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KDE Plasma 6.5 Sees More Fixes & More Early Feature Work For Plasma 6.6

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:17 a.m. | Original

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly feature recap for all things Plasma. Some of this week's KDE Plasma highlights include:

- Plasma 6.5 when set to a non-English language, the Emoji Selector will now let you search using the English names in addition to the names in

DM-PCACHE Merged For Linux 6.18 Along With Other DeviceMapper Changes

Phoronix | Oct. 4, 2025, 5:10 a.m. | Original

The DeviceMapper changes have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel that includes the new DM-PCACHE target.

DM-PCACHE is a high throughput, low-latency DAX read/write cache . This persistent memory cache can be used in front of slower block devices and according to its developer faster than the likes of BCache and DM-Writecache:

Notice: Brief Server Downtime Overnight

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 9 p.m. | Original

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array.

Starting around 3AM EST / 7:00 GMT on Saturday, Phoronix.com may be offline for about one hour. CloudFlare Always Online should kick in but the Phoronix Forums and similar will be unavailable for commenting.

One of the disks in the Phoronix.com web server's RAID array is being replaced in the data center by our friends at

Wine 10.16 Released With Fast Synchronization Support Using NTSYNC

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 8:16 p.m. | Original

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux.

Wine 10.16 is a very exciting update. Fast synchronization support is now working on modern versions of the Linux kernel using NTSYNC ! Building off the initial bits in Wine 10.15 , it appears the NTSYNC integration for Wine is now in good standing for the 10.16 release when using Linux 6.14 or newer

Linux 6.18 Will Be A Big Improvement For Servers Encountering DDoS Attacks

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 2:55 p.m. | Original

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.

Merged for Linux 6.18 as part of the networking changes is this patch series from Google engineer Eric Dumazet. Dumazet explains there:

"This series is

Linux 6.18 Lands Compress-Offload API For Opus Audio Codec

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 12:38 p.m. | Original

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers.

The notable API addition for Linux 6.18 in the sound subsystem is adding compress-offload API handling for the Opus audio codec. This contribution from Linaro is for raw Opus audio support for compress offloading from the CPUs. Besides adding the API support, for Linux 6.18 the Qualcomm qdsp6 driver

Rusticl Performance For AMD Strix Halo Against ROCm OpenCL

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 10:27 a.m. | Original

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

Apple Silicon|Intel

Linux 6.18 Device Tree Prepares For Arm C1 Nano / Pro / Platinum / Ultra CPUs

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 9:47 a.m. | Original

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Platinum, and Ultra processor cores.

Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS Plaform with the C1 CPUs . The Arm C1 Nano / Pro / Premium / Ultra branding will eventually replace Cortex-A and Cortex-X branding moving

Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.24 Released

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 8:35 a.m. | Original

Intel today released a new version of their NPU Linux driver user-space components that interface with the upstream IVPU kernel driver.

Intel engineers today published the NPU Driver 1.24 release with updated firmware and other seemingly mostly routine updates:

* Updated Level Zero to v1.24.2
* Updated vpux_elf submodule to ad07093
* Updated compiler to npu_ud_2025_38_rc1
* New Firmware binaries
* New driver and umd-test

Ubuntu 25.10 Ready With "Stubble" For Better ARM64 Experience

Phoronix | Oct. 3, 2025, 7:34 a.m. | Original

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10.

Canonical engineers have been working through Stubble over the summer with the Ubuntu X1E Concept images and then getting the

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