In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller... ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC.

Back in March ARCTIC Cooling published a fan controller driver for Linux to support up to 10 fan channels and nicely integrate with the Linux HWMON interfaces for fan control and monitoring. It was a

There's yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients.

For those that enjoy trying out evaluating new Linux desktop options, Starling was just announced as a new desktop option written over the

A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck.

David Vernet who is a Linux kernel hacker at Meta by day has taken to improving the AMD P-State driver with the proposed "epp_boost" feature for helping with the

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files) . With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync , Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop.

KDE developer Méven Car recently took to addressing this long-standing defect

In addition to the deprecation and stripping down of AF_ALG , another piece of the Linux kernel crypto code steaming ahead toward removal is the crypto_rng abstraction layer.

Linux crypto subsystem expert Eric Biggers of Google is working to remove the crypto_rng abstraction layer from the kernel. This generic interface for RNGs is ultimately unnecessary now with it recommended that APIs to the Deterministic Random Bit Generator (DRBG) and Jitterentropy modules are used directly.

Biggers explains in a patch currently pending via the wip-rng Git branch :

ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux.

Thanks to reverse engineering work by the open-source community, the WMI device IDs around Whisper Mode were figured out for enabling/disabling the Whisper Mode feature as well as figuring out its status.

Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points.

The AMD PMF testing tool "test_amd_pmf" is slated to live within the Linux kernel source tree while it's just a small user-space application akin to Turbostat and other in-kernel-source-tree apps. Test_amd_pmf reads

Last October on Phoronix we were first to point out there being some mysterious intrigue around a new x86 implementation from a "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" with the developer involved not elaborating on the matter. Now that same developer has posted another semi-cryptic message to the Linux kernel mailing list to talk about 16-tile and 32-tile Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) implementations. To date Intel only has 8-tile AMX.

Christian Ludloff has in the past has worked for Google