with your main area of focus.

With the third quarter wrapping up, here is a look back at the most interesting content on Phoronix over the past three months.