More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading.

Building off yesterday's Wine 11.18 bi-weekly development release is now Wine-Staging 11.18. This experimental flavor of Wine is presently carrying 273 extra patches over that upstream Git state, including some new patches for helping enhance the WoW64 support.

In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM.

Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9.

As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel.

Wine 11.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and apps on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API.

Google's Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first "real" drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is set to be retired.

The latest Apple Silicon enablement code working its way from the Asahi Linux project toward the upstream Linux kernel is the AVD driver used for accelerated video playback across Apple M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs.

Ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the "Stonking Stingray" on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today's tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo".

Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery "FRED" that debuted with the Core Ultra Series 3 processors.

The Ubuntu 26.10 desktop is adjusting its default out-of-memory (OOM) daemon behavior when dealing with memory pressure on the system.

The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration of these patches were posted by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes.

Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October.

Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed.

If you missed out on the Phoronix Premium special back during the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com in June, there is another promotion now active for helping to support the site and allow for continued daily original content and relentless Linux performance benchmarking and other open-sourced focused hardware testing.

The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes.

Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward.

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month of the Intel Xeon 600 workstation performance against AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series in over 400 benchmarks -- including when carried out at the same core count and memory configuration -- today's article is exploring the Hyper Threading / SMT impact on both the Intel Redwood Cove and AMD Zen 5 cores for workstations.