The Daily Brief — Tech Edition

Daily tech news, edited and dated.

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Saturday, 15 August 2026

74 stories filed.

D7VK 2.1 Brings Faster Load Times, More Performance Tweaks

Phoronix ·

D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK's focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton's Direct3D 12...

Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series

Phoronix ·

With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and…

Introducing Toast 1

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://www.mixedbread.com/blog/toast-1 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299746 Points: 137 # Comments: 42

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Qwen 3.8 27B

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299605 Points: 597 # Comments: 392

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Patches Posted For Fixing The Linux DRM Scheduler's Fair Policy

Phoronix ·

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there…

AMD GAIA 0.23 Delivers Ability To Install/Run AI Agents From The Terminal

Phoronix ·

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements...

KDE, Techpaladin & Kubuntu Focus Announce The Bullet-Proof KDE Software Initiative

Phoronix ·

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software...

Updated Coreboot/Dasharo For MSI PRO Z690-A / Z790-P Motherboards, Adds Overclocking

Phoronix ·

In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards...

The backup Microsoft never promised you

The Register ·

SPONSORED FEATURE: Your M365 and Azure data might not be as safe as you think from ransomware; time for a reality check

The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+

Phoronix ·

The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H…

GeForce NOW On Linux Native App Exits Beta

Phoronix ·

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA...

Linux Patches Enable Apple M4 NVMe Support

Phoronix ·

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4...

Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 Ships With 233+ CVE Fixes

Phoronix ·

While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era...

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 Released For Monitoring Arc Pro Graphics On Windows/Linux

Phoronix ·

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components...

Comma.ai Launches A PCIe Gen4 x4 To USB4 Dock With Open-Source Firmware

Phoronix ·

George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware...

Don't classify, hallucinate

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classifications Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249523 Points: 187 # Comments: 79

Discussion: Hacker News thread →