Linux

The Slackware-based PorteuX 2.5 distribution, inspired by Slax and Porteus and designed to be super fast, small, portable, modular, and immutable, is out today with various updates and changes.

Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.18 kernel series (with SYSRQ support), PorteuX 2.5 ships with no less than eight editions featuring the GNOME 49.2, KDE Plasma 6.5.4, Cinnamon 6.6, LXQt 2.3, COSMIC 1.0, Xfce 4.20, LXDE 0.11.1, and MATE 1.28.2 desktop environments.

Some interesting highlights of the PorteuX 2.5 release include support for some Realtek network cards, the NVIDIA 590.48.01 graphics driver, improved handling of cheatcodes, improved overall stripping, improved support for NTFS3 partitions, improved KVM support, and support for Flatpak apps.

The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout.

Linux 6.19 does bring some nice performance improvements overall but during my early testing there were some regressions and I ended up bisecting some of them to the scheduler changes in Linux 6.19.

This won't be interesting for any longtime user but maybe it'll give someone on the fence the courage to switch. This post includes every problem I ran into and how I solved it

I settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I downloaded a couple more distros and loaded them into a Ventoy USB stick.

Good thing I did because despite partitioning the drive itself, the opensuse installer kept saying it said was out of space and no fix I found worked. So I booted up TempleOS for advice and the good lord whispered through my speakers, "try the Fedora KDE iso..."

The Fedora live environment booted right away. And unlike OpenSUSE, it recognized my 32:9 resolution so it looked good, too. I clicked through the installer and it rebooted. I was up and running in about 5 minutes.

The "app store" had a Steam and Discord flatpak so I could brag about my superior OS to my friends immediately. ~~Do not install Steam this way, though (see below)~~ EDIT: This apparently wasn't a mistake, see viktorz's comment below

The biggest problem I faced was with my audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 18i8) which was recognized but hardware muted. Had to install alsa-scarlett-gui to unmute them....this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it's a niche problem and it was solved.

The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly

A minor problem I ran into was Steam not creating shortcuts for games. I learned that this was because the flatpak version is siloed. Installing it "normally" solved this problem. I had already downloaded some games but was able to move them from the original folder in /var to the new one in /home. EDIT: In the comments, viktorz said a symlink would have accomplished the same thing. See what he wrote for more info

Another minor "problem" (I was prepared to lose the functionality) was my crappy Corsair mouse/keyboard. I mainly wanted to disable the default RGB rainbow but was thrilled to find CKB-Next which allowed me to change the colors and map the extra keys on my keyboard.

Anyway, I don't know why I wrote all this. I guess I was just surprised to find how easy it was and wanted to share. I'm sure I'll run into some headaches once I try to actually use the computer for stuff but for now, I'm quite happy with the experience.

I have an old ThinkPad, and it has a massive lack of stickers on it.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.

Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix, found by Professor Robert Ricci at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. At the time, we quoted the redoubtable Kossow, who also runs Bitsavers, as saying that it "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable." Well, he was right, and at the end of last week, he did it. Ricci also shared a video clip on Mastodon.

When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest.

When it came to the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news of 2025 on Phoronix, many of the top stories were about their changes as a result of layoffs, corporate restructuring, and other ongoing changes at the company. To much dismay, Intel's Clear Linux project was shutdown this year, a number of prominent Linux kernel engineers left Intel, and impacts to their other open-source projects. Here is a look at the most-viewed Intel news of 2025

The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel.

Benoît Monin of Bootlin sent out a set of patches last week that would bring the Mobileye EyeQ6Lplus SoC to the mainline kernel support. The Mobileye EyeQ6Lplus is based on the MIPS I6500 IP with two cores and eight threads plus having specialized controllers and accelerators for driving assistance systems.

As part of my various end-of-year benchmarking comparison articles for looking at the performance evolution of Linux is a fresh look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience when using Ubuntu 25.10 with the latest X1E Concept packages, which includes taking the X1 Elite optimized kernel to the latest Linux 6.18 stable series. Unfortunately, there are significant performance regressions observed compared to a few months ago that just make AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra laptops a better choice for Linux laptop users.

In an excellent example of one of the most overused XKCD images, the libxml2 library has for a little while lost its only maintainer, with [Nick Wellnhofer] making good on his plan to step down by the end of the year.

While this might not sound like a big deal, the real scope of this problem is rather profound. Not only is libxml2 part of GNOME, it’s also used as dependency by a huge number of projects, including web browsers and just about anything that processes XML or XSLT. Not having a maintainer in the event that a fresh, high-risk CVE pops up would obviously be less than desirable.

The developers behind the Debian-based ParrotOS ethical hacking and penetration testing distribution announced today the general availability of Parrot 7.0 (codename Echo) as a major update with a new base and new features.

Based on the latest Debian 13 “Trixie” operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 6.12 LTS, the Parrot 7.0 release ships with KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment on Wayland, which was tweaked to make it as lightweight as possible, along with a classic terminal green style across the entire system.

New hacking tools have been included in this release, such as ConvoC2, a Red Teamer’s tool to exploit MS Teams, goshs, a SimpleHTTPServer written in Go, evil-winrm-py, a Python-based tool for executing commands on remote Windows machines, and AutoRecon, a multi-threaded network reconnaissance tool.

I have been setting up stateful firewalls on various machines at home using iptables for over a year now, following the guide on the Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Simple_stateful_firewall

I would now like to learn how to tighten security even more by not setting the OUTPUT chain policy to ACCEPT. I want to allow only that which I need, following the philosophy of least privilege or default to deny, if you will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP8j9dgpAs0

Question: is it as simple as copy-pasting the rules for the INPUT chain into the OUTPUT chain, reversing the "-s/--source" options to "-d/--destination" and changing ESTABLISHED states to NEW? My guess is... Probably not? Because I would need to add ports 80 and 443 for web browsing, for starters, right? And also any outgoing port for my torrent client? And any port that I have chosen for my ssh server? Do I need to add the loopback interface there too?

Any guidance and referral to further reading would be appreciated! Unsolicited advice to use the newer front end nftables is... Well, not sought for at this moment

One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available.

Wayback 0.1 was published in July as the initial preview release for this X11 compatibility layer. Wayback 0.2 came in August and since then there hasn't been much news to report on it.

Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new 'amifuse' project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.

Amifuse is a FUSE driver for macOS and Linux, allowing you to natively mount disk images using the Amiga's Professional File System 3 (PFS3). The project's documentation says other Amiga filesystems might work, "but have not been tested." Disks are read-only by default, but you can enable the experimental read-write support through a command-line argument.

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy. The proposed policy would allow AI-assisted contributions to be made to this open-source compiler codebase but that there would need to be a "human in the loop" and the contributor versed enough to be able to answer questions during code review. Separately, yesterday a proposal was sent out for creating an AI-assisted fixer bot to help with Bazel build system breakage.

Last week's LLVM AI tool policy was brought up for discussion. AI-assisted contributions would be welcome as long as there is a human in the loop that understands the code and competent enough for answering any questions during the code review. Contributors should also be transparent if there are "substantial amounts" of tool-generated content. This pull request in turn is open on GitHub for adding their AI contribution policy to the LLVM documentation. That LLVM Ai tool policy remains under discussion.

As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.

Arnd Bergmann began his 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference session on the future of 32-bit support in the Linux kernel by saying that it was to be a followup to his September talk on the same topic. The focus this time, though, was on the kernel's "high memory" abstraction, and when it could be removed. It seems that the kernel community will need to support 32-bit systems for some time yet, even if it might be possible to remove some functionality, including support for large amounts of memory on those systems, more quickly.

The high-memory problem

High memory, he began, is needed to support 32-bit systems with more than 768MB of installed physical memory with the default kernel configuration; it can enable the use of up to 16GB of physical memory. The high-memory abstraction, though, is a maintenance burden and "needs to die". Interested readers can learn more about high memory, why it is necessary, and how it works in this article.

For those currently owning an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO or ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A motherboard, Linux sensor monitoring support will be in place for the next kernel release.

The ROG MAXIMUS X HERO and Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A are the latest ASUS motherboards seeing hardware monitoring "HWMON" support exposed under Linux. The motherboard support is being added to the ASUS-EC-Sensors upstream open-source driver. Patches for the support have been queued to "hwmon-next" and thus these motherboards will be supported with the next kernel cycle, which depending upon how it plays out will either be called Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0. As with other ASUS-EC-Sensors driver work, the new product support wasn't sadly carried out by ASUS engineers but rather the open-source community.

An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.

SCX-LAVD as the Latency-criticality Aware Virtual Deadline scheduler has worked out very well for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck with similar or better performance than EEVDF. SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve. SCX-LAVD has also seen varying use by the CachyOS Handheld Edition, Bazzite, and other Linux gaming software initiatives.

Built on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, elementary OS 8.1 has been released just in time for Christmas, and is now available for download, marking the first point update in the 8.x series.

The biggest change is that the Wayland-based Secure Session is now the default, but users can still switch back to the Classic session if needed. Secure Session also brings better authentication dialogs that stop other windows from stealing focus, so there’s less risk of typing passwords in the wrong place.

Multitasking and window management have been refined through continued work on the Dock. Visual indicators for multiple windows have returned, background apps are now visible and manageable, and workspaces can be created, rearranged, and switched directly from the Dock.