Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

For those still using old AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" or GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is a wonderful holiday gift. With Linux 6.19, the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are now defaulting to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver in place of the legacy "Radeon" DRM driver that has been the default for GCN 1.1/1.0 and other ATI/AMD graphics processors of the past 2+ decades. In this article is a look at the performance benefit of now AMDGPU being the default as well as now enabling RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box.

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.

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.

5 Hours Ago - 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.

6 Hours Ago - 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.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.19 is now available for testing in leading up to the stable release in early February.

MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs.

21 December 12:55 PM EST - AMD - AMD ISP4 Driver v7

One of the features that sadly didn't make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops.

21 December 07:43 AM EST - Intel - Intel APX For KVM Guests

Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX.

Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps.

Open-source developer Armin Wolf has been working most recently on marshalling support for the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) platform code within the Linux kernel. This WMI marshalling support is to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' WMI ACPI driver and ultimately to allow for better compatibility with some ACPI firmware and enhancing some WMI drivers.

It's not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there's an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems' SATA bus and/or potentially other issues.

Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today's Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support.

The Swedish VPN service Mullvad announced this week GotaTun, an open-source Rust-based WireGuard implementation that is forked from Cloudflare's BoringTun.

In addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request to DRM-Next adding Nova Lake display support, a drm-xe-next pull request was also sent out on Friday that prepares a new multi-queue feature for Xe3P_XPC -- initially just the "Crescent Island" AI inference accelerator card. Plus other new features too for this Xe kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0~6.20 kernel version.

With the Arch Linux packages for the NVIDIA official graphics driver moving to the now-stable NVIDIA 590 driver series that drops the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series GPU support, Arch Linux users with those old Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards will need to transition to using the NVIDIA legacy driver packages from the Arch Linux AUR. Meanwhile for those on Turing and newer with the NVIDIA 590 driver will enjoy the open-source kernel modules by default being used.

20 December 11:25 AM EST - GNU - GDB 17.1

The GNU Debugger "GDB" 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience.

The beta release of Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" is now available for testing ahead of the holidays for this latest incremental update to this desktop OS built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base.

20 December 07:39 AM EST - AI - Gemini AI + Ubuntu Development

A few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was "plain wrong" and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu's monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google's Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in those Ubuntu releases.

In addition to the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver in Mesa merging compression support for big performance wins, another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" graphics processors.

20 December 05:50 AM EST - Debian - LoongArch64 Official In Debian

Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit "Loong64" was added to Debian Ports, it's now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux.

20 December 05:25 AM EST - KDE - Plasma 6.6 Improvements

There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas.

20 December 05:10 AM EST - BSD - Multi-Queue

For helping with the I/O performance in virtualized environments, merged this week to the DragonFlyBSD development code is multi-queue support for its VirtIO block "virtio_blk" driver.

19 December 08:28 PM EST - Google - Needed For Flatpak + Snap Printing

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google's web browser.

19 December 05:33 PM EST - WINE - Wine 11.0-rc3

In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate.

19 December 04:00 PM EST - Intel - Nova Lake Monitor Support

For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake.

19 December 12:27 PM EST - Intel - Panther Lake Slow Workload Hints

Five years ago Intel began introducing "workload hints" used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities. Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for new workload hint functionality coming for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs.

The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year's Long Term Support version. As such it's sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life. Here are benchmarks showing the performance advantages of upgrading from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS for 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" as well as an early look on the same server for the performance direction Linux 6.19 is bringing the kernel into 2026.

19 December 09:11 AM EST - X.Org - xorgproto 2025.1

For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously referred to file-systems in user-space as for toys and misguided people. But FUSE has shown a lot of interesting use-cases over the years and has grown more capable in the decade since Torvalds' prior comments. Out today is FUSE 3.18 as the latest release for the FUSE library.

19 December 08:10 AM EST - Intel - Intel Panther Lake NPU

Since late 2024 Intel has been working on 5th Gen NPU support for their Linux IVPU driver. That 5th Gen NPU support for Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13. Now today the Intel Linux NPU user-space driver has seen its official support added for Panther Lake.

19 December 06:30 AM EST - BSD - FreeBSD On Laptops

As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience.

19 December 06:12 AM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.04 Kernel Plans

Canonical confirmed their Linux kernel plans today for the Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release due out in April.

Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others.

The Mageia development team recently met to solidify their plans for releasing Mageia 10 as the next major release of this LInux distribution with its roots that trace back to the days of Mandrake Linux.

Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it's a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions.

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats.

OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support.

The Linux Foundation today published their 2025 Annual Report where they offer a glimpse into the finances of the organization for this year.

18 December 03:56 PM EST - RISC-V - Spectre V1 For RISC-V

Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks.

In the past few weeks on Phoronix we have explored a fresh look at the open-source Nouveau/NVK performance compared to the NVIDIA 580 packaged Linux driver as well as a multi-generation Nouveau vs. NVIDIA comparison from the GeForce GTX 980 to RTX 5080 since the forthcoming NVIDIA R590 driver series is ending the GTX 900/1000 series support. Today's article provides another round of fresh open-source NVIDIA Linuc graphics performance data using the upstream open-source Nouveau and Mesa NVK/Zink drivers compared not only to the current NVIDIA packaged driver but also competitively for how the GeForce RTX 50 line-up compares to the current AMD Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.

In addition to the release this week of OpenShot 3.4, released today is a major update to another popular open-source video editing application: Kdenlive. The Kdenlive 25.12 release brings many improvements to help with editing of any year-end / holiday videos.

18 December 01:20 PM EST - Nouveau - Linux 6.19 + Mesa 26.0 = Better Perf

Merged today to the Mesa 26.0-devel code for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is compression support for helping to deliver better performance.

18 December 12:09 PM EST - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 590.48.01

NVIDIA has promoted their R590 driver series to stable with the release today of the NVIDIA 590.48.01 Linux driver as their latest new feature branch version.

Beyond the Firefox browser to see more changes under its new CEO, the Thunderbird mail client is also expected to see some big changes in the new year.

18 December 09:20 AM EST - Qt - Qt 6.11 Beta 1

Qt 6.11 Beta 1 is out on-schedule with the code having entered its feature freeze and code branching earlier this month. This toolkit is working toward the stable Qt 6.11 stable debut in March.

18 December 08:26 AM EST - Intel - Intel ISPC 1.29

Intel ISPC 1.29 released on Wednesday as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C variant able to target Intel hardware from their CPUs to GPUs for SIMD programming.

18 December 06:11 AM EST - Radeon - Strix Halo Laptops For ROCm Bug Fixes

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it's in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those contributing PyTorch and vLLM ROCm bug fixes for Strix Halo laptops.

Announced one year ago was KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" with an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation. Development on Kiot sadly fell through the cracks for most of the year but development on it recently restarted.

17 December 08:39 PM EST - Intel - AI Assisted Video Encode

Intel's Video Processing Library "libvpl" is out with a new version ahead of the holidays. The only major change with libvpl 2.16 is adding experimental APIs for AI-assisted video encode functionality.

Systemd 259 is out as the newest feature release for this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Yes, there are more features in tow for this systemd release to top off 2025.

A new set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list begin adapting the Linux software RAID code paths to begin making use of the folio data structure.

17 December 01:37 PM EST - Intel - Intel XPU Manager

Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support.

17 December 09:25 AM EST - Apple - M2 Pro/Max Macs

The Asahi Linux project is out with their latest status report to highlight upstream improvements made for the newly-minted Linux 6.18 kernel as well as some of their efforts going on downstream within Asahi Linux itself.

Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux.

The first CVE vulnerability has been assigned to a piece of the Linux kernel's Rust code.

17 December 06:24 AM EST - AMD - -march=znver6

Ahead of AMD releasing their Zen 6 EPYC and Ryzen processors in 2026, AMD today saw their Zen 6 "znver6" support land into the GCC 16 open-source compiler.

17 December 06:12 AM EST - Intel - Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8

Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

17 December 05:53 AM EST - AMD - Collecting Data

If you are not satisfied with the current performance for PyTorch or ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion on your Strix Halo APU system or with other consumer RDNA3/RDNA4 Radeon consumer GPUs, AMD engineers are interested in your logs to help better optimize the performance going forward.