Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

The HID subsystem updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel merge window. Among other hardware additions, the 2026 Valve Steam Controller is seeing initial kernel driver support.

A patch series being worked on for the ath11k mainline wireless networking driver for Qualcomm WiFi 6 / 802.11ax chipsets is yielding 7x lower latency or 2.2x throughput at identical latency.

The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel's internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it's being further restricted.

While Firefox 152+ already offers experimental JPEG-XL support, Mozilla formally announced today their plans for officially shipping JPEG-XL image format support in the Firefox web browser.

Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions.

GNU Emacs 31.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular text editor.

VKD3D 2.1 was released today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet as the upstream Wine project for getting Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API.

Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric.

With the in-development Linux 7.3 is support for discovering and enumerating support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions. Plus there are improvements to its control flow integrity Shadow Stack handling, CPU context switch support for QoS tagging, using UEFI runtime services for restart and powering off, and other improvements.

Merged last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel were all the hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver updates for Linux 7.3, which included supporting several more ASUS desktop motherboards, a few AIO liquid cooling products, more Lenovo system support, and per-CCD temperature monitoring on AMD EPYC 9005 server processors.

Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection.

The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default.

Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility.

The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system.

23 August 06:56 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Zen 4 / Zen 5 Tuning

An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4.

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements.

The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries.

There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons.

The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS.

The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness.

In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel.

A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system.

In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics.

The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!

The extensible scheduler framework "sched_ext" that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete.

Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat's tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems.

22 August 06:06 AM EDT - Mesa - Etnaviv + YOLOX

The open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver stack that began for providing accelerated graphics support on Vivante GPU IP and since expanded to handle Vivante NPUs as well is now able to handle YOLOX object detection.

The highlight of this week's x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that "it's certainly something to keep an eye on" in looking out for any regressions.

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8.

OpenZFS 2.4.4 is out today as the newest stable point release for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Wine 11.16 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms.

Just in time for those that enjoy their Linux / Steam Play gaming on weekends, Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 11.0-2 as the newest stable release of this Wine 11.0 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games gracefully on Linux.

21 August 04:07 PM EDT - AMD - Ultra Accelerator Link

Whether coincidental or intentional, AMD engineers tend to drop interesting, feature patches for the open-source/Linux space on Friday afternoons. Hitting the kernel mailing list minutes ago were two patch series sent out by AMDGPU maintainer Alex Deucher for introducing UALink infrastructure.

At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release.

While the past few weeks have been quite busy with the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro testing with that all-new laptop model and paired with Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", at the same time Framework Computer has begun shipping some updated components for the Framework Laptop 16 laptop. If looking for a bit more GPU compute power hor larger form factor than the 13-inch model, the Framework Laptop 16 can now be equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU as well as a haptic touchpad and one-piece keyboard for improving the input experience.

In early 2025 I wrote about the upstream Nginx web server rejecting dark mode support for its error pages on the basis of wanting to keep the default error pages simple and developers arguing the extra HTML tag for the dark mode styling as superfluous. Following a lot of public backlash for being against offering native dark mode handling by default, Nginx stakeholders were polled and largely came out in favor of supporting the functionality but more than one year later it remains elusive from upstream Nginx.

The main set of media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. Notable this round is the Intel Computer Vision Sensing "CVS" driver merged the previous cycle now supporting next-gen Nova Lake platforms.

Merged this week for the Linux 7.3 kernel was a big clean-up to the stack randomization code for better security on Linux systems and helping unify some of the architecture-specific code.

Intel today released the Compute Runtime 26.31.39395.13 open-source GPU compute stack update for Windows and Linux systems. Big ongoing trends for the Intel Compute Runtime continue to be preparing for upcoming Crescent Island and Nova Lake Xe3P graphics hardware as well as building out their new OpenCL LEO driver.

21 August 06:33 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Solarflare NIC

With the mainline Linux 7.2 kernel there is now the basic support in place for CXL Type-2 accelerator drivers within the CXL core subsystem code. The first in-tree Type-2 driver with the Linux kernel is for the new AMD Solarflare NIC hardware.

21 August 06:19 AM EDT - AI - Intel Xe Driver Fix

It's pretty rare to see Linus Torvalds author patches himself pertaining to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but waking up this morning I was surprised to see he authored and committed an Intel Xe kernel graphics driver change himself. It ended up being after he encountered a "debug session from hell" but was ultimately helped by AI in fixing a bug that had been irking him.

20 August 08:44 PM EDT - Intel - No Longer Experimental

Intel's open-source Mesa drivers for Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV (Vulkan) on Linux are no longer treating next-gen Nova Lake processors with integrated graphics as experimental and off-by-default. With today's Mesa 26.3-devel code, the Intel driver code across Nova Lake's S, U, H, and HX product families are considered stable and enabled by default.

All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel's merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes -- including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are "completely overwhelmed" due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models.

Rust 1.98 released today and is headlined the debut of new algebraic floating-point methods.

KMSCON 10.0.2 debuted today as the latest update to this leading user-space terminal emulator for Linux systems. KMSCON is built around Linux's KMS/DRM interfaces and the most viable alternative to date for in-kernel VTs.

20 August 12:21 PM EDT - KDE - KDE + Btrfs Snapshots

With today's release of KIO-Snapshot, KDE software now has stable integration of Btrfs file-system snapshots.

FSCRYPT is the Linux file-system encryption framework for supporting per-directory, transparent encryption. FSCRYPT so far is used by the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and CephFS. For Linux 7.3 there is an important clean-up to the FSCRYPT code to simplify it while also opening the door for new features moving forward into future kernel versions.

The PreSonus Quantum 2626 is a high-end, Thunderbolt 3 based audio interface. PreSonus just maintains Windows and macOS drivers for this high-end audio interface while now an open-source Linux driver has been posted after being independently developed via reverse engineering.

RPM 6.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this package management system. With RPM 6.1 comes a number of features and improvements as well as a new release model.

For those preferring the tradition of waiting for the first point release of a new Mesa feature release before upgrading, Mesa 26.2.1 is available today with a healthy round of bug fixing.

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out some 32-bit time code persisted but that is now being fixed with Linux 7.3.

20 August 05:58 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Gear 26.08

KDE Gear 26.08 was released today to deliver the latest collection of KDE application updates.