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)

NVIDIA Ships Fixes For Descriptor Heaps, More Vulkan Performance Optimizations

([NVIDIA] 2 May 06:41 AM EDT NVIDIA 595.44.06 Vulkan Beta Driver)

NVIDIA on Friday released the 595.44.06 beta driver build as their newest Vulkan developer beta for Linux. This was joined by the NVIDIA 595.46 Windows Vulkan beta and there are performance improvements in tow and more work on their descriptor heaps support.


KDE Plasma 6.6.5 Fixes Some NVIDIA Performance Issues, More Features Land For Plasma 6.7

([KDE] 2 May 06:19 AM EDT Plasma This Week)

We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series.


Steam On Linux In April Pulled Back From Its Record High Marketshare

([Valve] 1 May 08:16 PM EDT Steam April 2026 Stats)

Steam on Linux use in March had skyrocketed to 5.33%, a 3.1% boost month-over-month and easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago. This record growth came amid the ongoing success of the Steam Deck handheld and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling more Windows games to run well on Linux. The April numbers are in and the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back somewhat but still remaining healthy.


Wine 11.8 Improves VBScript Compatibility, Finally Fixes Microsoft Golf 1999

([WINE] 1 May 05:52 PM EDT Wine 11.8)

Wine 11.8 delivers the latest and greatest support for running Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms. This newest bi-weekly development release brings several more enhancements in working toward Wine 12.0 stable due out in early 2027.


EndeavourOS "Triton" To Ship New Desktop/WM Options, Titan Neo Brings Various Updates

([Operating Systems] 1 May 04:13 PM EDT EndeavourOS Titan Neo)

In addition to today's monthly ISO refresh of Arch Linux that is now pulling in the Linux 7.0 kernel and other updates, the downstream EndeavourOS also happens to be out with a new ISO release for starting the month of May.


Vulkan 1.4.350 Released With Three New Extensions

([Vulkan] 1 May 02:56 PM EDT Vulkan 1.4.350)

Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions.


AMD Posts HDMI 2.1 FRL Patches For Their AMDGPU Linux Driver

([Radeon] 1 May 10:44 AM EDT HDMI 2.1 FRL)

It's not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions.


Linux Support Coming For The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II: A $160 High-End Gaming Controller

([Linux Gaming] 1 May 09:12 AM EDT ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II)

The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II is a recently-launched wireless gaming controller for both PC and Xbox gaming. This is a premium controller priced at $160 USD and has been receiving positive reviews under Windows while now it will soon be seeing mainline Linux support.


Intel Making More GPU Driver Improvements For Crescent Island With Linux 7.2

([Intel] 1 May 06:29 AM EDT Intel Crescent Island)

Intel's upcoming Crescent Island product as a reminder is a new inference-optimized Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM and targeting enterprise AI workloads. Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the driver support for Crescent Island as well as making broader Xe3P improvements.


Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600

([Mesa] 1 May 06:17 AM EDT Mesa Amber2)

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa's older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and many smaller drivers.


Linux 7.0 Release, Age Verification Laws, Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 & Other April Happenings

([Phoronix] 1 May 05:56 AM EDT April 2026 Highlights)

A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 "BMG-G31", and much more software and hardware content that made the month interesting. Last month on Phoronix were 303 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles.


Linux 7.2 To Set Default DRM Scheduler Priority To "Fair", New AIE4 Hardware In AMDXDNA

([Linux Kernel] 30 April 08:26 PM EDT drm-misc-next)

Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial "drm-misc-next" pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer.


Shotcut 26.4 Released With Timeline Improvements, Vulkan Accelerated Speech-To-Text

([Multimedia] 30 April 05:29 PM EDT Shotcut 26.4)

Shotcut 26.4.30 shipped today as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, cross-platform video editor.


Linux Mint To Begin Publishing HWE ISOs For Better Hardware Support

([Operating Systems] 30 April 12:53 PM EDT Linux Mint HWE ISOs)

Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement "HWE" ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware.


CachyOS Linux Performance Leading Over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora Workstation 44

([Operating Systems] 30 April 11:45 AM EDT 41 Comments)

It's not too entirely surprising given the aggressive stance that the CachyOS Linux distribution has taken on out-of-the-box performance, but for those curious, it continues largely leading over the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 distributions for the leading performance on modern hardware.


AerynOS Updated With Linux 7.0, Gaming Optimized Kernel Flavor

([Operating Systems] 30 April 10:57 AM EDT AerynOS April Update)

AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.


Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper

([Linux Kernel] 30 April 08:23 AM EDT Threadripper + Linux 7.1)

My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads.


GCC 16.1 Released With AMD Zen 6 Support, Algol 68 & Many C++ Improvements

([GNU] 30 April 06:37 AM EDT GCC 16.1)

GCC 16.1 is now available as the first stable release of GCC 16 as this year's major open-source GNU compiler feature release.


3mdeb Gets More Bits Of AMD openSIL & Coreboot Working On Ryzen AM5 Motherboard

([Coreboot] 30 April 06:28 AM EDT Latest Milestone Achieved)

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI PRO B850-P motherboard.


AMD Posts Newest Linux Patches To Accelerate Page Migration For Better Performance

([Linux Kernel] 30 April 06:12 AM EDT Accelerated Page Migration)

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results.


More

Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two
complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through
rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the remaining
errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote to this
design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be the
result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the
problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the
system.
-- A. L. Scherr, "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage
Operating Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and
Philosophies," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4.