With the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end for all Radeon GPUs rather than the conventional AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with Radeon 8060S Graphics for comparison.

A few weeks back I reported on Linux kernel patches surfacing for implementing Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions. This should help some HP devices and hardware from other OEMs for obtaining fan information reporting under Linux. The good news now is that the patches should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.

H.J. Lu, a long-time compiler expert at Intel, merged today improved memmove() behavior for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 16 release.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel will add support for the Line 6 POD HD Pro X audio effects processor that has been in the market for several years now -- the past decade! -- but only now seeing the necessary additions for Linux support.

Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur" is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for "init freedom" lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.18-rc4 as the latest weekly test release. Linux 6.18 is looking to be in good shape for potentially releasing on-time at the end of November otherwise the first week of December.

Slipping under my radar in October was the release of NASM 3.00 and the follow-up NASM 3.01 release shortly there after. This widely-used open-source assembler is now ready with support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10.

Merged this weekend ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc4 test kernel release due out later today is the "x86/fixes" for the week. There are a few notable changes on the x86 (x86_64) side of the kernel this week for Linux 6.18.

Open-sourced at the start of the calendar year was Perforator as a continuous profiling tool to find code inefficiencies. Yandex who open-sourced it claimed that it could lead businesses to saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure." It's been a few months since the last feature release but out this weekend is Perforator 0.0.7.

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet.

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut.

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset.

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.

Kicking off November for Arch Linux users happen to be the releases of Pacman 7.1 as well as Archinstall 3.0.12.

Restructuring to the Linux kernel's PCI Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support is set to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.

During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most.

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming.

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6.

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December.

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option.