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)

GNOME's libadwaita Introduces Adaptive Sidebar Widget

([GNOME] 26 September 08:30 PM EDT AdwSidebar)

Following last week's GNOME 49 release, This Week in GNOME is out with their latest weekly summary of all interesting GNOME developments. Notable now for this post-49.0 time is libadwaita adding an adaptive sidebar widget.



Ubuntu 25.10's Only Supported RISC-V Platform: QEMU Virtualization

([Ubuntu] 26 September 02:20 PM EDT Ubuntu 25.10 + RISC-V)

Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target.



Features Expected For Linux 6.18: File-System Improvements, Sheaves, New Drivers & More Perf

([Linux Kernel] 26 September 01:22 PM EDT Linux 6.18 Features)

With Linux 6.17 expected for release this weekend, the Linux 6.18 merge window will in turn kick-off for its usual two week dance. Here is a look at some of the features on our radar that are expected to be merged for Linux 6.18, which is also likely to be the 2025 LTS kernel version.



Vulkan 1.4.328 Published With Copy Memory Indirect Extension

([Vulkan] 26 September 11:07 AM EDT Vulkan 1.4.328)

Vulkan 1.4.328 is now available as the latest specification update to this high performance graphics and compute API from The Khronos Group.



Linux 6.17 Gets Ready For Release With Intel Panther Lake & More Performance

([Linux Kernel] 26 September 10:51 AM EDT Linux 6.17)

The Linux 6.17 kernel is tracking well for its planned stable release on Sunday. Here is a look back at some of the most interesting changes to find with this next kernel version.



Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables

([Ubuntu] 26 September 09:13 AM EDT Coreutils Breakage)

I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files... I quickly realized it's due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.



Intel Returns To Working On The Habana Labs AI Accelerator Linux Driver

([Intel] 26 September 06:43 AM EDT Habana Labs Accelerator Driver)

After being on a hiatus for more than one year and going through several rounds of Habana Labs driver maintainers due to Intel layoffs, there finally is some updated "habanalabs" AI accelerator kernel driver code slated to go into the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle. There is some new feature work but still no Gaudi 3 support for the upstream Linux kernel.



Linux 6.18 Landing Patch For Old AMD Bulldozer CPUs With XOP Instruction Set

([AMD] 26 September 06:30 AM EDT AMD Bulldozer CPUs)

The Linux 6.18 kernel is bringing a new patch to benefit those using the decade-old AMD Bulldozer processors and wanting to make use of Linux's X86_NATIVE_CPU build option for enhancing performance in some areas by optimizing the kernel build for your particular processor/ISA capabilities.



Mesa 25.3 Intel Driver Lands Support For Stochastic Rounding

([Intel] 26 September 06:12 AM EDT Stochastic Rounding)

A new feature merged this week for the Intel Mesa compiler code for their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers is support for Stochastic Rounding.



Today Is The Last Day On Our Autumn Deal To Help Support Linux Hardware Reviews

([Phoronix] 30 September 12:00 AM EDT Autumn Promotion)

Just a friendly reminder that today is the last day for those wishing to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate. Less than 1% of readers currently do so for helping to support the site and its Linux hardware testing and open-source news operations over the past 21 years. Joining Phoronix Premium gets you ad-free access, multi-page articles on a single page, custom forum avatar support, and other benefits all while helping for operations to continue during this difficult period for the web/ad industry.



System76 Releases Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta Alongside COSMIC Desktop Beta

([Operating Systems] 26 September 05:42 AM EDT Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta)

Overnight the Linux PC vendor System76 released their long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta operating system along with the beta milestone of their COSMIC desktop environment.



AMD's GAIA For GenAI Adds Linux Support: Using Vulkan For GPUs, No NPUs Yet

([AMD] 25 September 08:26 PM EDT AMD GAIA)

Back in March AMD announced the open-source GAIA software for GenAI but as noted in that former article, at launch it was limited to Windows-only support. AMD recently released a new version of GAIA with Linux support albeit in a rather interesting twist is limited to Vulkan acceleration.



Servo Engine Lands Support For Rendering Inline SVG Elements, More Performance

([Free Software] 25 September 03:57 PM EDT Servo)

The Servo open-source browser engine project has published their monthly status update that covers all the improvements they made over the course of August. There's been a lot of progress on this Rust-based browser engine that has a lot of potential particularly for embedded/CEF-like use-cases.



Linux 6.18 Linear RAID "md-linear" To Support Atomic Writes

([Linux Storage] 25 September 12:00 PM EDT md-linear + atomic writes)

Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.



PostgreSQL 18.0 Released With Async I/O, Performance Improvements

([Programming] 25 September 09:57 AM EDT PostgreSQL 18)

PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features.



BPF With Linux 6.18 To Support Signed Programs & Deferred Task Execution

([Linux Kernel] 25 September 09:34 AM EDT bpf-next)

Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions.



Intel Posts New Linux Patches To Reduce Overhead Of VMSCAPE Mitigation

([Linux Security] 25 September 08:07 AM EDT Less Costly VMSCAPE)

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors.



Wild: A Very Fast Linker Written In Rust, Aims To Outperform Mold Linker

([Programming] 25 September 06:33 AM EDT Wild Linker)

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild.



Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 Prepares For Panther Lake

([Intel] 25 September 06:14 AM EDT Intel Media Driver 2025Q3)

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode.



Qualcomm Begins Posting Linux Patches For Snapdragon X2 Elite, 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs

([Hardware] 25 September 05:56 AM EDT Snapdragon X2 Elite + Linux)

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel.



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if (argc > 1 && strcmp(argv[1], "-advice") == 0) {
printf("Don't Panic!\n");
exit(42);
}
(Arnold Robbins in the LJ of February '95, describing RCS)