Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding “significant” performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads…

A set of 36 patches sent out overnight is making big improvements to the Linux kernel’s AES library. The patches allow for making use of the kernel’s existing architecture-optimized AES code for better performance, that code is also constant-time, lower memory use, and all-around a nice improvement over the status quo…

Besides Debian’s aging bug tracker interface, another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters…

Merged back in December for Mesa 26.0 was RADV now supporting some new performance counters to help game developers and open-source driver developers. That new performance counter support aligned with the AMD GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release. At first those new performance counters were wired up for RDNA1 through RDNA3.5 GPUs while now the support has arrived for the latest RDNA4 GPUs…

While veteran open-source developer Keith Packard is known for his X.Org Server contributions over many years, another more recent open-source creation of his is Picolibc as a C library for embedded systems. As the latest achievement on that front, merged this weekend to the GCC 16 compiler codebase is support for using Picolibc…

Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux 26.0 distribution has been officially released today as a major update that introduces some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and open-source software.

These two Linux distributions have not yet reached stability, but I have high hopes for them in 2026.

The 6.19-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

So this rc is still a bit smaller than usual, but it’s not _much_
smaller, and I think next week is likely going to be more or less
back to normal.

Which is all exactly as expected, and nothing here looks
particularly odd. I’ll make an rc8 this release just because of the
time lost to the holidays, not because it looks like we’d have any
particular issues pending (knock wood).

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Manjaro 26, Devuan 6.1, IceWM 4.0, Archinstall 3.0.15, Orbitiny Desktop Pilot 8, Shotcut 15.12, key Linux and open-source moments of 2025, MiDesktop brings KDE 1 back to life, and more.

Following the holidays, Linux 6.19-rc4 was released today in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable kernel release in early February…

M5Stack has expanded its lineup with the CoreS3 Thread BR, a compact Thread Border Router kit designed for Matter- and Thread-based IoT deployments. The platform combines the CoreS3 controller with a dedicated IEEE 802.15.4 radio module in a DIN-rail-mountable enclosure for smart home, building automation, and low-power sensor networks. The system uses an ESP32-S3 application […]

GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by “orders of magnitude” for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head…

Package updates for the Arch Linux powered Manjaro Linux distribution have been pushed out for Manjaro 26.0 “Anh-Linh” while updated ISOs are expected to soon become available. The Manjaro 26.0 milestone brings KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 but with both of those you may lose X11 session support so they are recommending their Xfce Edition for wanting wanting to continue using an X.Org desktop session…

MYIR has announced the MYC-CZU3EG-V3, an updated SoM built around the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG MPSoC. The module integrates application-class Arm processing, real-time control cores, and FPGA fabric in a compact form factor targeting industrial automation, machine vision, edge computing, aerospace, and telecommunications systems. The MYC-CZU3EG-V3 combines a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 application processor running at […]

For those with fond memories of Puppy Linux as a very lightweight Linux distribution, released last month was a new TrixiePup64 for continuing the Puppy Linux spirit atop Debian. The new TrixiePup64 is based on Debian 13 components while shipping in both X11 and Wayland flavors. Out now is TrixiePup64 2601 as the latest iteration of this lightweight Linux distribution…

Worked on back in 2024 for the Linux kernel was a built-in counter to keep track of the number of hung tasks since boot. That feature for keeping track of the number of hung tasks since boot was merged in Linux 6.13 and exposed via /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count. For helping ease use around it, new code working its way to the kernel will allow resetting that “hung_task_detect_count” counter…

Following Linux 6.19 adding support for CRKD guitar controllers, new patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are bringing some additional guitar controllers to Linux. This latest work is around enabling the Rock Band 4 guitars for the PlayStation 4 and PS5 consoles to work under Linux…

A new feature being worked on recently for the AMDKFD kernel compute driver is batch user pointer “userptr” allocation support. With this new user-space API it will become possible to support allocating multiple non-contiguous CPU virtual address ranges that map to a single contiguous GPU virtual address…

Rust veteran Steve Klabnik is using an LLM to explore memory safety without garbage collectionNaming a new programming language “Rue” sounds like an acknowledgment of doubt about the project’s prospects, if you take “Rue” to mean “regret.”…

The upcoming Plasma 6.6 release will introduce new accessibility features and UI refinements, including Slow Keys for Wayland and improved notifications.