Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.

With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025.

Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months.

Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow.

Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided.

Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January.

As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing prematurely due to a show-stopping bug. In any case in this article offers a fresh look at older GCN and RDNA graphics cards on Linux 6.19 + Mesa 26.0-devel.

Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

26 December 06:47 AM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 2025 Highlights

It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop support were among the Ubuntu highlights in 2025.

An exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list this morning is proposing a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the "Modern Standby" functionality found with Microsoft Windows.

26 December 06:09 AM EST - NVIDIA - NVIDIA Linux 2025

This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix.

For those using Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also having lower overhead.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS has been quite popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for offering leading out-of-the-box performance, especially following the shutdown of Intel's Clear Linux. CachyOS has developed quite a following on the Linux desktop while looking ahead to 2026 they will be working on a server edition.

25 December 03:23 PM EST - NVIDIA - CUDA Tile IR Open-Source

As a wonderful Christmas gift to open-source fans, NVIDIA dropped their proprietary license on the CUDA Tile intermediate representation and has now made the IR open-source software.

One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMDVLK formerly delivered better performance than RADV was with Vulkan ray-tracing. But RADV ray-tracing improved a lot in 2025 as shown in recent benchmarks. So for this Christmas 2025 benchmarking is a final look at how RADV is going up against the now-defunct AMDVLK driver.

The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout.

For X11/X.Org fans there is a new Christmas surprise: Phoenix as an in-development X Server written from scratch using the Zig programming language.

25 December 06:37 AM EST - Intel - Top Intel Linux News Of 2025

When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest.

25 December 06:23 AM EST - LLVM - LLVM Propeller Tool

Google's Propeller is a profile-guided, reflinking optimizer for large codebases. Propeller is built atop LLVM and can allow for whole-program optimizations. Google compiler engineers are now hoping to bring the Propeller tool into the upstream LLVM codebase.

The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel.

The past several years we have seen new releases of the Ruby programming language implementation for Christmas (25 December). This year is no different with Ruby 4.0 having been released this morning.

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on free, open-source boot firmware is out with a new test release for Christmas.

As a wonderful gift to open-source Linux virtualization users this Christmas Eve is the release of the QEMU 10.2 emulator.

As part of my various end-of-year benchmarking comparison articles for looking at the performance evolution of Linux is a fresh look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience when using Ubuntu 25.10 with the latest X1E Concept packages, which includes taking the X1 Elite optimized kernel to the latest Linux 6.18 stable series. Unfortunately, there are significant performance regressions observed compared to a few months ago that just make AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra laptops a better choice for Linux laptop users.

One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available.

24 December 06:38 AM EST - AMD - AMD Linux News

As part of our various "year end" articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025.

The next kernel cycle that will be known as either Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0 depending upon how Linus Torvalds handles the versioning for this next x.20 milestone. More than likely it will be Linux 7.0 given his historical versioning scheme, but whatever the case, ahead of this next kernel cycle some initialization changes for the CXL subsystem are building up.

24 December 05:58 AM EST - LLVM - Qualcomm Xqci

In LLVM Git yesterday for next year's LLVM 22 release the Qualcomm Xqci RISC-V vendor extension is no longer deemed experimental.

One of the features being worked on for a while with the read-only EROFS file-system is page cache sharing. Besides EROFS being popular on some mobile/embedded devices, this open-source read-only file-system has been quite popular for container usage and there this page cache sharing functionality can provide some significant reductions in RAM usage.

23 December 08:35 PM EST - Intel - Using AMX To Cause A Panic

An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers... It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic.

Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026.

If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn't nostalgic enough for you, here's something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors.

With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the "Community Edition" branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite.

Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM.

23 December 12:35 PM EST - Intel - Intel Panther Lake NPU Firmware

Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository.

As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.

23 December 07:36 AM EST - Mesa - PowerVR New GPUs

The open-source Mesa PowerVR "PVR" Vulkan driver has merged multi-architecture support as part of preparing to add support for newer Imagination GPUs.

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy. The proposed policy would allow AI-assisted contributions to be made to this open-source compiler codebase but that there would need to be a "human in the loop" and the contributor versed enough to be able to answer questions during code review. Separately, yesterday a proposal was sent out for creating an AI-assisted fixer bot to help with Bazel build system breakage.

An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.

Merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 16.1 stable release of the GCC 16 compiler is initial support for the Armv9.6-A target.

For those currently owning an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO or ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A motherboard, Linux sensor monitoring support will be in place for the next kernel release.

22 December 08:15 PM EST - Intel - Panther Lake H

It looks like the upcoming Intel Panther Lake H SoCs for the next-gen premium/high-end performance laptop market there could be quite a few different SKUs. A new patch for an Intel open-source driver expands the Panther Lake H line-up from three to 13 different IDs.

22 December 04:06 PM EST - Google - BPF CCX For AMD Chiplet CPUs

For helping with thread placement on modern AMD Zen systems with multiple CPU core complexes, Google has been developing "BPF CCX" that leverages the Linux kernel's eBPF capabilities paired with a user-space agent for fine-grained thread control. Google has found very positive performance results out of their use of this alternative means of high performance scheduling for achieving even greater performance on AMD processors under Linux.

22 December 03:34 PM EST - Radeon - Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics team has landed improvements for the Mesa 260 RADV driver to support new performance counters in conjunction with AMD's Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release.

Thirteen months after the release of Elementary OS 8.0, Elementary OS 8.1 is now available for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and usability. With Elementary OS 8.1 they have transitioned to using the Wayland session by default.

Five years after releasing Lua 5.4, Lua 5.5 debuted today as the newest version of this lightweight and embeddable scripting language.

University researchers presented Rex at this month's Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 in Tokyo. Rex is designed for "safe and usable" Rust-based kernel extensions that could serve in place of eBPF programs for extending the Linux kernel functionality.

22 December 08:55 AM EST - AMD - AMD NPU2

The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products.

22 December 06:43 AM EST - NVIDIA - Automotive Safety Integrity Level ASIL-B

NVIDIA engineer Igor Stoppa presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) earlier this month around using Linux in safety-critical environments like automobiles and the current shortcomings of the upstream Linux kernel and the challenges on achieving Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) certifications around the Linux kernel. It's an interesting read/watch around the safety of Linux (or not) for such strict safety environments.

After being delayed by three months to allow additional time for new features to land, Weston 15.0 Alpha 1 is out today as a big feature release for this reference Wayland compositor.

22 December 06:01 AM EST - AI - Intel Generative AI Examples 1.5

Intel engineers as part of the OPEA Project today released the Generative AI Examples v1.5 update. This "GenAIExamples" open-source project is a collection of GenAI examples as part of showing the capabilities of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) and also highlighting Intel's hardware strengths for generative AI.

Intel today released libva 2.23 as the newest feature release for this Video Acceleration API "VA-API" reference library implementation. Most significant with libva 2.23 is adding AV1 Profile 2 support.