Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

AMD CEO Lisa Su back at CES 2026 showed off the Ryzen AI Halo box as a mini PC built around their excellent Strix Halo SoC. The Ryzen AI halo box is to serve as an AI development platform to compete with the likes of NVIDIA's DGX Spark and Dell GB10. This week is the first time I am seeing new Linux driver activity specifically referencing this exciting AMD "Halo Box" system.

Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today.

At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on "dual architecture" hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It's a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at how Windows 11 Pro is competing against the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in creator/workstation workloads.

28 April 10:35 AM EDT - AMD - Lemonade 10.3

Lemonade as the open-source local AI server backed by AMD and supported across AMD CPUs / GPUs / NPUs on Windows and Linux is out with a big update.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards.

28 April 09:13 AM EDT - GNU - GCC 16 Error Messages

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year's open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages.

Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages.

Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve's Steam Play is now out with a second beta release.

Following yesterday's polarizing news of Canonical to begin shipping AI features in Ubuntu Linux over the course of the next year, Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical has now provided some clarifications around their AI plans.

28 April 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - Hardware Scheduler Time Quantum

The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is preparing a new feature called hardware scheduler time quantum for ensuring fairness between multiple users/contexts wanting to leverage this neural processing unit for AI workloads.

7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives.

WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library.

It's crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3.9 released today.

27 April 03:33 PM EDT - Radeon - Vulkan protectedMemory

The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs.

Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD.

After looking at the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor earlier this month with its nice performance evolution for Arrow Lake on Linux, today we are looking at the other new Intel desktop CPU offering: the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus that retails for just $219 USD.

27 April 09:27 AM EDT - Arm - Linux 7.1 ARM RT

The Linux 7.1 mainline kernel will allow building a real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel for the ARM architecture with no longer needing any out-of-tree patches.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes.

Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has shipped, Canonical is opening up on their next major focus for Ubuntu development: lots of AI features.

One of the last feature pulls merged by Linus Torvalds prior to tagging Linux 7.1-rc1 this weekend were some power utility updates for those tools living within the kernel source tree.

Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs.

D7VK as what began as an implementation of the Direct3D 7 API on top of the Vulkan API, based off DXVK as part of Steam Play (Proton) for D3D8 through D3D11 support, continues enhancing its legacy D3D API support that over time has stretched now from D3D7 to D3D3.

The Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel was just released for concluding the Linux 7.1 merge window. A lot of new features are in tow for this next kernel version that will then be out as stable in mid-June.

The April 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux based CachyOS is now available with a variety of refinements, new hardware support, and other polishing.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines.

26 April 07:00 AM EDT - AI - gregkh_clanker_t1000

Earlier this month on Phoronix we were the first to draw attention to a new fuzzing tool / AI bot uncovering kernel bugs by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the "second in command" for Linux kernel development and stable maintainer. Greg has now shared more light on the "gregkh_clanker_t1000" for this tool that has been uncovering more Linux kernel bugs the past few weeks.

26 April 06:40 AM EDT - Apple - Apple M3 Linux Support

A new progress report from the Asahi Linux project is now published that highlights recent upstreaming work for the Linux 7.0 kernel release as well as the latest additions to the downstream Asahi Linux code. The Asahi Linux project also pushed out their first updated Asahi installer in nearly two years.

The legacy xf86-video-nv driver for user-space mode-setting on old NVIDIA GPUs is out with a rather rare release and the first in over two years with a collection of different bug fixes.

LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend.

Niri 26.04 is out today as the latest feature update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Microsoft's in-house Azure Linux operating system used within Azure and for WSL and other purposes is reportedly pursuing an overhaul where it would be derived from Fedora Linux.

Following last week's Linux 7.1 sound subsystem feature pull that added bus keeper support in working toward better Apple Silicon support along with a variety of other new audio hardware support, a secondary set of sound updates were merged as we approach the end of the Linux 7.1 merge window.

With the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out tomorrow to cap off the Linux 7.1 merge window, one of the most notable additions this cycle is the introduction of the new NTFS driver that aims to provide better performance and more modern features than the existing NTFS3 in-kernel driver that was originally contributed by Paragon Software.

After being deemed not ready for debuting this week as an early release target, Fedora stakeholders have decided that Fedora 44 will be ready to officially debut next Tuesday.

Merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.1 merge window are a number of enhancements to the LoongArch architecture support for that Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V.

Godot 4.7 reached its beta milestone on Friday for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.

KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It's a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7.

Linus Torvalds did it! He merged the pull request to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters. This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development.

Fwupd 2.1.2 is out today as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that allows for updating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux.

As usual in recent years, there were many x86 platform driver changes merged this cycle for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops. A variety of new features and laptop hardware support additions were merged for Linux 7.1.

The Linux kernel continues getting ready for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors.

Beyond Linux looking to remove old drivers due to the surge of AI/LLM bug reports, the Linux 7.1 kernel is also removing some old hardware drivers simply on the basis of long obsolete hardware. The input subsystem saw several drivers removed this week for decades old hardware.

Merged recently to the latest LLVM/Clang compiler development tree is the Arm C1-Ultra scheduling model for helping with delivering optimal binaries for that flagship next-gen Arm mobile CPU.

It was just days ago we reported on a proposal to drop old network drivers due to AI-driven bug reports becoming a burden on upstream kernel developers. Last night that culminated with an initial pull request to clear out some old, unused networking drivers plus also clearing out the entire ISDN subsystem and more.