In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away…

LibreOffice 25.8.2 fixes crashes, formatting errors, and UI glitches across Writer, Calc, and Draw to improve stability.

Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still
supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools
Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting
for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who
is working on just that compiler (known as “gccrs”), provided an update on
the status of that project and what is coming next.

Kevork Kechichian says x86 giant’s contributions should benefit Intel firstOver the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant’s new leadership.  …

Kevork Kechichian says x86 giant’s contributions should benefit Intel firstOver the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant’s new leadership.  …

Sudden increases in the size of Fedora’s initramfs
files have prompted the project to fast-track a proposal to increase
the default size of the /boot partition for new installs of
Fedora 43 and later. The project has also walked back a few
changes that have contributed to larger initramfs files, but the
ever-increasing size of firmware means that the need for more room is
unavoidable. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has
approved a last-minute change
just before the final freeze for Fedora 43 to increase the
default size of the /boot partition from 1GB to 2GB; this
will leave plenty of space for kernels and initramfs images if a user
is installing from scratch, but it is of no help for users upgrading
from Fedora 42.

Sudden increases in the size of Fedora’s initramfs
files have prompted the project to fast-track a proposal to increase
the default size of the /boot partition for new installs of
Fedora 43 and later. The project has also walked back a few
changes that have contributed to larger initramfs files, but the
ever-increasing size of firmware means that the need for more room is
unavoidable. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has
approved a last-minute change
just before the final freeze for Fedora 43 to increase the
default size of the /boot partition from 1GB to 2GB; this
will leave plenty of space for kernels and initramfs images if a user
is installing from scratch, but it is of no help for users upgrading
from Fedora 42.

Ubuntu
25.10, “Questing Quokka”, has been released. This release includes
Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, GCC 15, Python 3.13.7,
Rust 1.85, and more. This release also features Rust-based
implementations of sudo and coreutils; LWN covered the switch to the
Rust-based tools in March. The 25.10 version of Ubuntu flavors
Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu
Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu have also
been released.

Canonical published today the Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) release, the latest stable version of their popular GNU/Linux distribution, featuring up-to-date components and new features.

The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of LibreOffice 25.8.2 as the second maintenance update to the latest LibreOffice 25.8 office suite series with various bug fixes.

For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel’s open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel’s difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds — if not thousands — of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel’s open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel’s open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.

Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light… Especially as for what’s known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.

In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.

Intel Tech Tour 2025 in Arizona was primarily focused on disclosures around Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake / Xe3 but during the opening keynote was also teasing a yet-to-be-announced inference-optimized GPU…

At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel’s IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved…

A few months back it was brought up on the Intel driver mailing list around SR-IOV support for Panther Lake’s Xe3 graphics. This goes along with Intel open-source Linux driver developers being quite busy on SR-IOV support for Battlemage dGPUs as part of their Project Battlematrix. Unfortunately, I wasn’t provided any answer at Intel Tech Tour in Arizona whether SR-IOV support will be found with all Panther Lake SKUs or reserved for select offerings…

Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry…

“Are you getting the ‘Plugins Failed to Load’ error in OBS on Linux? In this video, we show you step-by-step how to locate and safely delete unsupported or problematic OBS plugins.

Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree…

PoCL 7.1 is now available for this “Portable Computing Language” implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc…