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)

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 3 Released For Testing

([Ubuntu] 30 January 01:25 PM EST Ubuntu 26.04)

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.



Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Still Committed To Linux 6.20~7.0 Even If Not Finalized For Release Time

([Ubuntu] 30 January 12:23 PM EST Linux 6.20 + Ubuntu 26.04 LTS)

Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release.



RISC-V User-Space Control Flow Integrity / Shadow Stack Appears Finally Ready

([RISC-V] 30 January 11:57 AM EST User-Space CFI For RISC-V)

Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support.



Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension

([Vulkan] 30 January 11:02 AM EST Vulkan 1.4.342)

Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension.



AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks

([Processors] 30 January 10:30 AM EST 8 Comments)

Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.



Linux's ublk Adding Batch I/O Dispatch Capability For Greater Performance

([Linux Storage] 30 January 09:00 AM EST ublk)

Linux's user-space block device driver framework "ublk" for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure.



AerynOS Establishes Policy Against LLM Contributions, 2026.01 ISO Refresh

([Operating Systems] 30 January 08:13 AM EST AerynOS)

In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year.



Open-Source Nova Driver In Linux 7.0 Continues Preparing For NVIDIA Turing GPU Support

([Linux Kernel] 30 January 06:15 AM EST Nova Driver + Turing Prep)

This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux "AGX" DRM kernel driver still isn't positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers.



Intel Xe Linux Driver Updated To Disable GuC Power DCC For Panther Lake

([Intel] 30 January 05:53 AM EST Duty Cycle Control)

Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window.



Intel Releases LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 With New LLM Model Support

([Intel] 30 January 05:34 AM EST LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.3)

Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM.



Microsoft Working On Improved vCPU Scheduler Support For Hyper-V Linux VMs

([Microsoft] 29 January 05:47 PM EST Integrated Scheduler)

Microsoft posted a patch series for introducing Hyper-V integrated scheduler support into the Linux kernel for enhancing vCPU scheduling behavior for virtual machines running within Microsoft's virtualized environment.



DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Performance With The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D In 300+ Benchmarks

([Memory] 29 January 12:50 PM EST 35 Comments)

With the incredible market demand around DDR5 memory and significantly elevated pricing on the more premium DDR5 memory modules, as part of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D launch there's been some communication that thanks to 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache, using lower memory speeds like DDR5-4800 can be suitable without much of an impact to the gaming performance. But what about for Linux gaming? And other workloads with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D? Complementing yesterday's Linux review of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D are benchmarks of DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 performance with Ubuntu Linux and this new 3D V-Cache 8-core / 16-thread desktop processor.



Libcamera 0.7 Released - GPU Acceleration Support For SoftISP Can Deliver 15x Performance

([Multimedia] 29 January 11:51 AM EST libcamera 0.7)

Libcamera 0.7 was published today for this modern software library for image signal processors (ISPs) and embedded cameras under Linux. The standout change with libcamera 0.7 is initial plumbing for GPU acceleration in the software ISP "SoftISP" for delivering better performance than just CPU-based.



IO_uring Zero-Copy Large Receive Buffer Support To Provide A Nice Performance Win

([Linux Networking] 29 January 11:21 AM EST Large Rx Buffer)

Slated for introduction in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.20~7.0) is introducing large receive buffer support for IO_uring's zero-copy receive code path. This large receive buffer support can be very beneficial for those with higher-end networking hardware capable of handling the larger buffers for some significant performance and efficiency wins.



Libgcrypt 1.12 Released With VAES/AVX-512 Accelerated AES: 2x Performance On AMD Zen 5

([GNU] 29 January 09:39 AM EST libgcrypt 1.12)

Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software.



NVIDIA GeForce NOW Is Now Available Natively On Linux In Flatpak Form

([Linux Gaming] 29 January 09:00 AM EST 68 Comments)

Following NVIDIA's announcement back at CES of their GeForce NOW game streaming service coming to Linux as a native desktop application, today's the day. The GeForce NOW Linux-native build is being published and the review embargo has lifted.



Valve Developer Improves Aging AMD APUs On Linux With VRR, DP/HDMI Audio, HDR & Atomic

([Radeon] 29 January 06:36 AM EST GCN 1.1 AMD APU Improvements)

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former "Radeon" kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends not being able to use the modern AMDGPU DC "Display Core" code. But new patches from Timur take care of those limitations.



Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11 Released With Wildcat Lake Support

([Intel] 29 January 06:19 AM EST Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11)

With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops.



NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.15 Released With A Few Fixes

([NVIDIA] 29 January 05:57 AM EST NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15)

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA's NVDEC.



GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30+ Years In Development - Adds LLM Features

([GNU] 28 January 08:31 PM EST GNU gettext)

Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released.



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The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The
man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
-- Alan Ashley-Pitt