With this week's release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux.
Version 0.27 of GNUnet is now available for this free software framework for constructing decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. But it comes with some big caveats before use.
The last release of Llamafile was back in May and it's led me recently to wonder if Mozilla was slowly abandoning this AI project like they had done in the past to DeepSpeech and other software projects. Fortunately, that's not the case and out today is Llamafile 0.10 with some big updates.
([Mesa] 19 March 08:05 AM EDT
MESA_map_buffer_client_pointer)
The OpenGL API is still seeing new extensions introduced in 2026. Merged today to the OpenGL Registry is a new extension intended to help Wine usage for 32-bit Windows games/apps on 64-bit Linux systems.
([Proprietary Software] 19 March 06:22 AM EDT
Opera GX + Linux)
It's been a while since most of you probably thought about the Opera web browser, but these days they have been catering their "Opera GX" web browser to gamers. Today they have finally delivered this Opera GX gaming-focused browser for Linux users.
Drew Fustini sent out DeviceTree patches this past weekend for enabling the HDMI display controller on the T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC. Additionally, there's a patch for lighting up the HDMI display support on the LicheePi 4A RISC-V board.
([Ubuntu] 19 March 06:04 AM EDT
How To Improve Mir)
With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS quickly approaching release next week, Canonical is beginning more of their road-mapping for Ubuntu 26.10 and beyond. To help in plotting future work, Canonical is interested in feedback for features or improvements that developers/users would like to see around their Mir project.
([Linux Kernel] 19 March 06:19 AM EDT
Virtual Swap Space)
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage.
([Intel] 18 March 04:03 PM EDT
kAFL-Fuzzer Archived)
An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended.
([Fedora] 18 March 11:48 AM EDT
Fedora Asahi Remix 43)
While Fedora 43 was released at the end of October and there is just one month to go now until the release of Fedora 44, Fedora Asahi Remix 43 debuted today as this spin of Fedora Linux for Apple Silicon Macs.
Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.
Last week it was security issues with AppArmor to worry about on Ubuntu Linux while this week a "high" rated vulnerability for Ubuntu's Snap daemon has been revealed.
([Linux Kernel] 18 March 09:00 AM EDT
Multi-Gen LRU)
It's been a while since having any improvements to talk about for the MGLRU multi-gen LRU functionality for the Linux kernel to optimize page reclamation and help with system performance especially when enduring memory pressure. But this week a Tencent engineer posted some very promising patches for further enhancing this kernel feature.
([Linux Networking] 18 March 08:18 AM EDT
Samba 4.24)
Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support.
Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It's now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google.
([Arm] 18 March 06:08 AM EDT
Arm Live Firmware Activation)
A new platform feature being worked on by Arm engineers for the Linux kernel is Live Firmware Activation to allow for updated firmware components to be deployed without requiring a system reboot.