AI Use In The Linux Kernel, Microsoft Defender On Linux & Other October Highlights

October brought the releases of Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 26.10, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop, and a wealth of other open-source software releases. The expanding use of AI/LLMs within Linux kernel development also made for interesting discussions in October. Microsoft bringing their Defender software to the Linux desktop was perhaps the biggest surprise out of October. Here is a look back at the past month. During October on Phoronix were 308 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. A lot of interesting technical content on Phoronix each and every day. Before getting to the most popular articles of the month, the usual monthly public service announcement... If you enjoy all of this content on Phoronix over the past 22+ years, please consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits. Tips via Stripe and PayPal are also much appreciated. Or at the least, please turn off any pesky ad-blocker when viewing this site. Due to the unfortunate state of the ad industry and squeeze among independent online publishers, operations remain very difficult. The most popular news for October 2026 included: Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Accidentally Posted To Public Kernel Mailing List Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched on mainline but at least in some cases there are patches undergoing testing or queued in "-next" branches. The CVSS scores are as high as 9.0. Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been known to use AI to help with kernel debugging and outside of the kernel tree has also done some vibe coding with Google's Antigravity. He has previously said he views AI as a useful tool. It turns out he's even now using Claude Code for working on new Linux kernel features. The Amazing Work By Valve's Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux Over the past year Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has made multiple very nice improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver for enhancing support for old (GCN 1.0/1.1 era from a decade ago) graphics cards so that they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work that he initially began as a kernel driver development exercise after initially spending years in user-space focused on the Mesa 3D driver code. Linus Torvalds "Did What I Preach", Used AI To Make Code Decipherable & Uncovered More Bugs After using Claude Code to draft code to help make a fundamental improvement to the Linux kernel, Linux creator Linus Torvalds continued using AI this weekend and talking up its benefits. Beyond generating initial patches and a test program for that noted I/O enhancement, he separately talked up using AI/LLMs for making patches more decipherable to understand in the process the AI noted more long-standing bugs within the Linux kernel. Microsoft Releases Microsoft Defender For The Linux Desktop Microsoft's newest software release for Linux is... Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to "secure Linux desktops" with Microsoft acknowledging that "more developers begin to use Linux desktops" and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support. Siemens Slams The Door Shut On Promising Open-Source Radioss Project As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end -- and close-up access -- to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss. Linus Torvalds' AI Code Improved: Huge Performance Wins With Reworked Code Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results. NVIDIA's Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer's conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency. Meta Developing Compressed RAM "CRAM" For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM. FAT32 File-System Seeing As Much As 265x Improvement With Linux 7.4 A change merged for Linux 7.4 is showing some mighty big speed-ups for the FAT32 file-system. AI Makes "Open-Source, Clean Room" Implementations Of Adobe Photoshop & Premier In Rust As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language. Linux's Early Boot-Time Physical Memory Allocator Sees Big Speed-Up: ~268s To ~50ms Sent out today for the Linux 7.4 kernel were a set of memblock improvements. Most notable is a performance optimization within mm/memblock.c that implements the kernel's early boot-time physical memory allocator that is used prior to the bring-up of the full page allocator. Linus Torvalds Eliminates Unsafe __get_user() & __put_user() Functions In Linux 7.4 Linus Torvalds continues with his recent uptick in kernel patches himself, assisted in part by AI with Claude Code. Merged today was removing the historical and unsafe __get_user() and __put_user() kernel functions. Claude Code / AI Shows Potential For Reverse-Engineering Hardware For Linux Support AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks. Linux 7.4 To Introduce Initial Device Trees For Apple M4, A18 Pro For MacBook Neo Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter today sent out the pull requests of the Apple SoC Device Tree changes they are ready to upstream for the Linux 7.4 merge window happening later this month. Most notable is the initial Device Tree for Apple systems using the base M4 SoC model as well as for the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro SoC. Today's Steam Beta Makes The Linux Client A 64-bit App Valve just dropped a new Steam client beta and it's a big one for Linux gamers. New Wayland Protocol Proposed For VNC/Remote Software Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it's intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world. Linux Kernel Developers Plan To Remove "Assisted-By" Tag Requirement For AI/LLM Usage Currently there is a policy requirement for Linux kernel patches where AI tools contributed, they should be documented with an "Assisted-by:" tag to make clear AI was used in the creation of said patch. But Linux kernel developers are now looking at dropping this requirement amid the rampant use of AI/LLMs. Fedora 45 Hits A Second NO-GO: Not Releasing Until November Fedora 45 wasn't released this week as its ideal early release target due to not having a release candidate build in time for last week's Go/No-Go meeting. At today's Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 45 was delayed by at least one more week due to open blocker bugs. Omarchy Gets The Web Browser Launching Faster By Avoiding XDG Overhead Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements. And the most popular Linux hardware reviews of last month: CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 Performance On AMD Ryzen 9 With the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 and the nearly-released Fedora Workstation 45, Phoronix readers have begun inquiring about fresh benchmarks looking at how they stack up against the performance-optimized, Arch Linux based CachyOS. Up today are our first CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D2 desktop system. Snapdragon X2 Performance On Linux Exceeding Expectations In Initial Benchmarks For your viewing pleasure today are the first Linux benchmarks of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme on Linux using the new Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO for Snapdragon X laptop support on Linux. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme flagship SoC is tested within the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA laptop. Fedora 45 Beta Performance: The Satisfyingly Boring Benchmarks While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it's largely boring but here are some to illustrate. NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA's Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera's strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos. With recently having unfettered remote access to a dual NVIDIA Vera server, I ran through a variety of HPC workloads and similar performance benchmarks. Here is a look at how NVIDIA Vera performs against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, including with CPU power and frequency metrics. Star Labs StarFighter Ultra: A Modern High-End Linux Laptop With Coreboot When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven't had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and streamlined firmware updates via LVFS. For those after a high-end mobile workstation, the Star Labs StarFighter offers a lot of performance potential while being open-source friendly and with Coreboot in tow. AMD ROCm vs. Vulkan Performance For Lemonade Local AI Server With Llama.cpp A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about seeing some new benchmarks of AI performance between Vulkan and AMD ROCm back-ends to see how the situation plays out today. Here are some fresh benchmarks on two separate systems with AMD Radeon graphics and using the Lemonade local AI server while exploring the difference between the ROCm and Vulkan Llama.cpp back-ends. Framework Laptop 12 Offers Improved Performance & Efficiency With Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as a convertible, 2-in-1 laptop that was friendly with Linux and upgradeable inline with the beloved Framework Laptop 13 and 16 models. The initial Framework Laptop 12 was nice but the use of an Intel Raptor Lake U SoC in 2025 wasn't all that exciting. Now though Framework Laptop 12 is available with Intel Core 3 "Wildcat Lake" for offering better performance and power efficiency. LPDDR5 5467 vs. 6400 vs. 7467 MT/s Memory Performance Benchmarks For Laptops With the recently reviewed Star Labs StarFighter Ultra Linux laptop its BIOS allows for configurable memory speeds unlike many other laptop vendor BIOS implementations these days. Star Labs also made the default design decision to run the LPDDR5-7467 rated memory at LPDDR5-6400 speeds in the name of a balanced user experience for power/performance. So I was curious to run some benchmarks quantifying that power and performance impact of LPDDR5-6400 vs. LPDDR5-7467 plus tossed in LPDDR5-5467 testing as well as the third choice offered with this StarFighter Ultra laptop. ROCm 10 OpenCL vs. Mesa 26.3-dev Rusticl Performance On AMD Strix Halo With all the recent progress on Mesa's Rusticl driver as a Rust-based OpenCL driver working across the different Mesa Gallium3D hardware drivers, a Phoronix Premium supporter inquired about seeing some fresh benchmarks of this open-source OpenCL solution. Here is a look at how the Mesa 26.3 Rusticl driver is looking against AMD's official OpenCL driver within ROCm 10. NVIDIA Vera Single vs. Dual Socket CPU Performance For those curious how NVIDIA Vera is scaling between single and dual socket deployments, here are some benchmarks I carried out a while back exploring the power and performance from one to two Vera CPUs.