Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

59 Minutes Ago - KDE - Better Shared Memory Buffer Experience

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.

82 Minutes Ago - AMD - Ryzen AI SR-IOV

AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units.

Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project.

D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API.

Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more.

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

6 May 01:30 PM EDT - Radeon - AMDGPU DC Power Module

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows.

When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to reach the limelight.

6 May 09:53 AM EDT - Intel - VK_EXT_device_generated_commands

Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.

Dell and Lenovo have stepped up to become premier sponsors for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that provides for seamless system firmware and device/component firmware updating under Linux with the Fwupd client.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API.

Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware.

For those with fond memories of the AMD Geode x86 embedded processors, the Linux kernel is set to orphan these since discontinued and obsolete CPUs.

Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.

6 May 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - AVX-512 Optimizations

Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it's not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged.

Last month a Fedora Linux change proposal was shared proposing that Fedora 45 be built with x86_64-v3 packages to complement the generic x86_64 (v1) packages currently being compiled. This has the possibility of providing greater performance out of packaged Fedora software but comes with the cost of greater burdens on web mirrors, QA / testing, and related infrastructure impact. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" decided today to wait on coming to a decision over this Fedora 45 change proposal.

Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.

5 May 04:00 PM EDT - Intel - VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

After the merge request was open the past three months for code originally authored eight months ago, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is now advertising support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. But for the moment at least it's treated as experimental.

The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 3.1 as the first major spec update in six years and incorporating various features into the core spec for enhancing AI and HPC capabilities. As a very exciting development, Rusticl as Mesa's lead OpenCL driver implementation is ready to go with same-day OpenCL 3.1 support pending.

The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won't be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel.

5 May 08:57 AM EDT - Intel - Out Of Memory Behaviro

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make use of this new interface.

The preview release of the Arch Linux powered Manjaro 26.1 is now available for testing.

An improvement on the way for the AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver and the Linux ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) code at large is supporting a new "HighestFreq" register to be standardized by a future revision of the ACPI specification.

Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group.

5 May 06:08 AM EDT - Qt - QML Profiler For AI Agentic Development

The Qt Group announced today the QML Profiler Skill for Agentic Development. This new "skill" can delegate code performance profiling to AI agents for 2D Qt Quick applications.

AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own.

4 May 04:29 PM EDT - NVIDIA - AutoFDO Profiling For GCC Toolchain

NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance.

Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack.

For those eager to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller, the gaming controller is now shipping.

Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update.

With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It's also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year.

CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance.

The growing number of file-systems within the Linux kernel source tree is causing an ongoing burden for upstream developers maintaining the virtual file-system (VFS) code around it and associated code. As a result of the continuing rise of new file-systems being proposed for the Linux kernel, documentation is being introduced to establish clear guidelines for getting new file-systems accepted into the mainline kernel.

Since last November we've begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too.

Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off.

Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language.

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week.

This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD.

It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity.

One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager. RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It's been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing.

One of the most prominent changes with the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is the introduction of the new NTFS driver in the Linux 7.1 kernel. This new driver provides more features and better performance than the Paragon NTFS3 driver that's been in the kernel the past few years and far better off than the original NTFS read-only driver that previously was in the kernel and for which this new driver is based. Needless to say it's also a big improvement over the NTFS-3G user-space FUSE driver too.

It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve's downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other distributions targeting the Steam Deck OLED have carried the patch, but now there is a proper solution upstream ahead of Linux 7.1-rc2.

Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been developing the FUSEX file-system as an extended/experimental area for File-System in User-Space "FUSE" development.

2 May 04:19 PM EDT - AMD - Generative AI Is Awesome

AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD's CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs.

Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes.

2 May 01:04 PM EDT - KDE - KDE Linux + KMSCON

KDE Linux continues making progress as the in-house Linux distribution to best showcase the latest KDE Plasma desktop innovations.

While the Alliance For Open Media had been aiming for the AV2 release by the end of 2025, as of right now the AV2 specification remains in a draft status. VideoLAN developers though for months have already been working on dav2d as an open-source AV2 decoder and that code was published this weekend.

2 May 06:53 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD-15.1 Beta

Following last year's release of FreeBSD 15.0, FreeBSD 15.1 is working its way toward release release in June. For kicking off the release dance, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 is available today for testing.

2 May 06:41 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 595.44.06 Vulkan Beta Driver

NVIDIA on Friday released the 595.44.06 beta driver build as their newest Vulkan developer beta for Linux. This was joined by the NVIDIA 595.46 Windows Vulkan beta and there are performance improvements in tow and more work on their descriptor heaps support.

2 May 06:19 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma This Week

We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series.