Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

78 Minutes Ago - AMD - AMD Instinct MI455X + Helios

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

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.

4 Hours Ago - 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.

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.

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.

Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage.

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.

Linux's cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface.

Canonical today disclosed three new Snap security vulnerabilities affecting snapd. Two are rated high impact vulnerabilities while the third is considered medium but covers all Ubuntu releases of the past decade going back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Following recent Linux kernel patches enabling the Snapdragon X2 Elite powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 and HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite laptops to boot outside of Windows 11 on ARM, Qualcomm engineers have now posted a new patch series for getting the X2 Elite Extreme powered ASUS Zenbook A16 working on Linux.

Earlier this month I provided a look at the KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers -- including some premium supporters -- requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME Shell 50.3 desktop as well as the X11-based Xfce 4.20 desktop on CachyOS.

21 July 11:38 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Enterprise Store

For months the Enterprise Store "enterprise-store" has been mentioned in some Ubuntu documentation and other elements while today it was formally announced by Canonical. The Enterprise Store is for helping to manage Ubuntu Linux deployments particularly within enterprise organizations that may have their computers air-gapped or otherwise strict Internet controls.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the latest batch of features for the upcoming Fedora 45 release.

21 July 08:00 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen AI Halo LED Driver

For those that have picked up one of the neat AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PCs, the LED driver allowing for customization of the LED lighting bar is set to be mainlined for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

21 July 06:23 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Open-Source GPU Compute

Going in-step with last week's release of the Intel Graphics Compiler 2.38.2, out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.27.39122.11. Most intriguing with the new release is Intel continuing to build out the still-experimental LEO feature.

21 July 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Zen 6 Instruction Based Sampling

Among the recent patch series in preparing Linux for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors is making the kernel aware of additional EILVT registers to be found with at least EPYC Venice platforms.

InputPlumber is out with its newest feature release. As a reminder, InputPlumber is the open-source input router and remapper daemon for combining various input devices from gamepads to mice and keyboards as well as the ability to emulate them.

20 July 08:35 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Cold Reset Recovery

One of the patch series going through nearly a dozen revisions now is for introducing a cold reset recovery method for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers with an initial focus on the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver.

NetworkManager 1.58 is out today with the latest feature enhancements for bettering wired and wireless network management on Linux.

20 July 02:47 PM EDT - Intel - Granite Rapids More MRDIMM

With Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors not slated to launch until next year and with AMD EPYC Venice being right around the corner, Intel announced today that with upcoming BIOS updates they will be expanding the range of RDIMM and MRDIMM memory support for current-generation Xeon 6 and Xeon 6+ processors.

20 July 12:18 PM EDT - AMD - SPIR-V IR With ROCm

While AMD ROCm 7.14 released last week as the first production release built off TheRock, there is already more to look forward to moving into the future with the AMD ROCm stack... In particular, SPIR-V with ROCm becoming a reality for unified binaries that can work across graphics architectures/targets, better portability across GPU hardware, and other improvements to the experience in targeting a unified IR.

20 July 11:55 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Security Tracking

The GNOME project is changing its handling of security reports due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated security findings.

My testing of the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel continues in the lab. One of the latest promising findings from this kernel that will be released as stable in August is faster Intel Xe3 graphics performance on Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware.

Some extremely cool patches were posted to the Linux kernel mailing list on Sunday. The patches for "KNOD" allow for in-kernel network offloading to GPUs with an initial focus on AMD GPU support. What makes this all the more nifty is that it doesn't depend upon any user-space libraries like AMD ROCm but is all handled in-kernel with driving the GPU directly.

Mozilla has uploaded the Firefox 153.0 release binaries today for the newest monthly update to this cross-platform web browser. Making Firefox 153 exciting is that it's the newest Extended Support Release "ESR" as well as introducing Vulkan Video decode support.

20 July 07:17 AM EDT - SUSE - openSUSE Sponsors

While openSUSE is closely aligned with SUSE as a company, they aren't the exclusive sponsor of this free and open-source Linux distribution with its rolling-release Tumbleweed and Leap stable releases. AMD has been a longtime major supporter of openSUSE and the Fastly content delivery company has been another platinum sponsor too besides SUSE. There are also various other lower-tier sponsors while today the openSUSE Project put out a call for further corporate sponsorship.

20 July 06:27 AM EDT - GNU - AVX10_V2_AUX ISA

Earlier this month Intel compiler engineers posted initial GCC compiler patches for the AI Compute Extensions "ACE" that was born out of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group to augment AVX and scalar code with new capabilities for AI/ML workloads. Now as part of that an AMD compiler engineer posted patches over the weekend for AVX10_V2_AUX ISA support.

20 July 06:17 AM EDT - Hardware - Qualcomm Crypto Engine Accelerator

The Qualcomm Crypto Engine Accelerator "QCE" driver is being disabled within the Linux 7.3 kernel over a number of issues, including being slower than having the CPU cores handling cryptographic work and a history of different driver bugs. Plus race conditions causing security issues and other challenges.

Out today is Hyprland 0.56 as the newest feature update to this unique Wayland compositor and incorporating just under three months worth of improvements.

The fourth weekly release candidate of the Linux 7.2 kernel is now available for testing.

If you are looking for a reason to celebrate today, the last of the MPEG-4 Part 2 patents expired today.

The latest hand-tuned code in the FFmpeg multimedia library for allowing better performance on today's modern Intel/AMD AVX-512-capable processors is showing 1.372x faster performance for RGB24 to RGBA pixel format conversions.

The Legion Y700 Gen4 is an Android tablet that debuted last year and powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. This 8.8-inch tablet is now seeing patches for enabling Linux support outside the confines of Android and will hopefully end up in the mainline kernel.

Thanks to the work of the open-source community, more ASUS desktop motherboards for Intel Core and AMD Ryzen systems are seeing working sensor monitoring under Linux. With the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, several additional ASUS motherboards will now enjoy working sensor monitoring.

The GNU Hurd project recently issued their Q2'2026 status report to outline recently development efforts. The Hurd is still happening!

The performance of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver continues to improve each feature release in its quest toward better competing with NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver with its proprietary Vulkan driver.

This week's batch of AMDGPU Display Core "DC" updates arrived heavy with 70 new patches for improving that open-source display support for Radeon graphics on the Linux desktop.

18 July 07:24 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME OS Safe Mode

At GNOME's annual GUADEC conference happening this week in Spain, an update was shared on the current state of GNOME OS.

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space.

Following the release of AMD's ZenDNN 6.0 earlier this month, there is a new feature release of the oneDNN neural network library that used to be developed by Intel as part of oneAPI and is now under the UXL Foundation umbrella. Even so, oneDNN feature releases continue to be heavy on new Intel optimizations and future hardware support.

In addition to Friday night's release of DXVK 3.0.2, debuting separately a short time later was D7VK 2.0 as the latest major feature release for this implementation of Direct3D 7 and earlier built off the Vulkan API.