Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Ubuntu 26.10 is notably working on laying the foundation for a context-aware desktop and their initial deliverable being worked on is Myna as a speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop. Interestingly there is already a promising voice dictation / speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop called Vocalinux that continues advancing and is usable right now for those looking at their own speech-to-text desktop solution.

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too.

42 Minutes Ago - Mesa - Vulkan 1.4 For KosmicKrisp

KosmicKrisp as the Vulkan API driver built atop Apple's Metal API in Mesa for macOS and iOS systems is now advertising Vulkan 1.4 compatibility.

Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 now has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver.

For those that were intrigued by the COSMIC desktop's "Frosted Glass" effect, it's now available in released form with today's COSMIC Epoch 1.3 release.

14 July 03:38 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 16 GPLFree

As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired.

For those that were intrigued by the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform with a very capable mini PC but looking for something more affordable and not needing quite as much horsepower or AI focus, BOSGAME recently launched their VTA-439 mini PC. The BOSGAME VTA-439 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 with Radeon 890M graphics for those wanting still quite a capable mini PC that retails for around $1,049 USD while sporting 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD storage.

Blender 5.2 is out today as the newest Long Term Support release for this leading, open-source 3D modeling software.

System76 today announced their new Adder Pro laptop that they are promoting as the "gamer's dream machine" with its NVIDIA graphics, 2K OLED 500 nit display, up to 96GB RAM, and 3.37 lb weight.

There is yet-another-foundation being stewarded by the Linux Foundation that further broadens its scope outside of the typical Linux/open-source umbrella. Today the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation for aiming to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents and applications.

14 July 09:08 AM EDT - Hardware - GlandaGPU DRM Kernel Driver

A new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver has been sent out for GlandaGPU, an open-source custom 3D graphics core designed in VHDL and running on FPGA hardware.

14 July 08:50 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Graphics Compiler 2.38.2

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime release, IGC 2.38.2 was released today as the newest feature update to this open-source graphics compiler used by Intel iGPU/dGPU hardware on both Windows and Linux.

14 July 07:58 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Vulkan Video + 10-bit H.265

Hyunjun Ko with Igalia continues advancing the Vulkan Video capabilities of the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

14 July 06:31 AM EDT - Apple - Hodgepodge Sensors

While there has been the Apple System Management Controller "SMC" hardware monitoring driver with the intent on exposing battery/power stats as well as thermal and more for Apple Silicon SoCs on Linux, it hasn't yet been working out properly on the mainline kernel. Between missing Device Tree nodes to the hodgepodge mess of sensors between the different Apple M-Series SoCs, it's a mess.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their June 2026 status report. In the past month the developers merged their NVMM VM monitor support, hardware driver improvements, and progressed toward the upcoming Haiku sixth beta release.

14 July 05:51 AM EDT - Fedora - GRUB + Confidential Computing

A month ago there was a change proposal raised for offering a "light" version of the GRUB2 bootloader for use in confidential computing environments. While there were some differing views on the matter for this alternative, stripped-down GRUB package as opposed to just using other bootloaders like systemd-boot, ultimately, the proposal is now approved.

Overnight the Weston 16.0 release occurred as the latest milestone for this reference Wayland compositor.

For those having Linux systems with multiple swap devices, such as for swap tiering or layered swap handling, a set of patches posted today for the Linux kernel are looking to improve the situation.

Following the recent GA of the AWS M9g series as the first instances powered by the new Graviton5 CPUs, I recently ran benchmarks looking at Graviton4 vs. Graviton5 CPU performance. There was very nice generational gains for the new AWS Graviton processors with the shift from Arm Neoverse-V2 to Neoverse-V3 cores and from DDR5-5600 to DDR5-8800 memory, among other improvements. For those wondering how the Graviton5 ARM server processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, here are some additional comparison data points from the Amazon EC2 cloud.

13 July 09:21 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD Desktop Install

Alfonso Siciliano, who has been one of the FreeBSD developers leading the effort on adding a KDE-based desktop option to the FreeBSD installer, provided an update on recent work around adding integrating this desktop option.

13 July 06:39 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME OS Test Center

GNOME developers working on GNOME OS have received funding from Germany's Prototype Fund to work on creating the GNOME OS "Developer Tool Suite" or also tentatively called their "Test Center" to help in testing experimental applications/libraries in a modern Linux computing world with systemd-sysext, Buildstream, and other newer tech.

Stemming from looking at a proposed Linux kernel patch to alter the Linux kernel's system call number handling, veteran Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner went down a rabbit hole of the kernel's system call entry handling to make a number of clean-ups and improvements to the code. That rework to the system call entry handling is now expected to land for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is already over two and a half years old, one of the missing elements of its support from the mainline Linux kernel has been the IOMMU driver. We are now seeing Raspberry Pi's downstream IOMMU driver being adapted for mainline with hopes of getting it into the upstream kernel.

Cloud Hypervisor 53.0 is now available for this open-source, Rust-based VMM focused on cloud workloads and modern security needs. Originally started at Intel, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing new development these days by Microsoft, Meta, Arm, and other organizations.

Linux 7.2-rc3 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel version coming up in August.

Similar to Linux 7.2 enabling Eswin SoC support by default in the RISC-V "defconfig" kernel build, UltraRISC RISC-V coverage is also now being enabled by default for RISC-V kernel builds in Linux 7.2.

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world.

It wasn't on my bingo card for the week but merged to Git ahead of today's Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel release are a number of fixes for the SEGA Dreamcast drivers.

The staging driver fixes that were sent out this week ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 release is predominantly made up of hardening the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. In particular, a number of fixes for addressing out-of-bounds behavior when connecting to "bad" WiFi hosts.

Debian 13.6 is out today as the newest point release of Debian Trixie to ship the latest security fixes and other maintenance updates.

Sent out today was this week's round of x86 (x86_64) fixes ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel test candidate due out on Sunday.

11 July 06:12 AM EDT - LLVM - x86 Lightweight Fault Isolation

Stanford researchers have been developing Lightweight Fault Isolation "LFI" compiler passes and targets for LLVM as a means of efficient, native code sandboxing. The AArch64 LFI target was previously upstreamed while this week the x86/x86_64 LFI target was also upstreamed for this means of in-process sandboxing.

11 July 05:51 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.8 Features

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop.

11 July 04:00 AM EDT - Mesa - Rusticl + Panfrost

A change upstreamed to Mesa by an Arm engineer now enables the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics to work with the Rusticl driver by default.

System76 developers have for the past number of weeks been working on developing a "frosted glass" appearance for the COSMIC desktop environment featured on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. For Pop!_OS users this frosted glass feature is now available and will become more widespread for other Linux distributions once the next COSMIC release is formally tagged.

Wine 11.13 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software enabling support for running Windows games and applications on Linux.

AMD on Thursday sent out another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver updates to DRM-Next of new feature material ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window.

10 July 06:26 AM EDT - Apple - Linux + Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra

Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was initial support for booting Linux on the Apple M3 SoC devices. But just the barebones suppport for booting with not yet any accelerated graphics or other typical function needed for daily use of M3 Apple devices on Linux, just booting to a console. Now this work is complemented by additional Device Tree patches for also booting M3 Pro / Max / Ultra devices on Linux.

After two years being on the TODO list for a possible performance optimization, the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has now merged an HiZ plane optimization that can yield up to a few percent frame-rate improvement for Linux gaming/graphics on newer Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Earlier this week NVIDIA confirmed some basic details around their next-gen Rosa CPU that succeeds Vera. Among the public confirmation was that it will feature a "Rigel" Armv9.2-A core iterating on their Olympus core design. With the basic details published, NVIDIA immediately introduced Rigel core support into the GCC compiler. Now they have also upstreamed their initial Rigel core enablement into the LLVM Clang compiler.

10 July 05:41 AM EDT - Intel - Intel-Scaler-vLLM 0.21

Released this morning was Intel's newest version of Intel-Scaler-vLLM as their Docker-based solution providing an optimized vLLM stack for execution on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware.