Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.

It's not too surprising but the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support release will be transitioning to OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version.

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games.

The Turbostat command-line utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other useful information for AMD and Intel CPUs can now report some L2 cache stats for recent Intel CPUs beginning with Linux 7.0.

Linux block maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe recently was debugging some slowdowns in the AHCI/SCSI code with IO_uring usage. When turning to Claude AI to help in sorting through the issue, patches were devised that can deliver up to a "literally yield a 50-80x improvement on the io_uring side for idle systems." The code is on its way to QEMU.

The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a single socket AMD EPYC 9004/9005 E-ATX server motherboard for those wanting up to 24 RDIMMs, dual 10 Gigabit LAN, and plenty of storage potential via six MCIO connectors and four PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. Beyond offering nice capabilities for this modern AMD EPYC server motherboard at a ~$700 USD price point, it's uniquely positioned for an open-source firmware future thanks to ongoing work around AMD openSIL and hopefully followed by OpenBMC.

The newest addition to AMD's ROCm/HIP portfolio is HIP Threads "hipThreads" as a C++ style concurrency library for AMD GPUs.

When searching for "MT7902" and "Linux" there is no shortage of users asking about Linux driver support for the Mediatek MT7902 WiFi chipset or users complaining about their MT7902 WiFi not working under Linux with that chipset found in numerous laptops in recent years. Fortunately, there is finally Linux driver support for the MT7902 surfacing for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.

After delays, Weston 15.0 shipped this morning as the latest feature release to this reference Wayland compositor. Weston 15.0 comes in heavy on new features - including a Vulkan renderer in experimental form.

Merged on Wednesday were some additional memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.0 merge window. Most interesting out of these latest three dozen patches is support for batched unmapping of file-backed large folios.

Simdjson is the open-source project for high performance JSON parsing by leveraging SIMD instructions for "parsing gigabytes of JSON per second." Notably it showed years ago the huge performance advantage to using AVX-512 in JSON parsing for surprisingly big benefits. Simdjson has continued advancing since then with various optimizations over the years and today is out with simdjson 4.3 that brings yet more SIMD optimizations.

PipeWire 1.6 is out today as the newest feature release for this software widely used by the Linux desktop for managing of audio and video streams while nicely integrating with sandboxed Flatpak apps and more.

Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel's staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it's continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware.

Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with "RDNA 4m" while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4.

With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong direction with the early Linux 7.0 benchmarking.

Long past due for retirement, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed the obsolete Mwave driver for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some Pentium II era IBM ThinkPads from the 1990s.

Back in 2022 Intel announced OpenPGL as an open-source library for path guiding to help enhance the quality of path-based renderers. With time Blender began making use of OpenPGL and other industry interest and adoption. Unfortunately, Intel quietly ended work on OpenPGL in 2025 but has now fortunately found a new home.

Linux hardware vendor System76 has begun teasing a redesign of their Thelio chassis that is used by their modern desktops and workstations. Helping distinguish System76 from other Linux desktop/PC vendors has been their custom-engineered, built-in-the-USA enclosures and now they are preparing to launch a next-generation design.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged recently for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window. As is a common theme for platform-drivers-x86, a lot of the feature work is around Linux laptop drivers for enhancing the support on modern hardware.

Earlier this month Dell sent over a review sample of their new UltraSharp U5223KW monitor. While the model number may not imply much, this monitor is outright incredible. The Dell UltraSharp U5223KW is a 52-inch 6K @ 120Hz monitor with integrated USB hub also working as a KVM switch, 140 Watt power delivery support for USB-C/Thunderbolt laptops, 2.5G Ethernet, and the color reproduction and visuals with this Dell 6K monitor are impeccable.

The Linux 7.0 kernel is shipping improvements for LoongArch, the Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS64 and RISC-V and has been showing much potential for their domestic PC manufacturing.

18 February 06:34 AM EST - Apple - Apple M3 + Asahi Linux

Asahi Linux developers have published a status report following the recent Linux 6.19 kernel release to outline recent progress and upcoming items around Apple Silicon support on Linux. This year will also mark five years that Asahi Linux has been around for bringing Linux to the Apple M-Series hardware.

18 February 06:25 AM EST - BSD - KDE Desktop + GPU Drivers

As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn't get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing.

18 February 06:21 AM EST - Intel - Intel Data Streaming Accelerators 3.0

Last year we began seeing Linux patches preparing the kernel for Intel Data Streaming Accelerator "DSA" 3.0 IP. Finally with the Linux 7.0 kernel those patches in updated form have now been merged.

All of the KVM virtualization feature changes were recently merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

17 February 08:53 PM EST - GNOME - GNOME sdr-native

As a late stage change for GNOME 50 ahead of its official debut next month and following last week's GNOME 50 beta is plumbing the Mutter compositor for a new "sdr-native" color mode option.

The NTFS3 driver maintained by Paragon Software for Microsoft NTFS file-systems today saw a batch of improvements merged for Linux 7.0 This comes as there is also the competing "NTFS Remake" driver that began a few months ago as the "NTFSPLUS" driver. That NTFS Remake driver isn't looking like it will be submitted for the Linux 7.0 merge window so at least for now the NTFS3 driver continues seeing improvements with the latest mainline kernel code.

With memory pricing being as wild as it is these days and with MRDIMMs on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids offering much more memory bandwidth than conventional DDR5 RDIMMs, you may be wondering about the performance impact when not populating all twelve memory channels on the Xeon 6900 series processors. In this article are benchmarks to demonstrate the performance difference of MRDIMM-8800 memory across using six, eight, ten, and twelve MRDIMMs with a Xeon 6980P server.

17 February 04:22 PM EST - AMD - RMPOPT Instruction

AMD sent out a set of Linux kernel patches today for enabling use of a new instruction dubbed RMPOPT. Given the timing of these patches, RMPOPT is presumably a feature coming with next-gen AMD EPYC Zen 6 "Venice" processors.

The LED subsystem updates for the Linux kernel typically aren't too noteworthy each kernel cycle but with Linux 7.0 is a new TI RGB LED driver that captured my attention in being curious over its "autonomous animation engine" integration.

The close_range system call for closing all file descriptors "FDs" in a given range should enjoy a nice speed boost with the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

17 February 01:33 PM EST - Radeon - AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL

One of the limitations of the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has been the lack of its support for HDMI 2.1 and later. AMD has wanted to support HDMI 2.1+ functionality under Linux but it's been legally blocked by the HDMI Forum. But anxious independent users have been working on open-source patches for wiring up HDMI 2.1 into the AMDGPU driver outside of the realm of AMD and the HDMI Forum's blessings.

17 February 12:03 PM EST - BSD - GhostBSD Update

GhostBSD lead developer Eric Turgeon published an update regarding X.Org Server vs. XLibre vs. Wayland planning for the GhostBSD distribution moving forward as well as some future uncertainties to this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-derived OS.

A pull request for the Microsoft .NET Runtime build on Linux to use IO_uring for sockets is showing some massive performance benefits.

The latest Nova Lake enablement work for the Linux kernel to land is adding support for Nova Lake S platforms to the Intel LPSS driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel.

DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions.

17 February 05:32 AM EST - KDE - Plasma 6.6

KDE Plasma 6.6 is now officially out as the newest feature update to this prominent open-source desktop environment. Plasma 6.6 is self-described by KDE developers as "the best desktop in the known universe (according to us). Plasma 6.6 is all about making your life as easy as possible without sacrificing any of the flexibility."

The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo's desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft's Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.

16 February 05:46 PM EST - AMD - AMD Zen 5 Address Translation

A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem.

This month I have been doing a lot of Panther Lake benchmarking under Linux with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of much interest has been the Arc B390 Xe3 graphics that have been working nicely out-of-the-box with the Intel open-source driver stack on Linux although there still are some gaps to fill against Windows. Those Intel Arc B390 Linux benchmarks so far have been focused on OpenGL and Vulkan graphics, but what about OpenCL and GPU compute with the open-source Intel Compute Runtime? Today's article is looking at the performance of the Xe3 Panther Lake graphics on the newest Compute Runtime release compared to prior Intel graphics generations and the AMD Ryzen AI competition.

DRM Panic is the Linux kernel infrastructure now supported by most of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers for being able to render a QR code kernel error message or similar when a kernel panic occurs to provide a cleaner interface should your system run into serious problems. An idea has been raised now within the Fedora Linux camp to provide an improved experience around this feature akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" functionality.

For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers.

The RISC-V architecture updates have been merged for Linux 7.0 with a few items to note.

Merged a few days ago for the Linux 7.0 kernel were all of the driver core enhancements. As has been the common theme in recent kernel releases, a lot of the driver core code churn revolves around additions for allowing more Rust kernel driver usage.

Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it's since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too.

The PCI subsystem updates for Linux 7.0 are aplenty as usual and contain a wide assortment of different fixes and code improvements.

Upstreamed last week to the linux-firmware.git repository by Qualcomm was the GPU firmware files needed for enabling the Adreno GPU on the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC.

While the OpenRISC project began ten years before RISC-V was started, it hasn't enjoyed the hardware ecosystem successes of the latter but still the upstream Linux kernel support continues moving forward and the ability to run OpenRISC on FPGA developer boards.

InputPlumber 0.74 is now available for this open-source input routing and control daemon for Linux systems. InputPlumber enables combining of multiple input devices, emulating different inputs, and a variety of other features particularly of benefit for Linux gaming.

For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago.

Linus Torvalds merged the code this weekend that allows easily replacing the Tux penguin boot logo used during the boot process. This new code optionally allows specifying an alternative boot logo at compile/build time.

The open-source Linux file-system driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT now can deliver better sequential read performance with Linux 7.0 thanks to multi-cluster support.

Version 0.20 of the popular wlroots Wayland support library is nearing its official release. Over the past week were two release candidates for wlroots 0.20 were published for this library used by Sway, Wayfire, Cage, Gamescope, and numerous other Wayland compositors.

A patch series sent out for review this weekend can significantly improve the system hibernation performance under Linux. Particularly for those with slower SSDs, the patches can make Linux hibernate up to several times faster.

Announced last year by consulting firm LunarG was KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan-on-Metal driver for efficiently leveraging the Vulkan API on Apple macOS systems as an alternative to the MoltenVK project. KosmicKrisp was upstreamed for Mesa 26.0 and continues making great progress for opening up more Vulkan possibilities in Apple's world.

The NFS server changes for Linux 7.0 happen to include some nice improvements for this big kernel version number release.

15 February 06:07 AM EST - Hardware - PCIe M.2 Connectors In Device Tree

The power sequencing subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 cycle. Typically not an area of the kernel too exciting but one new driver addition is the "pwrseq-pcie-m2" to provide power sequencing for PCIe M.2 connectors.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) has multiple performance improvements to provide its users with on the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

This Valentine's Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior "master" codebase.

Vim 9.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this robust and comprehensive text editor. This Valentine's Day release for Vim lovers brings experimental Wayland support, XDG Base Directory specification support, modernized defaults for HiDPI displays, new completion features, and an improved diff mode.

The HID subsystem changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Among the Human Interface Devices (HID) work this cycle were supporting more guitars while also adding more device IDs and different laptop quirks.

14 February 09:08 AM EST - Intel - Intel Quantum Passes

Following Intel recently discontinuing a number of open-source projects, this week they formally discontinued their Quantum Passes open-source project that was intended to provide additional passes for their LLVM-based compiler in the Intel Quantum SDK.

In addition to this week's GNOME 50 beta release, there were also other exciting developments in the GNOME ecosystem.

14 February 06:47 AM EST - Arm - ARM64 LS64/LS64V

Beyond all of the exciting Intel/AMD x86_64 changes and improvements to enjoy with the upcoming Linux 7.0, there is one notable ARM64 feature addition this kernel cycle.

The Linux Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel and include introducing Octal DTR "8D-8D-8D" support in SPI NAND for better performance.

For those that may be considering the new ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406GA) laptop that has been refreshed for the new AMD Ryzen AI 400 series, Cirrus Logic has now upstreamed the necessary firmware for the cs35l41 audio amplifier for working speaker support.