Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

Last week I provided benchmarks to quantify how the AMD Strix Halo graphics performance has evolved since launch one year ago, in today's article is a look at how the Zen 5 CPU performance with the flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 has evolved under Linux in the year since these exciting APUs began making their way to high-end laptops and desktops. Complementing the nice Radeon 8060S performance gains are also some nice CPU performance benefits quantified when using Ubuntu 26.04.

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.

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.

6 April 06:24 PM EDT - Mesa - Mesa Gen AI Policies

Building on prior Mesa contributor guidelines and discussions among upstream Mesa developers, there are two generative AI "GenAI" policies that have now been decided upon for Mesa development moving forward.

Rust Coreutils 0.8 was released today as the newest major release to this alternative to GNU Coreutils.

6 April 02:32 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD Laptop Support

Over the past year the FreeBSD project has been making much progress on making it more viable to run this BSD operating system on laptop hardware. They have worked on better graphics driver support, improved power management / suspend, making sure audio is working, and even rolling out a KDE desktop option from the FreeBSD OS installer to ease the deployment on desktops. While that engineering work continues, they are also working now to make it easier to summarize laptop hardware working or not on FreeBSD.

A small but convenient feature is coming with the Linux 7.1 that will be useful in debugging AMD Zen system problems and information reporting/transparency purposes.

6 April 10:53 AM EDT - BSD - NetBSD 11.0-RC3

For the better part of the past year NetBSD developers have been preparing for the NetBSD 11.0 release and in February NetBSD 11.0-RC1 released followed by 11.0-RC2 and now a third release candidate was announced today.

6 April 10:15 AM EDT - WINE - Wine-Staging 11.6

Following Friday's release of Wine 11.6 with reviving the Android driver and improving game mod support as part of DLL loader updates, Wine-Staging 11.6 is out today with extra patches atop.

Separate from the recently discussed work on MediaTek MT7927 "Filogic 380" support being worked on for the MT76 Linux driver (still undergoing review), a number of other MediaTek MT76 wireless driver improvements are queued up ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening as soon as next week.

6 April 06:11 AM EDT - LLVM - JSIR - JavaScript IR

Google engineers have been developing JSIR as a high-level intermediate representation (JSIR) for JavaScript that they are already using in production at the company code code analysis and transforming other code/bytecode to JavaScript as well as for deobfuscating JavaScript code.

Open-source friendly company Tiny Corp that is behind the Tinygrad MIT-licensed neural network framework and developing a "sovereign" AMD GPU driver stack with their Tinybox hardware offerings has their sights on shipping the Exabox next year. The Tiny Corp's Exabox is expected to retail for around $10M USD but offer immense AI compute power.

Timed for Easter this year is the seventh weekly release candidate for the Linux 7.0 kernel. If all goes well, Linux 7.0 stable will be out next week.

It's finally time: a patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from the Linux kernel. Anyone still using an i486 CPU with an upstream Linux kernel would be incredibly rare and no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support, but in case you are, you can continue to be running one of the existing Linux LTS kernel versions.

5 April 09:31 AM EDT - AMD - AMDGPU By Default

A nice Easter surprise are some last minute updates submitted to DRM-Next of the final planned AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature changes for the upcoming Linux 7.1 feature cycle.

5 April 07:34 AM EDT - AI - Security Reports

For helping with the increase of AI tools scouring the Linux kernel source tree and sending security bug reports, a pull request sent today ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc7 improves the documentation to better guide AI agents -- and anyone reading the documentation -- how to send better quality bug reports.

Zubeyr Almaho has been leading work on a new HID driver named hid-omg-detect with an intent on passive monitoring to watch out for any malicious HID devices being connected to the system.

Seeing new Linux patches for benefiting Sega Dreamcast devices wasn't on my bingo card for 2026. A patch series was sent out today for fixing the Linux kernel's GD-ROM driver for accessing media using the drivers on "real" Sega Dreamcast devices.

As a small but interesting addition coming for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 release is making it easy to simulate a GPU reset with the LLVMpipe software driver. While seemingly mundane, this can be quite handy for compositor developers and other app/software developers wanting to more easily test how their code behaves when encountering a GPU reset.

4 April 03:05 PM EDT - Debian - Debian + Age Verification Laws

With age verification/attestation laws down to the OS level enacted by California and being decided upon by other US states, it's been a hot topic of discussion in the open-source world. For the Debian project that is strictly volunteer/community-driven unlike various commercial Linux platforms, they are figuring out how such laws will impact them.

Ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.0-rc7 kernel release, this week's batch of input fixes were sent in and merged. Besides a few small input fixes are also some new device IDs and quirks for hardware now to be handled by Linux 7.0.

A small but important patch that looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is for enumerating AVX-512 BMM support for KVM virtualized guests. AVX-512 BMM is one of the exciting ISA additions with next-gen AMD Zen 6 processors.

An Amazon/AWS engineer raised the alarms on Friday over the current Linux 7.0 development kernel leading to the throughput for the PostgreSQL database server being around half that of prior kernel versions. The culprit halving the PostgreSQL performance is known but a revert looks like it may not happen and currently suggesting that PostgreSQL may need to be adapted.

4 April 06:50 AM EDT - AMD - MSI PRO B850-P

In addition to 3mdeb firmware engineers porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte EPYC Turin server motherboard, the staff at this firmware consulting company are also porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a modern Ryzen AM5 desktop motherboard. They continue making good strides with that quest for the first readily-available Ryzen desktop motherboard with open-source system firmware.

In the past few days was the release of FreeCAD 1.1 and SolveSpace 3.2 for open-source computer aided design (CAD) while now joining the party is Design 50 Alpha as a GNOME-aligned 2D CAD design tool.

4 April 06:11 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Features

KDE Plasma developers continue working on new features for Plasma 6.7 while continuing to land more fixes and hardening for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

OpenRazer 3.12 released in mid-March as the latest feature update to these open-source drivers for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is OpenRazer 3.12.1 for enabling two more Razer products on Linux plus shipping a couple fixes.

Wine 11.6 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

The Rust-based Redox OS operating system is preparing to land a new CPU scheduler thanks to work being carried out by open-source developer Akshit Gaur on modernizing the platform's process scheduling subsystem.

3 April 12:37 PM EDT - Intel - Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.32

Intel today released their Linux NPU Driver 1.32 as the user-space driver components that interacts with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for supporting the NPU hardware with Core Ultra processors.

Most of my Intel Panther Lake benchmarking over the past two months for the new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware has been done with Ubuntu Linux given the pervasiveness of it, especially in the corporate/enterprise space. But for those looking at achieving even greater out-of-the-box Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake, the Arch Linux based CachyOS does a pretty fine job at further advancing the performance.

Following an April Fools' Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available.

With Linux 6.19 AMD GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.1 dGPUs now default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon Linux driver. For these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics cards it means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improved functionality in using this modern AMDGPU kernel graphics driver on Linux. One of the exceptions has been the GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri still defaulting to the older Radeon driver but a patch has been volleyed to make that change.

Meta's great Linux engineering team have been working through some fresh performance optimizations recently from optimizing /proc/interrupts outputs to renewing their investment in jemalloc. A new Linux kernel patch this week provides another optimization to avoid a possible situation of throttling the TCP throughput unnecessarily on Linux systems.

3 April 06:18 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD Laptop Project

Developers working on the FreeBSD laptop initiative to make the FreeBSD operating system more suitable for running on modern laptop hardware have drafted their road-map of further action items they hope to accomplish in 2026.

Rob Clark on Thursday sent out the batch of MSM DRM driver feature changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. This new work for DRM-Next includes enhancements to the Adreno X2-85 GPU support as found within the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs plus various enhancements to existing Qualcomm graphics/display hardware.

Vulkan 1.4.348 released this morning as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.348 comes four new extensions.

2 April 08:26 PM EDT - AMD - AMD P-State Features

A few Linux kernel releases have passed since there have been any new features to talk about for the AMD P-State driver for CPU frequency scaling / power management with modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. But for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel there are some new features now ready for mainline.

Sent out today were the networking subsystem fixes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel. These networking fixes in time for Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc7 release include addressing performance issues within the Qualcomm Ath11k and Ath12k WiFi drivers that have always existed ever since the drivers were upstreamed.

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source (MIT-licensed) software project.. the Agent Governance Toolkit. Microsoft is trying their hand at coming up with runtime security governance for autonomous AI agents.

2 April 11:26 AM EDT - Intel - Linux Cache Aware Scheduling

Just over one year ago Intel Linux engineers began working on cache-aware load balancing for Linux or more commonly referred to as Cache Aware Scheduling. The functionality for helping modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors especially hasn't yet been upstreamed to the Linux kernel but yesterday the fourth version of these patches were posted for review.

Following this morning's announcement of IBM working with Arm on "dual architecture" hardware, we have some more details on at least what's happening from the software side... It's improving Arm virtualization on IBM Z Systems (s390).

2 April 08:30 AM EDT - Arm - IBM Dual Architecture

IBM announced today a strategic collaboration with Arm around new dual-architecture hardware.

The CentOS project has established the Accelerated Infrastructure Enablement "AIE" special interest group with a focus on providing a "fast lane" for "in-flight" patches. This CentOS AIE SIG is particularly focused on carrying the code needed for enabling NVIDIA AI factories.

2 April 06:13 AM EDT - WINE - Zink Driver By Default

A CodeWeavers engineer opened a merge request yesterday for Wine to use Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver by default. This would build Zink as a Windows Portable Executable (PE) for allowing OpenGL to go straight to the Vulkan API with the host Vulkan drivers.

2 April 06:01 AM EDT - AI - KTransformers 0.5.3

KTransformers 0.5.3 released today for this framework for efficient inferencing and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) with a focus on CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. With this release, KTransformers 0.5.3 is now more applicable for CPUs lacking Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) and AVX-512 in now providing some AVX2-only kernels too.