With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025.

This year brought a lot more Rust code to the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds continuing to make sound decisions around kernel happenings, from handheld gaming devices to hyperscaler servers there continues to be immense activity each merge window, Bcachefs was dropped from the kernel this year, and the overall Linux kernel development community continues to be healthy and move in a steadfast manner.

So far this year we’re at 982 original news articles around the Linux kernel development alone. In case you missed any interesting daily news items, below is a look at the top 30 most-viewed Linux kernel news articles of 2025 on Phoronix. Here’s to hoping for a lot more Linux kernel excitement in 2026.

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers 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.

Linus Torvalds Grows Frustrated Seeing "Garbage" With "Link: " Tags In Git Commits Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing "Link: " tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he’s had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he’s going to be more strict over "useless" link tags in Git commit messages.

The Linux Kernel Looks To "Bite The Bullet" In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions Two patches queued into the Linux kernel’s build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.

Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support.

Linus Torvalds Removes The Bcachefs Code From The Linux Kernel With Linux 6.17 was the decision by Linus Torvalds to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and not accept any new Bcachefs code into the mainline kernel but keeping the existing code within the tree. That was useful for those relying on Bcachefs to still boot a mainline kernel at least. Now for Linux 6.18, the Bcachefs code was removed from the mainline kernel.

Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability The first CVE vulnerability has been assigned to a piece of the Linux kernel’s Rust code.

Linux’s Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement.

Linus Torvalds Rejects RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.17: "Garbage" Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won’t land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window.

Torvalds Frustrated Over "Disgusting" Testing "Turd" DRM Code Landing In Linux 6.15 The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he’s unhappy with some new "hdrtest" testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the "turds" it leaves behind and this code "needs to die" at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers.

Multi-Kernel Architecture Proposed For The Linux Kernel Code was open-sourced this week and posted to the Linux kernel mailing list as a "request for comments" (RFC) for a multi-kernel architecture. This proposal could allow for multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel could run on dedicated CPU Cores while sharing underlying hardware resources. This could also allow for some complex use-cases such as real-time (RT) kernels running on select CPU cores.

A Major Trading Firm Has Open-Sourced The Latest Linux File-System: TernFS XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives.

Btrfs Has Saved Meta "Billions Of Dollars" In Infrastructure Costs Amid the ongoing discussion over what will happen too Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel, an interesting anecdote around Btrfs was mentioned.

Linus Torvalds Vents Over "Completely Crazy Rust Format Checking" After Linus Torvalds yesterday shot down RISC-V big endian prospects for the Linux kernel, today he has used his authority to wage a war on "crazy" Rust code formatting as well as to critique poor text formatting.

Mysterious Intrigue Around An x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD" Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and GNU Binutils mailing list today is an intriguing message from a longtime x86/x86_64 expert around a "a corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" using some x86 opcodes not used by AMD or Intel processors.

Linux Kernel Ported To WebAssembly - Demo Lets You Run It In Your Web Browser Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.

Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs As Now "Externally Maintained" Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17.

Greg Kroah-Hartman Makes A Compelling Case For New Linux Kernel Drivers To Be Written In Rust The debate over the Linux kernel’s Rust programming language policy continues... While some kernel maintainers are against it, Linus Torvalds has reportedly said he would override maintainers that may be against honoring Rust code. Linux’s second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has also been a big proponent of Rust kernel code. He’s crafted another Linux kernel mailing list post today outlining the benefits of Rust and encouraging new kernel code/drivers to be in Rust rather than C.

New Linux Patch Confirms: Rust Experiment Is Done, Rust Is Here To Stay Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to "conclude the Rust experiment". The "experiment" of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it’s now accepted to be a success and "Rust is here to stay" in the kernel.

Christoph Hellwig Steps Down From One Of His Kernel Roles Following Rust Drama Following the recent Rust drama within the Linux kernel that came out in part because Christoph Hellwig expressed objections to Rust bindings for the DMA mapping helpers that he is a maintainer of, Hellwig has now stepped down as one of the DMA mapping helper maintainers.

NTSYNC Driver Ready For Enhancing Windows Gaming With Linux 6.14 Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

The New Rust-Written NVIDIA "NOVA" Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15 For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn’t too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau’s extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" Revived After Lowering 70% Performance Hit To 13% Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%.

Linus Torvalds Clearly Lays Out Linux Maintainer Roles - Or Not - Around Rust Code The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues... Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.

New Code Merged For Linux 6.18 To Address Linus Torvalds’ Rust Formatting Critique Back during the Linux 6.18 merge window Linus Torvalds commented on "mindless and completely crazy Rust format checking" and that the RUst format checking "is all bass-ackwards garbage" with condensing multi-line import statements into single lines. Merged minutes ago to Linux Git ahead of tomorrow’s Linux 6.18-rc2 are fixes to the Rust format checking and updated guidelines to address Torvalds’ criticism.

Linux Finally Introducing A Standardized Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to finally introduce a standardized way of informing user-space of GPUs becoming hung or otherwise unresponsive. This is initially wired up for AMD and Intel graphics drivers on Linux so the user can be properly notified of problems and/or user-space software taking steps to address the hung/unresponsive graphics processor.

Linus Torvalds Would Reportedly Merge Rust Kernel Code Over Maintainer Objections The drama surrounding Rust code within the Linux kernel continues... Christoph Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers and several other areas of the kernel has been an outspoken critic of Rust code or secondary programming languages within the Linux kernel kernel. Hellwig has been critical of Rust code for the Linux kernel and its long-term maintainability. Today he’s out with another mailing list post where he notes that Linus Torvalds mentioned in private he would override maintainer vetoes on Rust code within the kernel.

Linux Swap Table Code Shows The Potential For Huge Performance Gains Following recent discussions by Linux kernel developers around integrating swap cache and swap maps functionality with the swap allocator, Swap Table was born. With Swap Tables the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel.

Bcachefs Changes End Up Being Merged Into Linux 6.16, For 6.17: "We’ll Be Parting Ways" Last week was a Bcachefs pull request consisting of fixes and a new "journal_rewind" feature to aide as a disaster recovery tool for the file-system. But with that code being submitted as part of the ongoing Linux 6.16 release candidates, it drew criticism from Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers. However, one week later and that discussion having subsided a few days ago, Linus Torvalds ended up merging all of the code. But there is a concerning warning for the future of Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel.

Btrfs Developer Josef Bacik Leaving Meta & Stepping Back From Kernel Development Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he’s also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job.

Bytedance Proposes Faster Linux Inter-Process Communication With "Run Process As Library" Bytedance engineers are exploring faster inter-process communication (IPC) on Linux via a new approach they call Run Process As Library (RPAL). Their initial benchmarks of RPAL are very promising for faster Linux IPC performance.