Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the latest Pidgin, Gaim 3 is under development.

AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month's update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements.

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 is out today as the newest update to this desktop-minded BSD operating system. Notable with this update is introducing the Aged daemon and Agectl program for handling age verification and age attestation given the increasing number of US states pursuing laws around age verification at the OS user level.

A merge request for Wayland Protocols was opened today for introducing "xx-fractional-scale-v2" as an experimental protocol to address current shortcomings with current Wayland fractional scaling. There is also a KDE KWin compositor merge request already out for review that implements this xx-fractional-scale-v2 protocol.

After KDBUS failed to make it into the mainline Linux kernel more than one decade ago as an in-kernel version of D-Bus, BUS1 was proposed as a clean sheet design for in-kernel, capability-based inter-process communication (IPC). BUS1 didn't gain enough traction to make it to the mainline kernel and then many of the same developers devised Dbus-Broker as a more performant D-Bus user-space implementation. Well, as a big surprise now, a new version of BUS1 is being worked on for the Linux kernel.

Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable.

With Q1 wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter that excited Linux readers the most. During this quarter on Phoronix were 881 original news articles thus far and 61 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles.

One of the latest Linux kernel optimizations being worked on by Meta's large kernel engineering team is making reading of /proc/interrupts less costly. Due to monitoring of their servers frequently reading /proc/interrupts, it's actually become a noticeable cost over time with their massive fleet of systems.

Servo 0.0.6 is out today to round out the month with many great improvements made in recent weeks to this Rust-based browser engine advancing with its servoshell implementation and many prospects around using it for embedded browser use cases.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is just three weeks out for release with many great features in tow from the GNOME 50 desktop to the very leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel and many other package updates. One feature that many had been looking forward to is Canonical's plans to ship AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu archive for a much cleaner experience for those wanting to make use of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. As a common question in recent weeks from readers, it remains to be seen if that milestone will be achieved for the Ubuntu 26.04 launch day.

Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow the next phase of their transition to encourage vendors to support the open-source project goes into effect.

In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel.

30 March 08:20 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Optimization Zone

Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware.

Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library.

For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD's ROCDXG "librocdxg" library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL.

30 March 01:29 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI NPU

Hitting the mailing list today are patches providing initial support for AMD's next-gen NPU "AIE4" platform, complete with SR-IOV support.

While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state is performing relative to Ubuntu 25.10 with this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.

Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs.

30 March 10:46 AM EDT - Radeon - OpenCL 3.0 Conformance

The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015.

Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to enable FRED by default. Now this week that patch appears all-set for merging with the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window.

30 March 09:42 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM RVCC Compiler

A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration "RVCC" as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal.

After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going.

Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system.

30 March 08:56 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV Vulkan Video Low-Latency

The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added new low-latency Vulkan Video encode/decode options for those seeking better performance.

30 March 06:32 AM EDT - Intel - Panel Replay Disable

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week's drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling.

30 March 06:03 AM EDT - AMD - AMD vIOMMU

Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed.

SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams.

Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes.

Here's something that wasn't on my bingo card for this year of the "MKISS" driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn't seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago.

29 March 09:56 AM EDT - Intel - QuickAssist QAT Gen6 Wireless

Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware.

Ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due to be released later today, quite a number of EXT4 file-system fixes were sent out this morning.

Sent out this week was another drm-misc-next pull heading to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. Notable with this week's Direct Rendering Manager code changes was introducing per-process buffer object "BO" memory usage query support for user-space.

Released this week was Nginx 1.29.7 as the newest mainline version of this HTTP(S) web server. Releasing alongside Nginx 1.28.3 stable, it fixed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and some other vulnerabilities. Making Nginx 1.29.7 more exciting though is that it landed Multipath TCP support.

It's fairly rare for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to hit OpenGL rendering game bugs these days as besides more games going opting for Vulkan API use, RadeonSI is rather robust and very mature at this stage. Recently though a Linux gamer that upgraded to a Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card noticed that the open-source EDuke32 Duke Nukem 3D build and its derivatives were failing to render properly with the RadeonSI driver.

It was just two weeks ago that GIMP 3.2 released, one year after the big GIMP 3.0 debut. Out today is GIMP 3.2.2 with various bug fixes, plug-in / file format handling updates, and some minor UI/UX work.

28 March 10:55 AM EDT - AMD - AMD GAIA Agent UI

AMD's GAIA AI agent framework (that previously stood for "Generative AI Is Awesome" albeit they seemed to have dropped promoting it as that name) for Ryzen AI hardware is out with a new version. AMD GAIA 0.17 introduces Agent UI as a new privacy-first web application for local AI agents.

The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux.

28 March 07:28 AM EDT - LLVM - Distributed ThinLTO

Last year LLVM began landing their Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" support as an enhancement to their ThinLTO approach for link-time optimizations. An improvement merged this week to LLVM addresses a performance bottleneck discovered when adding files to the link.

Following the release of GNOME 50, Gedit 50 was released on Friday as the newest version of this graphical text editor aligned with the GNOME desktop. Moving forward the Gedit developers are banning AI / large language model (LLM) driven developments and aim to ship more releases faster.

Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms.

It's been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release.

Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device "DRBD" for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It's a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline.

Framework Computer as the company behind the modular Framework laptops and incredible Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop has stepped up their support for the KDE community.

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.

27 March 10:10 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Xe Driver Memory Pressure

Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM.

With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers.

27 March 06:43 AM EDT - AMD - AMD ROCm 7.12

In addition to this week's ROCm 7.2.1 stable point release, ROCm 7.12 was also released as the newest tech preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0.

27 March 06:06 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA Vera Rubin SMT Issue

An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform.

Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down.

Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager.

Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April.

26 March 05:32 PM EDT - KDE - KWin + Vulkan Work

Merged today was the very first step toward implementing Vulkan support within KDE's KWin compositor as an alternative to OpenGL rendering.

Canonical engineers are planning a switch to ntpd-rs as the newest Rust-based system component for Ubuntu Linux for handling time synchronization.

26 March 09:47 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen 9 9950X3D2

AMD this morning finally announced the long-rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 flagship processor with 3D V-Cache for both of the CCDs.

26 March 07:05 AM EDT - Intel - THP For Device Pages

Sent out today was a new batch of "drm-xe-next" material of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ready for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Standing out in this pull is enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support for drm_pagemap as a big win for those making use of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for GPU compute and the like.

One of the early features for Fedora 45 that was approved this week is enabling IPv6-mostly support within NetworkManager for a more modern out-of-the-box network experience.

26 March 06:19 AM EDT - AI - libNeutronDriver.so

Last month NXP posted open-source Linux kernel driver patches for their Neutron NPU accelerator. The NXP Neutron NPU aims to help with edge AI applications and this neural processing unit is found in their different SoCs. Unfortunately, their GitHub repository for the user-space software ends up containing a binary-only blob that will end up delaying plans on getting this driver into the mainline Linux kernel.

A new set of Linux kernel patches for batch TLB flushing for dirty folios within the kernel's vmscan path were recently floated on the Linux kernel mailing list. This batch TLB flushing optimization for dirty folios during memory reclaim can be a significant performance win with today's multi-core hardware.