Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Last week after receiving the Intel Arc Pro B70 review hardware I began with some benchmarks looking at how the Arc Pro B70 compared to existing Intel GPUs on Linux with their fully open-source driver stack. Today's article features the latest Arc Pro B70 benchmarks under Linux in looking at how the performance and value compares to other NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon (AI) PRO workstation graphics cards in the lab.

Eric Engestrom stepped up again to serve as Mesa release manager for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 feature release. Mesa 26.1-rc1 was just released in kicking off the weekly release candidate dance until Mesa 26.1 stable is ready for debut in May.

A change proposal has been filed to build x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level packages alongside the existing x86_64-v1 packages for Fedora Linux.

Linux developer Qais Yousef with Google has announced the alpha release of Sched QoS as a new initiative for user-space assisted scheduling. The scheduling model in turn is based in part on Apple's quality of service classes used by iOS for classifying software as user interactive, user initiative, utility, or background tasks.

The clone3() system call in Linux 7.1 is adding three new flags for greater control over the creation of child processes.

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers.

The x86/asm changes merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a few low-level improvements.

The exFAT file-system changes have landed for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel.

14 April 08:14 PM EDT - Intel - Intel 486 Kconfig Options

As a follow-up to the news first-covered on Phoronix earlier this month about Linux 7.1 expected to begin removing i486 CPU support: it indeed happened. Linus Torvalds took the initial removal bits today without any fuss today for beginning the phase out of M486 / M486SX / ELAN kernel support.

14 April 06:57 PM EDT - AMD - ROCm 7.2.2

ROCm 7.2.2 is out today as a small point release to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack. There are a few code changes but most notable is arguably on the documentation side.

Code now merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel may provide some negative performance implications for those still running modern Linux kernels on 32-bit hardware. A fundamental change can present cache line alignment and slab sizing implications for 32-bit Linux OS users but will provide for cleaner code with modern 64-bit computing.

While a lot of interesting new features and changes have been merged already for the Linux 7.1 merge window, two pull requests stand out so far for being rejected by Linus Torvalds and complete with his to-the-point commentary.

As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 in its near final state compared to Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS with its HWE stack on an ASUS Zenbook S16.

Nginx 1.30 was just released as the newest stable version of this popular web server. Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP).

GNOME Shell 50.1 and Mutter 50.1 were released today as the first point releases in the GNOME 50 series.

14 April 09:59 AM EDT - X.Org - X.Org Server 21.1.22

X.Org Server 21.1.22 is out today and driven by five new security vulnerabilities being disclosed for the aging codebase. In turn these vulnerabilities also impact XWayland too and thus necessitating the XWayland 24.1.10 release.

Sunshine v2026.413.143228 released this week as a new feature release for this self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight, an open-source game streaming client that is an implementation of the NVIDIA GameStream protocol. Notable with this Sunshine release is Vulkan Video encode support as an alternative to using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for game streaming.

OpenSSL 4.0 was just released as a big update for this widely-used SSL/TLS and crypto library.

Merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel is overhauling the T10 PI code for generating and verifying data integrity information. In turn the new code is cleaner while also allowing for better read storage performance.

14 April 08:23 AM EDT - Radeon - VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

As a big helper for Valve's Steam Play with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its initial support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap Vulkan extension.

14 April 06:24 AM EDT - KDE - Per-Screen Virtual Desktops

A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops.

All of the power management subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel.

Over the course of March there was much progress made on the ARM64 port of Haiku OS, the open-source operating system serving as the spiritual successor to BeOS.

14 April 05:50 AM EDT - Arm - Faster ARM64 CRC64-NVMe

Merged yesterday were all the CRC code updates for the Linux 7.1 kernel. Most notable with that pull is an ARM64-optimized CRC64-NVMe implementation that can deliver multiple times faster performance.

Jemalloc 5.3.1 was released today with next month marking four years since the prior release, jemalloc 5.3.0. While the version bump may not seem like much, jemalloc 5.3.1 comes with many performance improvements, new features, and other enhancements.

Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has introduced GreenBoost-Proton for helping Linux gaming on NVIDIA hardware.

For those that had purchased a StarBook MK VI laptop 3+ years ago over the advertised support for Coreboot, Star Labs has now delivered with a Coreboot build finally available and working for this AMD Ryzen 5000 series powered laptop.

On this first day of the Linux 7.1 merge window, among the early pull requests merged were beginning to land the various VFS pull requests submitted by Christian Brauner. Among that code merged is enabling support for user.* extended attributes on sockets.

13 April 12:13 PM EDT - AI - LLM-Generated Spack Packages

The Spack package manager is quite popular in the HPC / supercomputer space for scientific software. Even with the more selective niche than a typical general purpose OS package manager, large language models (LLMs) have already proven capable of being useful in generating new Spack packages. But there have also been some headaches involved too for Spack developers.

13 April 11:45 AM EDT - NVIDIA - CUDA Tile Compiler Engineers

Last year NVIDIA announced the new CUDA Tile programming model as one of the biggest updates ever to the CUDA platform. CUDA Tile brings a virtual ISA for tile-based parallel programming and they subsequently open-sourced the CUDA Tile IR as an intermediate representation built atop LLVM's MLIR. Now they are looking to hire additional LLVM compiler engineers to help foster their CUDA Tile initiatives.

In advance of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening, Miguel Ojeda sent out all of the Rust feature updates on Friday. This includes bumping the minimum Rust version for building the Linux kernel as well as a new experimental option that can provide better performance for Rust code within the kernel, alongside other updates.

Sent out today was an initial patch series for comment on introducing the FTRFS file-system. The FTRFS proposal is more interesting than last week's VMUFAT file-system proposal.

Mold 2.41 is out as the latest major update to this high performance linker and viable alternative to the linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects.

The open-source, Rust-based Servo browser engine has been improving its Servoshell demo browser application while one of the most promising potentials for this engine is around embedded use as an alternative to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). With the latest moves by Servo developers, they are making for a more compelling story for its use.

13 April 06:27 AM EDT - Radeon - AMD APUs + Rust OpenCL

For those wishing to make use of modern OpenCL 3.0 capabilities on AMD APUs/SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics using Mesa's Rusticl driver, an improvement was merged this weekend to the RadeonSI driver ahead of this quarter's Mesa 26.1 release.

Nearly one year ago to the day I noted Linux developers were considering the removal of the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the kernel. They were orphaned the past decade and turning into a maintenance burden for upstream developers. But then to some surprise, a few developers stepped up to maintain the HFS(+) drivers. One year later it's proving to be a success story with more fixes for this aging Apple file-system support continuing.

Among the early pull requests sent out to Linus Torvalds even before the Linux 7.0 kernel officially released on Sunday were the Btrfs file-system updates. This feature-packed CoW file-system is seeing more performance optimizations for Linux 7.1 as well as its shutdown ioctl feature no longer being experimental and a variety of fixes.

13 April 05:35 AM EDT - GNU - GNU Linux-Libre-7.0

Building off last night's release of the Linux 7.0 kernel is now the GNU Linux-libre 7.0-gnu kernel release for that downstream kernel that removes support for loading non-free-software kernel modules, blocks the loading of loadable microcode/firmware even when it means greatly reduced hardware support, and other sanitization of code in the name of software freedom.

Merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel was a power sequencing driver for PCIe M.2 connectors as part of an effort to allow describing PCIe M.2 connectors in Device Tree files. For Linux 7.1, that driver is extending support for PCIe M.2 Key E connectors.

As expected the stable Linux 7.0 kernel was just released today in marking this next kernel release. The Linux 7.0 milestone comes due to Linus Torvalds' preference of bumping the major version number after hitting X.19 as opposed to any single major change, but in any event there are a lot of great improvements and changes to find with this new kernel version. Linux 7.0 is also what's powering the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

An out-of-bounds access within the Linux kernel has existed in mainline the past three years that could be exploited by an unprivileged user submitting a specially crafted certificate to the kernel.

With Linux 7.0 expected for release later today, in turn the Linux 7.1 merge window will kick off for the two week period of landing all sorts of exciting new features, changes, and removal of old features from the kernel. Here is a look at some of what is on the table for the Linux 7.1 merge window.

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.

12 April 06:23 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Zen 3 Hardware Errors

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.

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.

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.

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.