Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

While the Meson build system has been capturing much of the limelight in recent years by open-source projects, the cross-platform CMake build system also shows no signs of slowing down and continues evolving with new features and functionality.

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 stable kernel release expected later today are some last minute pull requests sent out this morning. Notable for those using AMD Zen 3 hardware is addressing some bogus hardware errors that began appearing for some users on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

For those sticking to absolute free software ideals, Trisquel 12.0 was released this weekend for this Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved distribution for only containing free software and foregoing loadable microcode/firmware and running on the Linux-libre kernel even with its reduced scope in hardware support.

11 April 03:49 PM EDT - AMD - Generative AI Is Awesome

In addition to their efforts around the Lemonade SDK itself, AMD software engineers working on their AI initiatives continue to be investing quite a bit into the Lemonade-using GAIA, the project that originally stood for "Generative AI Is Awesome". AMD's GAIA now allows building your own custom AI agents via chatting with GAIA as well as becoming a "true desktop app" so it's easier to deploy across Windows, Linux, and macOS environments.

D7VK as the open-source project that began as a fork of DXVK in adding support for Direct3D 7 atop Vulkan has with time extended its range to also supporting Direct3D 6, 5, and 3 APIs. Out today is D7VK 1.7 in continuing to better support those vintage versions of Microsoft's Direct3D API.

The BeagleV Ahead is an open-source RISC-V single board computer S(BC) built around the quad-core TH1520 SoC. With the Linux 7.1 mainline kernel there is HDMI display support coming now that the Device Tree bits have been added.

11 April 07:21 AM EDT - Microsoft - Updated Microsoft WSL2 Linux Kernel

Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series.

Among the new VFS features expected to land for the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is FSMOUNT_NAMESPACE.

Cage as the Wayland compositor providing a kiosk mode for single, maximized apps is out with a new feature release more than six months after its prior version.

A few weeks past the GNOME 50 release and there continues to be a lot of ongoing GNOME app activity worth highlighting.

Back in February we were the first to report on a new AMD "RDNA 4m" target appearing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. While part of the "RDNA 4" family, it's graphics IP version is GFX 11.7 (GFX1170) that is associated with the RDNA 3 family but with some ISA changes to align it slightly more with the newer RDNA 4 graphics IP. While the RDNA 4m AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler patches have been out for two months, the Mesa patches have only been posted this week for enabling the RADV Vulkan driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver support.

10 April 04:11 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Jay Compiler

It was just a few days ago that Jay was publicly posted as the new shader compiler in-development for Intel GPUs on Linux for both their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. While still very experimental, that initial Jay compiler code was merged today for Mesa 26.1-devel.

The newest Linux file-system driver proposed for the kernel is... VMUFAT.

The Linux 7.0 kernel is gearing up for its stable release and should be out this coming Sunday, 12 April, barring any major last minute issues.

It has been a while since featuring a showdown of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers on Linux. With some fresh benchmarks being overdue plus the new JetStream 3 browser benchmark having been announced last week, here is some fresh data for how these two dominant web browsers are competing on the modern Linux desktop from an Intel Panther Lake system running Ubuntu 26.04.

A big kernel patch series was posted today by longtime Linux developer Thomas Gleixner. The set of 38 patches amount to some big time "spring cleaning" with addressing some code remnants still around that originated back in the very early Linux v0.1 kernel while some other code being cleaned up dates back to the Linux 1.3~2.1 kernel series from the 90's.

Bitland, the Chinese OEM that manufactured systems for Lenovo and other companies until being added to the US Entity List due to being accused of using Uyghur forced labor, is expected to see a WMI driver added to the Linux 7.1 kernel for better supporting Bitland laptops.

10 April 08:23 AM EDT - Vulkan - VK_ARM_data_graph_optical_flow

Vulkan 1.4.349 is out today as a small update to the Vulkan API specification that incorporates various fixes that accumulated over the past week. Plus there is one new extension.

Linux-friendly hardware vendor Framework Computer sent out a notice this morning that they will be announcing their new 2026 hardware products later this month.

10 April 06:10 AM EDT - Hardware - Uniwill Driver Improvements

TUXEDO Computers' laptops received some heat in the past from upstream Linux kernel developers over their out-of-tree kernel drivers but fortunately that situation has been improving. The Uniwill driver premiered in the Linux 6.19 kernel with that OEM manufacturing many of the TUXEDO Computers laptop models. That Uniwill x86 platform driver enabled more functionality for TUXEDO hardware in the mainline kernel and has continued improving since its upstreaming. More features are on the way for Linux 7.1.

The SpacemiT K3 is exciting as one of the first RISC-V RVA23 designs coming to market. For the Linux 7.0 kernel there is initial K3 support in the mainline kernel while the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is expected to land more K3 enablement.

Out today is the newest monthly update to FEX for this emulator for running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems, including games and the likes of Steam Play with Windows games. This Valve-sponsored project that is quite important for the upcoming Steam Frame has rolled out more performance improvements, memory savings, and other improvements with FEX 2604.

9 April 04:20 PM EDT - Intel - NPU Frequency Limits

The Intel IVPU accelerator driver used on Linux for the neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra SoCs saw a patch posted for allowing the NPU clock frequency to be limited in the name of power and thermal management.

Merged back in Linux 6.19 was the ASUS Armoury driver to enhance support for the ROG Ally gaming handhelds and modern ASUS laptops. The ASUS Armoury driver enables various laptop features to be toggled under Linux and since its introduction it has continued expanding support for more ASUS devices. Ahead of Linux 7.0 coming out on Sunday, a few more devices are now supported by this upstream driver.

RISC-V processor IP purveyor SiFive just announced they have raised $400 million USD in an over-subscribed Series G financing round. This latest funding is so they can further focus on delivering high performance RISC-V designs for the data center.

In addition to RISC-V discontinuing its eXecute In Place "XIP" kernel support for Linux 7.1, there is an optimized strnlen() function coming for Linux 7.1 on RISC-V as well as some other optimized functions.

Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics driver team primarily working on the RADV Vulkan driver has come up with a new interesting creation: patches to the Linux kernel and KDE for sharply improving the gaming experience for those running systems with limited amounts of video memory. Such as for graphics cards with just 8GB of dedicated vRAM, the patches now available -- initially on CachyOS for a nice out-of-the-box experience -- provide a noticeably better Linux gaming experience.

Beyond the capabilities of just the Vulkan Video API, the FFmpeg multimedia library has made interesting Vulkan-accelerated adaptations using compute shaders. With Vulkan compute they've implemented Apple ProRes video acceleration, FFV1 decode, and other features. The newest Vulkan feature now in place for FFmpeg is 360 degree video conversion.

The open-source Lemonade local AI server that enables using Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux for LLM usage as well as AMD Radeon GPU support and common x86_64 CPU support (in addition to Microsoft Windows support) is now becoming easier to embed within other apps for AI usage.

9 April 05:53 AM EDT - Mesa - VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index

The newest Vulkan API extension now wired up for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index that was introduced last week.

Miracle-WM as the Wayland compositor / window manager built atop Canonical's Mir project is out with a big new feature release. This "hackable" and i3/Sway-inspired Wayland compositor has landed a WebAssembly-based plug-in system for opening up new possibilities as well as a new Rust API with this week's v0.9 release.

8 April 08:50 PM EDT - AI - New AI Agent Keys

Since last year the Linux kernel already supported the Microsoft Copilot key appearing on recent laptops to trigger AI agent interactions. That keyboard key is becoming more common but now three additional new keys have been standardized for additional AI integration on future PCs. Merged today for Linux 7.0 is supporting those new standardized keycodes for AI use.

TrueNAS 26 Beta released today as the initial test release for this next version of this Linux-based operating system for network attached storage (NAS) devices and more.

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source operating system provided a status update on all of their interesting development activities during the month of March. In addition to a lot of code improvements, Redox OS also enhanced its documentation as well as added an AI policy to reject any contributions relying on large language models.

8 April 12:35 PM EDT - AMD - Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Price

At the end of March AMD announced the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor with both dies having 3D V-Cache. This 16 core processor with 206MB of total cache is quit exciting and will be on sale later this month but AMD refrained from commenting on the price until today.

Last month Intel announced the Arc Pro B70 with 32GB of GDDR6 video memory for this long-awaited Battlemage G31 graphics card. This new top-end Battlemage graphics card with 32 Xe cores and 32GB of GDDR6 video memory offers a lot of potential for LLM/AI and other use cases, especially when running multiple Arc Pro B70s. Last week Intel sent over four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards for Linux testing at Phoronix. Given the current re-testing for the imminent Ubuntu 26.04 release, I am still going through all of the benchmarks especially for the multi-GPU scenarios. In this article are some initial Arc Pro B70 single card benchmarks on Linux compared to other Intel Arc Graphics hardware across AI / LLM with OpenVINO and Llama.cpp, OpenCL compute benchmarks, and also some OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks. More benchmarks and the competitive compares will come as that fresh testing wraps up, but so far the Arc Pro B70 is working out rather well atop the fully open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is the "Yogafan" hardware monitoring driver to provide fan speed monitoring not only for Lenovo Yoga laptops but also various Legion and IdeaPad laptops too.

8 April 06:29 AM EDT - Intel - OpenVINO 2026.1

Intel's OpenVINO toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inferencing across their range of hardware platforms is out with its newest quarterly feature update. There is official support for Intel's latest hardware as well as enabling more large language models and other new AI innovations for this excellent open-source Intel software project.

Google on Tuesday announced the Chrome 147 stable release to all Windows, macOS, and Linux users. There are a number of refinements in this latest routine Chrome stable update paired with various fixes and new developer capabilities.

8 April 06:00 AM EDT - AI - Safetensors

Announced today from the PyTorch Conference EU in Paris is word that Hugging Face has contributed their Safetensors project to the PyTorch Foundation, which is an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation for hosting AI initiatives. Safetensors aims to help mitigate arbitrary code execution risks and more.

In addition to the release today of Flatpak 1.16.4 for shipping new security fixes including a sandbox escape and the ability to delete host files, XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.20.4 is also now available with another security fix of its own to prevent sandboxed apps from being able to trash arbitrary host files.

That Flatbox app sandboxing and distribution system is out today with important security updates.

Jay is a new open-source shader compiler being developed for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers. Ultimately this Jay shader compiler should help in delivering better Linux graphics performance with modern Intel hardware.

For those that like to make remarks about AMD "fine wine" especially when it comes to open-source Linux drivers and/or nostalgic about feature work on really old hardware, to much amusement there are new patches today for the AMD InterWave ISA sound card from the 1990s.

7 April 10:45 AM EDT - Intel - Intel QuickAssist

The Intel QuickAssist "QAT" driver for the mainline Linux 7.1 kernel is adding support for Zstd offloading across QuickAssist Gen 4 / Gen 5 / Gen 6 accelerators for Zstandard compression as well as Zstandard decompression (limited there to the latest Gen 6 hardware).

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the main Linux stable kernel maintainer and typically viewed as the second-in-command to the Linux kernel development, has turned to new "gregkh_clanker_t1000" fuzzing tooling to help uncover new kernel bugs.

Framework Computer on Monday issued their latest update concerning the ongoing price increases for memory and solid state drives affecting the industry. There has been some more price increases, signs of some temporary reprieve, and then a bit of good news on pricing for select Framework hardware.

It looks like with the Linux 7.2 kernel later in the year the AMD ISP4 driver will finally be merged to mainline. This driver is needed for the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop and other future AMD Ryzen laptops.

7 April 06:19 AM EDT - RISC-V - RISC-V Execute In Place

Introduced in Linux 5.13 back in 2021 was eXecute In Place "XIP" support for RISC-V that allows for the kernel image to be executed from ROM. The intent is on allowing the kernel to run from non-volatile storage like NOR flash that is directly addressable by the CPU and to reduce RAM usage. But after RISC-V XIP support is broken for months at a time, the feature is now set to be retired from the mainline kernel.

It doesn't change too much in practice with how Mesa updates typically have been handled under Fedora Linux, but now it's officially documented: Mesa graphics drivers have a permanent updates exception so new Mesa versions can be shipped as updates in Fedora stable releases.

Following last month's Lemonade SDK 10.0 release that finally makes AMD Ryzen AI NPUs under Linux useful for running large language models (LLMs) where as before the Linux build could only target GPUs, released on Monday was Lemonade 10.1 with more enhancements to this local LLM solution.