Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Last October on Phoronix we were first to point out there being some mysterious intrigue around a new x86 implementation from a "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" with the developer involved not elaborating on the matter. Now that same developer has posted another semi-cryptic message to the Linux kernel mailing list to talk about 16-tile and 32-tile Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) implementations. To date Intel only has 8-tile AMX.

Fwupd 2.1.7 is out today as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering a nice firmware upgrade story on Linux systems.

Back in April, Framework Computer announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up re-design of their modular/upgradeable laptop. This new Framework Laptop 13 Pro features a much larger battery (74Wh), LPCAMM2 memory support, a full CNC aluminum chassis, haptic touchpad, and a new power-optimized touch display. Paired with the very efficient Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs, the Framework Laptop 13 Pro ends up being an incredible offering from the hardware perspective.

8 Hours Ago - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Virtualization HWE Stack

Ubuntu has long provided hardware enablement "HWE" stacks for Ubuntu LTS releases to provide a newer kernel and Mesa drivers and more for better supporting new/modern hardware on the long-term support Ubuntu Linux releases. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical will also now be providing a virtualization HWE stack for shipping newer virtualization / confidential computing features.

Last month I wrote bout new AMD Linux patches introducing a new "low power" CPU core type as an alternative to their standard performance cores and dense efficiency cores. That work now is poised to land with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel.

The Wayfire modular and extensible Wayland compositor formerly used by default on Raspberry Pi SBCs is nearing its v1.0 release. Wayfire 0.11 was released on Sunday for this Compiz-inspired, wlroots-powered compositor with that being their hopeful last planned version before Wayfire 1.0 releases.

9 Hours Ago - BSD - Plus AMD ROCm Port Too

The FreeBSD project published today their Q2-2026 status report that highlights all of their interesting open-source development initiatives for the past quarter. A lot is happening including FreeBSD seeing an AMD ROCm port and also their own NTSYNC driver being created.

NVIDIA and more than two dozen other companies have started the Open Secure AI Alliance for helping to keep open-source AI models secure. The other founding members range from Microsoft to Adobe, IBM, Red Hat, SpaceX, OpenClaw, Palantir, and others.

In working toward releasing the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in less than one month's time, out today is Linux 7.2-rc5 to ship this week's latest bug/regression fixes and help facilitate more testing of this in-development kernel version.

26 July 03:36 PM EDT - GNU - GNU Binutils 2.47

Along with this weekend's release of GNU C Library 2.44, the GNU Binutils 2.47 release is also now available for this important set of binary utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms with the GNU toolchain.

A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure".

26 July 09:24 AM EDT - BSD - Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio

Besides the FreeBSD graphics and WiFi drivers lagging behind Linux and other operating systems, the FreeBSD audio driver support and handling of audio streams with FreeBSD on the desktop can be problematic depending upon the hardware/system. One of the most active mailing list threads this week in the FreeBSD camp was over the "tragic state" of FreeBSD audio/sound support.

Auto-CPUFreq is one of the open-source projects striving to be a CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux systems to improve battery life without making any real compromises to the user experience. Out today is v3.1 as the newest feature release of Auto-CPUFreq.

Since 2017 in Linux 4.12 has been the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver where it was introduced into the staging area and remains there nearly a decade later. The rtl8723bs driver for this Realtek 802.11n WiFi SDIO driver has seen a lot of code cleaning over the years and all these years later still is needing lots of code clean-ups from unnecessary code abstractions to dealing with malicious WiFi APs for what Greg Kroah-Hartman has called a "beast of a driver". The latest twist is there now being patches for adding Realtek RTL8723BS and RTL8723B onto the existing RTW88 driver.

Firewire still isn't dead yet on Linux. Current plans call for maintaining IEEE-1394 Firewire on Linux at least through 2029 and with today's Linux 7.2-rc5 kernel release is a fix for those wanting to leverage IPv4 networking over Firewire.

Following last month's beta release, Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS derived mobile operating system for select smartphones and tablets.

25 July 12:37 PM EDT - Fedora - Fedora Conflict of Interest

Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project.

25 July 07:00 AM EDT - GNOME - New Kiwi Menu Update

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME.

GNU developers today released GNU C Library "glibc" 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms.

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too.

Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project.

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward.

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as "broken" and "harmful" due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine "QCE" driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it's even worse than anticipated.

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window.

24 July 10:20 AM EDT - Ubuntu - /etc/os-release Is Better

Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file.

Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition.

24 July 08:14 AM EDT - AMD - Open-Source At AMD

At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in "open" mentions and a ramp that's been building each year at the AMD events.

At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under Linux now and against the AMD/Intel competition. Unfortunately, it's regressed even further than the last round of testing.

23 July 03:16 PM EDT - AMD - AMD EPYC Zen 8 Ravenna

After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development.

In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers.

While AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 "Venice" for taking their server offerings to the next level in the agentic AI era.

23 July 12:59 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Instinct MI455X + Helios

Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack.

23 July 12:25 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD Frozen

The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things.

23 July 09:52 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora Atomic Desktop + Remote Install

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images.

23 July 07:58 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen AI Software 1.8

Ahead of Lisa Su's keynote this morning at the AMD Advancing AI event, tagged on GitHub just now was the Ryzen AI Software 1.8 release for helping to deploy AI models on Ryzen AI PCs.

23 July 07:50 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM 23.1-rc1

Following the recent code branching for the LLVM 23 series, LLVM 23.1-rc1 was released today in working toward the next stable release of this open-source compiler stack.

While the VideoLAN developers are busy these days working on dav2d for AV2 video decoding, they haven't let up work on dav1d and recently released dav1d 1.5.4 for continuing to enhance this leading open-source, CPU-based AV1 decoder.

Just one week after releasing Lemonade 11.0, the Lemonade 11.5 local AI server was released today for this open-source AMD backed project during their AMD Advancing AI event.

Sam Lantinga of Valve and SDL fame has landed HDR10 rendering support into the Simple DirectMedia Library.

System76 developers today released COSMIC Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment.

For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage.

22 July 08:16 AM EDT - Intel - Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupt

Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent out this week's batch of sound fixes that he describes as "A collection of fixes that have been accumulated recently. The amount is still "new normal", but all small fixes. Mostly hardware-specific quirks, but including a few core fixes, too." The "new normal" has been a common phrase recently to reflect the increased tempo of patches as well as security/bug disclosures all due to the increased pace of AI/LLM activity.

Following the launch of the 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the 5-inch display variant, Raspberry Pi announced today the addition of a 10-inch model.