Linux, Distributions and Operating Systems

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 31, 2025,
updated Sep 01, 2025

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Bcachefs goes to "externally maintained"

    Linus Torvalds has quietly changed

    the maintainer status of bcachefs to "externally maintained",

    indicating that further changes are unlikely to enter the mainline anytime

    soon. This change also suggests, though, that the immediate removal of bcachefs from the mainline kernel is not in the cards.

• Graphics Stack

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ 20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community

    Providing another fine example of the depth of support for older hardware on Linux, driver extensions have just been released to deliver functional improvements for owners of old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs. Linux-centric site Phoronix notes that the new OpenGL Extensions from the open-source community will also deliver benefits to X700 / X800, R400, and X1000 R500 series graphics cards.

    Let’s talk about the depth of support on offer here. Old ATI X300 series GPUs first walked the Earth in 2002 AD. They were the backbone of the Radeon 9000 series graphics cards, starting with the game-changing Radeon 9700 PRO, which spearheaded the latest DirectX 9 and AGP 8X performance technologies on the desktop. For a major episode of nostalgia, flick through our 29-page review of this Red Team challenger that “proved to be superior in all possible categories.”

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Darren Goossens ☛ Haiku OS on an old iMac

    Seemed a perfect machine to put Haiku on. Haiku would look great on a shiny metal Mac, and the Intel chip should make for good compatibility.

    I was able to get FreeDOS networking to work on it, so Haiku should find it a doddle.

    Downloaded the Haiku image; 64-bit, Release 1 Beta 5, it says: [...]

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2025 | The FreeBSD Project

      Here is the second 2025 status report, with 32 entries.

      As for the preceding quarters, this report is published just a few days before calls for 2025Q3 report submissions are sent. Indeed, although according to our timeline we should have published this report in July (general rule is publication should happen within the month just after the calls for reports are sent), we kept receiving important reports until the end of August. This is both a positive and a negative thing. On one hand, it means that our FreeBSD community is busy fixing existing issues and implementing new features, making the OS we love better and better every day; it means that the community works so intensely that very little time remains for reporting. On the other hand, it means that news in these reports is always two months old when published. Two months is not bad, especially if we consider that FreeBSD communication happens on many other channels too, but it would be nice if we could improve it.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2025/35

      Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

      Week 35 felt a little calmer. Our packagers delivered high-quality submissions that required little intervention from release engineering once staged. When things just work, they tend to go unnoticed. We published four snapshots this week, namely 0822, 0825, 0826, and 0827.

More on AMD below

wccfTech:

• Linux Still Isn’t Ready To Give Up On 20-Year-Old ATI Radeon GPUs, As Open-Source Developers Push Out a New Update

  There's always interesting stuff to find at Linux when it comes to getting information out of merge requests, and this time, Phoronix has spotted an update for the rather 'ancient' ATI Radeon R300 GPUs, credits to the open-source developers that are giving their time to maintain support for outdated hardware. This time, with the Mesa 25.3 version, the ATI Radeon GPUs will get two memory-related OpenGL extensions, which will provide more details around the GPU's memory, including ensuring effective memory utilization.

FUDZilla:

• Linux devs keep ancient Radeon cards kicking

  While Microsoft long ago lobbed support for ATI’s ancient R300-series GPUs into the skip, Linux developers are still quietly keeping the lights on for hardware that predates most influencers.