Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here's a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 since its launch last year in going from Ubuntu 25.04 to Ubuntu 26.04.

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.

Libinput devised a Lua-based plug-in system for modifying devices/events. The Lua plug-in support was introduced last year with libinput 1.30 but unfortunately some security issues have now come to light with the implementation.

If Valve's latest Steam Survey monthly figures are accurate, Steam on Linux enjoyed a very wild month of March. Steam on Linux is now above the 5% threshold and more than twice the size of the Steam on macOS marketshare.

With Linux 7.0-rc6 having released on Sunday, we are hitting the point of the cut-off of new feature material being allowed into the Direct Rendering Manager's DRM-Next tree of queuing new graphics/display/accelerator feature code ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. As presumably the last AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature pull ahead of Linux 7.1, today's pull request from AMD contains some noteworthy final enhancements.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" this week rejected a change proposal for Fedora 45 that would use systemd's environment generator functionality for managing per-user environment variables.

1 April 03:56 PM EDT - NVIDIA - Per-Plane DRM Color Pipeline API

Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions.

Cloudflare continues to be full of open-source surprises. Today Cloudflare announced EmDash as an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress with an emphasis on better security.

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library.

What's more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools' Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual.

KDE Linux as the in-house, leading-edge Linux distribution for showcasing the latest KDE Plasma innovations has promoted itself as being an atomically updated Linux distribution. But these atomic updates didn't quite work out as planned recently with some users finding their system(s) unbootable. But improvements are being made now for better robustness moving forward.

The Rust-For-Linux crew is preparing to raise the minimum supported Rust version for building the Linux kernel and and similarly also bumping the minimum supported version of bindgen, the tool for generating Rust FFI bindings for C code in the kernel.

Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols.

Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop. This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support.

Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to "deprecate legacy IP" support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing "legacy" IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build.

Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options.