Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

One month ago it was exciting to see the open-source ReactOS operating system running Valve's Half-Life game. Little to realize less than 30 days later it would also be running Half-Life 2.

9 Hours Ago - AMD - Linux 7.3 AMDGPU + AMDKFD

In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of "new stuff" to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

9 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel IPU8 With Nova Lake

More Linux kernel patches have been surfacing that confirm next-gen, high-end Nova Lake laptops will feature IPU8 image processing capabilities.

OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux.

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizations and improvements.

A set of patches to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes.

One area of Linux hardware testing I haven't explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel.

For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news coverage and relentless Linux hardware testing.

4 July 08:14 AM EDT - GNOME - Mutter + ext-background-effect-v1

Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window's background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code.

In addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code.

4 July 06:09 AM EDT - RISC-V - 256 Cores For RISC-V NR_CPUs

A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds.

4 July 05:52 AM EDT - KDE - KWin 6.8 Drops Desktop OpenGL

Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases.

3 July 08:48 PM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Mutter GPU Reset Recovery

While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code "GSoC" project this year, GNOME's Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling.

In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51.

The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery "fast" charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster.

3 July 11:42 AM EDT - Vulkan - VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types

Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it's interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project's Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan.

3 July 11:10 AM EDT - Coreboot - Coreboot + openSIL On AMD Ryzen

With 3mdeb's Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented.

While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling.

3 July 07:30 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Driver Changes For Linux 7.2

On Thursday Intel sent out their first batch of Intel kernel graphics driver changes of new feature material targeting the Linux 7.3 kernel. This first batch of drm-intel-next for v7.3 continues to focus heavily on lining up Nova Lake's Xe3P integrated graphics/display support.

NVIDIA's latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it's part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware.

Some post-merge-window code changes merged overnight ahead of Linux 7.2-rc2 this weekend is hardening the kernel's BPF code against JIT spraying attacks.

Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel's usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code.

The ReactOS project that is striving to be the "open-source Windows" with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first NT6 system call.

A change proposal under consideration for Fedora Linux 45 would enable x86_64 Shadow Stack usage by default in the name of better security on modern Intel and AMD systems.

The EFS file-system was used for non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and disk partitions on SGI IRIX before IRIX 6.0 switched over to XFS. Inside the Linux kernel has been a read-only EFS file-system driver without a maintainer for 20+ years while for Linux 7.3 it's expected to be removed.

2 July 11:11 AM EDT - AI - AI Agent Attribution On Patches

When AI/LLM agents are used in the creation of Linux kernel patches, the policy for a while now has been that it should be specified using an "Assisted-by" tag as part of the patches/commits. But Linux kernel developers this week have been discussing whether to revise that policy or to potentially eliminate it.

Since May we have been benchmarking the SpacemiT K3 RISC-V SoC as one of the first to market RISC-V chips supporting the RVA23 profile. The SpacemiT K3 has shown how far RISC-V performance has come in the past half decade and one of the promising elements of this modern RISC-V SoC with its X100/A100 cores is supporting the RISC-V Vector Extension "RVV" 1.0. In this article are some initial benchmarks looking specifically at the RISC-V RVV 1.0 performance impact in different supported software.

2 July 09:08 AM EDT - Intel - GCC ACE Patches

The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE.

One month ago we reported on YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust with the help of Claude Code. Since then YSERVER has continued to advance in supporting more X11 functionality thanks to the help of Claude Code (AI) and out today is version 1.3 o this display server.

A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop.

2 July 06:18 AM EDT - Arm - Old ARM Deprecations And Removal

It's not only old x86 i486 CPU support being removed from the Linux kernel but a number of older ARM platforms and features are on the chopping block too. A proposal has been laid out for deprecating and then removing a number of outdated ARM platforms and features from the Linux kernel in early 2027.

Back in May the FFmpeg project introduced Vulkan-accelerated decoding for the APV video format. The Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec was being handled using Vulkan shaders in a similar way to how FFmpeg implemented Vulkan acceleration for Apple ProRes. Now there is Vulkan-accelerated APV encoding too.

2 July 05:54 AM EDT - Mesa - Better Utilization

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst has landed his latest optimization work to Rusticl in Mesa 26.2. The latest effort for this Rust-based OpenCL driver that works across Gallium3D drivers is around better hardware utilization.

A new release of libjxl is now available for this reference implementation of the JPEG-XL image format, including both image encode and decode support.

Erin Catto who has been developing the Box2D 2D physics engine for games announced the release of Box3D. Box3D is now providing a new open-source 3D physics engine that is forked off from the Box2D code.

1 July 09:40 PM EDT - Fedora - No Fedora AI Developer Desktop For Now

Stemming from the widely varying views over the recent Fedora proposal for an "AI Developer Desktop" catering to running local AI and machine learning workloads in pre-configured environments with a seamless hardware-accelerated experience, the Fedora Council issued a statement this evening to effectively shutdown discussions for now over a Fedora AI Developer Desktop and to pause the Fedora Community Initiatives process.

Back in March Steam on Linux use shot up to 5.33% as a big 3.1% improvement over February. In April it dropped to 4.52% and then fell to 3.99% in May. Valve just published the Steam Survey numbers for June and it points to another minor setback from the recent all-time high of Steam on Linux.

With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux.

System76 today announced their new Lemur Pro high-end Linux laptop that is now powered by the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs.

While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs.

Earlier this year AMD disclosed the RMPOPT instruction that given the timing will seemingly be introduced with upcoming Zen 6 EPYC "Venice" processors. The RMPOPT feature amounts to a performance optimization for AMD EPYC SEV-SNP enabled servers by cutting down on the associated Reverse Map Table (RMP) overhead. Linux enablement of AMD RMPOPT remains ongoing and out this week is the latest iteration of the enablement.

1 July 09:32 AM EDT - GNU - /etc/tunables.conf

Red Hat has contributed new system-wide tunables infrastructure to the GNU C Library "glibc" that allows specifying system-wide tunables via the new /etc/tunables.conf configuration file.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues taking special focus on AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era GPUs for enhancing the open-source graphics driver support for these aging graphics cards.

For those that prefer waiting until the first bug-fix/point release before upgrading to a major new feature series, GCC 16.2 is being planned for an early August release for delivering back-ported bug fixes to the GCC 16 compiler.

The Asahi Linux project published a new blog post outlining recent development efforts in getting Apple Silicon hardware working with their downstream Linux distribution. There is ongoing work on bringing up Apple M3 support, fixing boot support for macOS 27 beta systems, Apple Video Decoder (AVD) support progress, and more.

Last month on Phoronix there were 294 original news articles and 18 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Beyond Phoronix.com turning 22 years old in June, there were also a lot of exciting Linux hardware and open-source software developments worth recapping.

With modern laptops, proper platform/WMI drivers are becoming more depended upon not only for supporting all typical functionality from keyboards to backlights and other handling, but also for achieving proper performance. For many laptop vendors, the Linux platform drivers are maintained by the open-source community and actual customers. The latest example of the challenges of the community-maintained support rather than from the vendor is with the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop seeing inappropriate power values set in the open-source driver that were incorrect and led to lower power/performance than Windows.

NVIDIA engineers have been developing a new binary format for their GPU firmware images for use with the in-development, open-source Nova kernel driver. With this new TLV binary firmware format it aims to be easier to parse by their Rust-based driver code.

As the last planned article on Phoronix of Q2, here is a look back at what excited readers the most in the second quarter. There were 872 original news articles this quarter as well as 54 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is what excited readers the most over these past three months.

Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76.

GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow.

Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change.

While Linux 7.2 introduces the ability to boot on Apple M3 Macs, it's not yet remotely useful for end-users wanting to use an Apple Mac/MacBook as their daily system. As it stands now, the M3 Macs boot to a simple console and that's about it with the lack of proper GPU acceleration and functionality like the keyboard on MacBooks not working either. Posted to the kernel mailing list today was the new driver patches for enabling the internal keyboard on more recent Apple MacBooks.

30 June 10:36 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7.2

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month.

30 June 10:22 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Linux Highlights Q2-2026

With Q2'2026 drawing to a close, as part of the different quarterly recaps of popular areas on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the quarter.

30 June 08:48 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Canonical + Trifecta Tech Foundation

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical continues making more inroads in the Rust infrastructure space. Canonical announced today they have become the first gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation that works on projects like sudo-rs for building more open infrastructure in the Rust programming language.

Intel has dropped AMX-TF32 before its debut in Xeon Diamond Rapids. The latest Intel programming reference manual has dropped AMX-TF32 and Intel engineers are already moving ahead to strip out the AMX-TF32 support that existed in the GNU Compiler Collection.

Released last week was the Servo 0.3 browser engine release along with their latest Servoshell demo browser. Today the project has published their monthly development recap to highlight all of the interesting changes made. Here's a look at what they accomplished over the past month while doing so on less than $8k in monthly donations.

30 June 06:10 AM EDT - GNU - SpacemiT X100

The newest GCC 17 compiler code has landed support for -mcpu=spacemit-x100 and -mtune=spacemit-x100 targeting for the SpacemiT X100 RISC-V core.