During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most.

From the Linux 6.18 kernel activity with exciting new features to mailing list drama, the release of the Plasma 6.5 desktop, Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 debuting, Intel Crescent Island being announced, and an assortment of other news it was an exciting month. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the state of the web advertising industry and the rampant ad-block use among readers... Web publishing operations remain difficult and only persist due to my passion for Linux hardware and grueling hours. If you enjoy all the original content on Phoronix each and every day, please consider joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode for the main site, and other benefits while helping to support the site. Tips via PayPal and Stripe are also welcome and appreciated.

The most popular news in October 2025 on Phoronix included:

Linus Torvalds Lashes Out At RISC-V Big Endian Plans Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel.

Asahi Linux Still Working On Apple M3 Support, m1n1 Bootloader Going Rust The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts.

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.

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.

KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Cater To Windows Power Users With “winver” Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it’s already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6.

Fedora 43 Is Not Ready For Release Next Week Fedora 43 had been planning for an early final target release date of 21 October. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen as a “No-Go” was declared at the Fedora Linux 43 release meeting.

Ubuntu 25.10 Unattended Upgrades Broken Due To Rust Coreutils Bug Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10’s unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug.

Python 3.14 Released With Performance Improvements, Free-Threading & Zstd Python 3.14 is now available as the newest annual major feature release for the Python programming language.

KDE Plasma 6.5 Is Said To Be “A Pretty Darn Good Release” With plans to release next Tuesday (21 October), KDE developers this week have been putting the finishing touches on this next open-source desktop update. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham says he thinks it’s going to be “a pretty darn good release” when it officially debuts.

Valve Developer Contributes Major Improvement To RADV Vulkan For Llama.cpp AI Valve’s Linux graphics driver team contributions aren’t limited to just enhancing the rasterization and ray-tracing graphics performance of the open-source Linux GPU drivers for gaming. Beyond other interesting contributions from that talented group of open-source Linux graphics developers over the years and for other areas like enhancing old GPU hardware support, merged this week for the Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver is a massive improvement to benefit the Llama.cpp AI performance.

Updated Linux Patch Would Disable RDSEED For All AMD Zen 5 CPUs A few days back we reported on a Meta engineer uncovering an architectural issue with RDSEED usage on AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” CPUs. It ended up being found to affect more CPU models than originally anticipated and a new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list would disable RDSEED usage across all AMD Zen 5 processors.

Rust-Written Redox OS Enables Multi-Threading By Default The Rust-written Redox operating system written from scratch is now enabling multi-threaded support by default for x86-based systems.

GNOME Has A New Security Threat Scanner Powered By VirusTotal For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner.

Intel’s Lead Engineer For Linux Performance Monitoring Is Leaving The Company This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire.

Multi-Kernel Architecture Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list one month ago were patches for a multi-kernel architecture design to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on the same single physical machine. This could let some CPU cores be running real-time “RT” kernels or other non-traditional uses between CPU cores. It wasn’t clear how far the multi-kernel patches would get especially with some initial negative views toward it and Bytedance separately proposing “Parker” for multi-kernel usage just days later. In any event, today a second version of the multi-kernel Linux patches were posted.

NTFSPLUS Announced: A New Linux Driver For NTFS With Better Performance, More Features Well this wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There’s long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is “NTFSPLUS” as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3.

Servo 0.0.1 Browser Engine Released It was to much surprise waking up this morning and seeing the Servo 0.0.1 release for this Rust-based web layout engine that began as a Mozilla project and is now being developed independently via Linux Foundation Europe and other parties.

Git Developers Talk About Potentially Releasing Git 3.0 By The End Of Next Year Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026.

FSF Announces The LibrePhone Project The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary.

And the most popular reviews / multi-page featured articles:

AMD EPYC Turin vs. Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids vs. Graviton4 Benchmarks With AWS M8 Instances With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin”, for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs. 9950X3D On Windows 11 & Ubuntu Linux For those wondering how the AMD 3D V-Cache performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is looking on Linux relative to Microsoft Windows, a few weeks back I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Windows 11 25H2 against Ubuntu Linux both the Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS release and an Ubuntu 25.10 development build using both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors.

Rusticl Performance For AMD Strix Halo Against ROCm OpenCL 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.

Python 3.14 Performance Looking Good In Benchmarks With this week’s release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.

Intel Announces “Crescent Island” Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card With 160GB vRAM Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering.

Intel’s Open-Source Strategy Is Changing At Odds With The Ethos Of Open-Source For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel’s open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel’s difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds – if not thousands – of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel’s open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel’s open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.

Ubuntu 25.10 Performance On System76 Thelio Astra / Ampere Altra With the recent release of Ubuntu 25.10 we have seen some nice performance improvements on the likes of AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake compared to prior Ubuntu releases. But what about ARM? In this article is a look at the Ampere Altra performance between Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 using the popular System76 Thelio Astra workstation.

Linux’s Proposed Cache Aware Scheduling Benchmarks Show Big Potential On AMD EPYC Turin The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the “request for comments” stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

System76 Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta Performing Well In Early Benchmarks Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.

AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Linux Performance For Single & Dual GPU Benchmarks Today the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is officially shipping as the company’s new RDNA4-based offering designed for AI workloads and priced at $1299+ USD. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 offers 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and features 128 AI accelerators and rated for 96 TFLOPs peak half-precision compute, up to 1531 TOPS INT4 sparse, and has a 300 Watt TDP. Here are the initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 under Linux with ROCm 7.0 and testing both in single and dual R9700 graphics card configurations.