The Daily Brief — Tech Edition

Daily tech news, edited and dated.

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Sunday, 05 July 2026

71 stories filed.

FEX 2607 Optimizing For Yet-To-Be-Released ARM 256-bit SVE2 Hardware

Phoronix ·

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more…

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux

Phoronix ·

One area of Linux hardware testing I haven't explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel...

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing

Phoronix ·

For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux…

GNOME Lands ext-background-effect-v1 Support For Background Blur Effect

Phoronix ·

Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window's background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code...

Linux 7.3 Adding More Graphics PCI IDs For Intel Nova Lake S

Phoronix ·

In addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code...

Linux 7.2-rc2 Raising The Default RISC-V 64-bit CPU Limit To 256 Cores

Phoronix ·

A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds...

GNOME Mutter GPU Reset Recovery Becoming A Reality

Phoronix ·

While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code "GSoC" project this year, GNOME's Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling...

UPower 1.91.3 Fixes Behavior To Avoid Degrading Your Laptop Battery Faster

Phoronix ·

The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery "fast" charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster...

Vulkan Adds Extension For OCP's Microscaling MX Formats To Help Machine Learning

Phoronix ·

Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it's interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project's Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan...

Coreboot + AMD openSIL On MSI Ryzen Motherboard Now Works With Windows 11

Phoronix ·

With 3mdeb's Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented...

Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest Incompatibility

Phoronix ·

While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling...

Intel Prepares More Nova Lake Graphics/Display Enablement For Linux 7.3

Phoronix ·

On Thursday Intel sent out their first batch of Intel kernel graphics driver changes of new feature material targeting the Linux 7.3 kernel. This first batch of drm-intel-next for v7.3 continues to focus heavily on lining up Nova Lake's Xe3P integrated graphics/display support...

NVIDIA VR-NVL BMC Device Tree Being Upstreamed For OpenBMC Support

Phoronix ·

NVIDIA's latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it's part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware...

Linux Preparing To Retire Its 32-bit MSR Interfaces

Phoronix ·

Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel's usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code...

ReactOS Implements First Windows NT6 System Call In Step Toward Vista Compatibility

Phoronix ·

The ReactOS project that is striving to be the "open-source Windows" with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first…