Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut.

Merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are some pretty exciting scheduler changes: new features and never-ending work around scheduler performance optimizations and greater scalability with today's increasingly high core count systems.

For programmers fond of the Go programming language, Go 1.26 is out today with two language changes, performance improvements, and other alterations to this Google-backed programming language.

10 February 01:46 PM EST - Intel - Intel 20260210 Microcode

Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues.

The various SoC and platform Device Tree additions were sent out today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Easily most exciting on the SoC side this cycle among the ARM and RISC-V changes is getting support ready for the SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC.

In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel.

CodeWeavers just announced CrossOver 26, the newest version of their commercial software built atop Wine for running Windows games and applications under Apple macOS and Linux.

With recently having carried out benchmarks and finding the Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" performance has improved ~14% since launch day thanks to open-source/Linux software improvements plus also recently having carried out Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks using the latest upstream software, here is a look at how the Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" dual socket server is comparing up against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship when both are running up-to-date software.

The open-source Redis 8.6 release is now available and this GA release has brought "substantial" performance improvements and to memory reduction too. Plus various new features like TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication, time series enhancements, and new eviction policies.

In addition to the BPF filtering support for IO_uring that was merged on Monday, the other block device changes and IO_uring updates were also merged for the newly-opened Linux 7.0 merge window.

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning.

The wonderful IO_uring for the Linux kernel for high performance asnyc I/O has picked up a new capability with Linux 7.0: BPF filtering.

Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere.

The many power management, thermal, and ACPI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. As usual there are many changes coming from fixes to new hardware support and more expansive thermal control capabilities under Linux.

MythTV 36 is now available for this long-time open-source digital video recorder "DVR" software that has been around now for more than two decades as the leading choice for those wishing to watch and/or record live TV under Linux especially as an HTPC.

We are nearing the stable release of LLVM 22 in hopefully two weeks. Out today is the third release candidate of LLVM 22.1 for soliciting more testing of this open-source compiler stack.

10 February 05:19 AM EST - Valve - Linux 7.0 EFI

The EFI subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel. Worth mentioning here is a new quirk for helping Valve's Steam Deck handheld.

Christian Brauner sent in a dozen VFS pull requests that are now-merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. The VFS pull requests worth noting right away in this article are the introduction of the NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE features.

Among the pull requests merged today on this first day of the Linux 7.0 merge window are the many Btrfs file-system feature updates.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to leverage Cargo and the Rust compiler "rustc" itself running within this platform. Plus they also made a heck of a lot of other improvements too over the course of the past month. Today they published a status update to outline all of the promising advancements made to this independent OS so far in 2026.

9 February 01:50 PM EST - AMD - MSI Motherboard

While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts... OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail.

Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state.

Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

9 February 09:20 AM EST - Debian - Debian tag2upload

Debian's tag2upload has finally reached general availability "GA" status for helping Debian developers/maintainers with an improved Git-based packaging workflow.

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.19 release is now the GNU Linux-libre 6.19-gnu downstream release that strips out support for open-source drivers dependent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements deemed against free software standards, removing the ability to load non-open-source kernel modules, and similar restrictions in the name of software freedom.

9 February 06:15 AM EST - AMD - AMD Peak Tops Limiter

The AMDGPU and AMDKFD Linux kernel graphics driver code has been readying support for the Peak Tops Limiter (PTL) as a new feature to the latest Instinct accelerators.

While Linux 7.0 is the next kernel version solely over Linus Torvalds' numbering preference, there is a notable symbolic change that was sent in overnight for this new kernel merge window: formally concluding the "Rust experiment" with upstream kernel developers now in acceptance that Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay.

9 February 05:41 AM EST - GNU - GNU Binutils 2.46

Following last week's release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Following Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 6.19 stable, Linus Torvalds is now out with his customary release announcement. Notably he officially confirmed that the next kernel version is Linux 7.0 as the successor to Linux 6.19.

As anticipated due to the extra week for the cycle given end of year holidays, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 6.19 stable kernel as the first major release of 2026. There is a lot in store with this early 2026 kernel release.

8 February 02:06 PM EST - Intel - Intel Open-Source Projects Ended

After discovering this morning that Intel archived/discontinued its On Demand "SDSi" GitHub project around that controversial feature, it was a slippery slope in noticing Intel recently archived around two dozen other open-source projects they previously maintained.

D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today's release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5.

With Linux 6.19 due for release later today it then opens up the next kernel merge window. It could be Linux 6.20 but more than likely the next kernel version will be called Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds' past tradition of bumping the major version number after X.19. Whatever it ends up being called, here is a look at various "-next" changes that have been queuing up ahead of the merge window.

Back in 2021 on Phoronix was first to report on Intel preparing Linux patches for a "Software Defined Silicon" feature for activating extra licensed hardware features. That Software Defined Silicon support continued moving forward and was then announced as Intel On Demand with a focus on users being able to pay to activate additional accelerators found on select SKUs but not enabled by default.

8 February 07:02 AM EST - WINE - Wine-Staging 11.2

Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.2 is now Wine-Staging 11.2 as this experimental/testing version of Wine with hundreds of extra patches that have yet to be introduced in upstream proper for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux. Notable in this bi-weekly update are more patches for continuing to improve the Adobe Photoshop installer support on Linux.

Of Intel's different CPU accelerator IPs, the arguably most useful and with the greatest customer interest remains around QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Intel QAT allows offloading various compression and encryption tasks for better performance. Intel this week released QATlib 26.02 as the newest version of their user-space library for leveraging QuickAssist Technology on capable hardware.

Back in 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced they were open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer and was then published in early 2023 for this renderer that has been used in a variety of featured animated films. Since then they have continued advancing this MoonRay code via the open-source OpenMoonRay project and this week published their newest feature update.

With QEMU 10.2 that released at the end of last year is the new "MSHV" accelerator for allowing VMs to be created from a Microsoft Hyper-V guest without using nested virtualization. Last weekend at FOSDEM 2026 was a presentation on this MSHV accelerator for those interested.

With the Linux 6.19 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow (8 February), here is a reminder about the top features to expect from this next version of the Linux kernel.

7 February 09:10 AM EST - BSD - NetBSD 11.0

The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing.

7 February 07:20 AM EST - AMD - AMD Zen 6

Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler's codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target.

Following the September release of the KDE LInux reference distribution for the KDE desktop in alpha form, KDE Linux developers have been working toward the beta release with more improvements to this open-source desktop distro.

A Linux kernel engineer at Microsoft is working on a useful Linux desktop improvement. Hamza Mahfooz who previously worked for AMD on their AMDGPU Linux display driver code has been spearheading work on a KMS recovery mechanism to help kernel mode-setting display drivers recover in case of problems.

7 February 06:11 AM EST - GNOME - Glycin Image Loader

GNOME's Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default.

Ahead of the planned Linux 6.19 stable kernel release tomorrow, there have been some last-minute fixes submitted for the scheduler code, including for performance regressions.

7 February 12:00 AM EST - Mesa - Mesa 25.3.5

While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release.

6 February 08:09 PM EST - KDE - Plasma 6.6

There is less than two weeks to go until the official KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release. Plasma 6.6 is still seeing bug fixes in this final stretch of development while KDE developers are also busy already on Plasma 6.7 feature work.

Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January.

Sent out today as a request for comments (RFC) by a Linux kernel engineer employed by IBM is a machine learning library for the Linux kernel. The intent is on plugging in running ML models to the Linux kernel that could be used for system performance optimizations and various other purposes.

Well, here's an unexpected combination... Toyota's Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite.

While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month's GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

In addition to their ongoing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end work for upcoming GFX1250 and recently the GFX13 target for their graphics IP, today AMD compiler engineers introduced a new "GFX1170" target to the LLVM codebase that is also called RDNA 4m.

6 February 08:23 AM EST - Apple - Backlight Brightness

A nice, overdue usability improvement is on the way for those using Apple Macs under Linux. Finally there will be the ability to preserve the same backlight brightness across reboots under Linux.

6 February 06:29 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Dynamic Housekeeping Enhanced Isolation

Sent out today as a request for comments is a new patch series for Dynamic Housekeeping and Enhanced Isolation (DHEI). DHEI aims to provide run-time adjustments to kernel behavior around CPU isolation for helping with latency-sensitive tasks. The expressed goal is for helping cloud-native orchestrators and high frequency trading platforms dynamically re-partition CPU resources without downtime.

As of this week Oracle's latest VirtualBox development code begins to work with Linux's native KVM back-end. Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality.

GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.

One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren't upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git.