Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI).

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it's the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable.

It's pretty rare nowadays seeing any real changes to the JFS file-system on Linux when there are multiple far superior solutions available. But in any event, the JFS file-system driver has seen a few fixes in Linux 7.1.

The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others.

The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes.

Following last month's GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications.

Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader "DPL" after running unopposed in this year's elections.

A fix today for GNOME Shell's screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback.

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a wide assortment of PCI(e) changes from new to old hardware.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements for Kaveri and other GCN 1.1 era APUs. Now Timur's out with some more fixes for helping select GCN 1.0 hardware.

The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions.

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS has now rolled out the Linux 7.0 kernel to its users. But beyond re-basing against the latest upstream kernel version it is also carrying some extra patches.

In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements.

The block subsystem and IO_uring changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 in continuing to enhance Linux storage capabilities.

18 April 03:15 PM EDT - BSD - GhostBSD 26.1

GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD.

18 April 02:41 PM EDT - AMD - New AMD SMCA Bank Types

The AMD Machine Check Exception "mce_amd" driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware.

For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available.

The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads.

For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements.

Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness.

18 April 06:05 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7

KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn't published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks.

As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!

Made public today was the Floating Point Divider State Sampling bug (stylized as FP-DSS or FPDSS) affecting original AMD Zen 1 (and Zen 1+) processors. The Linux kernel is already to go with a security fix for those still relying on the very first Ryzen or EPYC processors.

For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release.

Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it's been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year.

The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD's GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as "RDNA 4m".

Loongson's LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library "glibc" release.

Linux libcrypto cryptography subsystem changes for the v7.1 kernel are enabling more optimizations by default and in turn helping to achieve better crypto/hashing performance on this next kernel version.

Fedora 44 final had been aiming for an early release target of 21 April, but due to outstanding blocker bugs, it's now revised to target a release on 28 April.

17 April 06:19 AM EDT - Arm - -mcpu=armagicpu

The GCC open-source compiler has landed initial targeting support for Arm's newly-announced AGI CPU.

With the vast majority of x86/x86_64 systems supporting restarting the system using ACPi, BIOS, or even the KBD keyboard controller, with Linux 7.1 is now support in place for using custom restart handlers registered by drivers, such as in place for other CPU architectures.

All of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel.

Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 11.0 Beta as their first beta milestone for this software that powers Steam Play now rebased against upstream Wine 11.0.

The extensible scheduler "sched_ext" code for allowing Linux scheduling behavior to be defined via BPF programs is seeing some useful improvements with the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel.

Canonical today released Mir 2.26 as the newest feature release for this compositor for building Wayland-based shells. Notable with Mir 2.26 is a Rust-based input platform is in development as part of their broader effort for bringing Rust code into Mir.

The media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window and includes new hardware support.

Last month Intel began shipping the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus "Arrow Lake Refresh" desktop processor. This is a mighty interesting processor for the $349 USD price point with more cores and a larger cache compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K and capable of delivering much of the performance of the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake processor. In today's article is a look at how well the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus performs under Linux with more than 340 different benchmarks representing a range of Linux workloads from gaming to creator to developer and technical computing uses.

The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility.

16 April 09:43 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Core Series 3

Intel today formally announced the Core Series 3 low-end mobile processors previously known as Wildcat Lake. These are the new Intel 18A offerings that are a step below the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs that began shipping earlier this year.

Rust 1.95 was released to the wild today as the latest feature update to this popular programming language.

The Linux Mint project published their March 2026 monthly status update where they note the ongoing work toward Mint 23 "Alfa" that will be released under their new longer development lifecycle. Linux Mint 23 will be out for Christmas (December) 2026 atop an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base.

Mozilla today announced "Thunderbolt" as an open-source AI client built for control and independence. Mozilla Thunderbolt, while having the worst possible name, is built for organizations and others wanting to deploy self-hosted AI infrastructure.

16 April 07:02 AM EDT - Intel - Linear Address Space Separation

In addition to Linux 7.1 supporting FRED by default for Flexible Return and Event Delivery, another Intel CPU feature now in good shape for this next kernel version is Linear Address Space Separation (LASS).

Beyond Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support, this next Linux kernel version is also beginning to remove driver code for supporting Russia's Baikal CPUs.

Back during the Linux 7.0 merge window the MMC changes were rejected by Linus Torvalds as "complete garbage" that wasn't building properly and not vetted through linux-next. He went without pulling any MMC changes for the v7.0 cycle while now for Linux 7.1 the code has been better tested and successfully merged.

16 April 06:02 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Gear 26.04

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release, KDE Gear 26.04 is out today for shipping all the latest updated KDE desktop applications.

15 April 08:48 PM EDT - Radeon - AMDGPU DC Power Module

With the set of today's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a "power module" that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features.

The Linux 7.1 kernel is bringing performance improvements for Sheaves, the per-CPU caching layer introduced several kernel cycles ago (Linux 6.18) for better efficiency on today's high core count hardware. Sheaves began as an opt-in feature but since Linux 7.0 is now being used for all caches.

The SDL library widely used by cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime has now established a policy to block code contributions made using AI / Large Language Models (LLMs).

The workqueue changes merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel are significant for today's modern high-end processors where there can be many CPU cores per last level cache (LLC / L3 cache). The new WQ_AFFN_CACHE_SHARD affinity scope can reduce some contention on such systems and help achieve greater performance.

Archinstall 4.2 is now available as the latest update to this very convenient, text-based Arch Linux OS installer.

Last month I ran benchmarks showing the very positive performance impact FRED has on Intel's new Panther Lake processors while wondering why Flexible Return and Event Deliver wasn't enabled by default yet on Linux. Hours after that story was published, an Intel engineer posted the patch to enable FRED by default with the rationale they were waiting for hardware to be publicly released in order to evaluate the performance benefit. Days after that the FRED-by-default patch hit tip/tip.git and now as of yesterday that patch is merged for Linux 7.1.

15 April 10:24 AM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 26.1-rc1

Eric Engestrom stepped up again to serve as Mesa release manager for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 feature release. Mesa 26.1-rc1 was just released in kicking off the weekly release candidate dance until Mesa 26.1 stable is ready for debut in May.

A change proposal has been filed to build x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level packages alongside the existing x86_64-v1 packages for Fedora Linux.

Linux developer Qais Yousef with Google has announced the alpha release of Sched QoS as a new initiative for user-space assisted scheduling. The scheduling model in turn is based in part on Apple's quality of service classes used by iOS for classifying software as user interactive, user initiative, utility, or background tasks.

The clone3() system call in Linux 7.1 is adding three new flags for greater control over the creation of child processes.

15 April 06:33 AM EDT - Hardware - AMD Error Detection And Correction

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers.

The x86/asm changes merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a few low-level improvements.

The exFAT file-system changes have landed for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel.