So far on this last day of Q3’2025 we are at just over 800 original Linux news articles for the quarter on Linux hardware and open-source software. Here is a look back at what proved to be most popular for the quarter.
There was a lot of interesting developments for the Linux kernel this quarter both of technical merit as well as Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) drama. The ongoing Intel layoffs/restructurings have also led to a number of unfortunate setbacks in their Linux/open-source support. Plus a wide array of other interesting Linux/FLOSS developments.
Before getting to the Q3’2025 news highlight list (see yesterday’s Q3 review / featured article highlights as well)… As one last reminder, if you enjoy all of the daily original content on Phoronix over the past 21 years, today is the last day of the Phoronix.com autumn deal to help with the site by enjoying a discounted rate on Phoronix Premium. Thank you for your support consideration amid these ongoing difficult times for the web/ad industry and rampant ad-block usage and other issues continuing to hamper operations.
With that said, here’s a look at the most popular Q3’2025 news on Phoronix:
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.
Intel Announces It’s Shutting Down Clear Linux
The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what’s possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware… Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Raspberry Pi Launches A 1TB SSD For $70 USD
The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is… a 1TB SSD.
Git Developers Debate Making Rust Mandatory
Developers behind the Git distributed revision control system are debating whether to make Rust programming language support mandatory.
Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Well, it’s an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel’s corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel’s CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.
Ubuntu 25.10’s Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings
Ubuntu 25.10’s transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.
KDE Plasma 6.5 Brings Rounded Bottom Corners For Windows By Default
KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been “years in the wanting” and that is rounded bottom corners for windows.
Debian 13.0 “Trixie” Planning For Release On August 9
The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 “Trixie” that aims to be out as stable in less than one month’s time.
FFmpeg 8.0 Merges OpenAI Whisper Filter For Automatic Speech Recognition
The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library release continues to get more exciting almost by the day. The newest feature being squeezed into this next release is a Whisper audio filter for making use of OpenAI’s Whisper model for providing automatic speech recognition / transcription capabilities.
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%.
Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Leaves The Company
Amid Intel’s ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there’s been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.
Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel’s recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel… The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.
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.
Amarok 3.3 Released With The Music Player Ported To Qt6 / KDE Frameworks 6
Just over one year after the Amarok 3.0 release after a six year hiatus that brought it to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Amarok 3.3 is out today as the first version taking it to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6.
Latest Intel Engineering Layoffs Lead To An Intel Linux Driver Being Orphaned
The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now “orphaned” due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.
