Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland.

105 Minutes Ago - GNOME - Plus GNOME Shell 51 Beta

Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier.

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations.

Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates.

Queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window is adding support for the Realtek RTL8261C and RTL8261D 10 Gigabit PHYs that launched last year.

It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release.

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time.

2 August 10:32 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Starfire + Linux 7.3

Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel.

Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base.

2 August 06:25 AM EDT - AMD - Not Zen 6 Models

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6.

Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems.

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use.

NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system.

Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July.

Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project.

1 August 06:49 AM EDT - Hardware - Western Digital Drive Quirks

Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

1 August 06:34 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Request For Comments

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions.

1 August 06:18 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.8

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling.

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc.

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors.

31 July 04:29 PM EDT - AMD - AMD CDNA5 ISA Documentation

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture.

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI.

31 July 01:50 PM EDT - Multimedia - Shotcut 26.7 Open-Source Video Editor

Shotcut 26.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editing solution.

In addition to the Nouveau kernel driver unblocking Vulkan Video H.264 support for the Mesa NVK driver, another feature change on the way is this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver finally preparing to enable atomic mode-setting by default.

Last month the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" saw more than 1,500 malicious packages amid a sophisticated malware attack and then also seeing an influx of spam and profanities amid this community/user-maintained repository for the popular Arch Linux distribution. Unfortunately, there is another round of AUR troubles.

31 July 09:18 AM EDT - AMD - Dynamic Energy Performance Preference

Sent out last night was the last batch of planned AMD P-State driver feature improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window.

Servo 0.4 was just released for closing out the month of July. This month the Servo browser engine with its servoshell demo browser began rendering more real-world websites correctly.

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches for staging ahead of the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window bring an exciting change for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver.

In recent weeks there was a proposal to enable x86_64 Shadow Stack support by default with the upcoming Fedora Linux 45 release. That change has been approved now by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but with the feature being punted off to Fedora 46 next year.

31 July 05:53 AM EDT - Vulkan - VK_EXT_image_tiling_control

After two weeks without any Vulkan spec update, Vulkan 1.4.358 was released overnight. Besides the usual assortment of minor clarifications/fixes, Vulkan 1.4.358 introduces one new extension: VK_EXT_image_tiling_control.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE previously warned of many sound driver fixes due to AI/LLMs and a "new normal" of patch activity as a result. While we are approaching the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window with the stable release coming up in August, the sound patches continue trending higher and this week were "far larger than wished" ahead of Linux 7.2-rc6 due out on Sunday.

30 July 05:10 PM EDT - Intel - No Longer Force Probe Requiremet

Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable.

Following AMD posting AMDGPU patches for HDMI 2.1 FRL support after the HDMI 2.1 open-source support was long blocked by the HDMI Forum, as part of working toward a complete HDMI 2.1 implementation in this AMD Linux driver it was followed by HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC) support. Now the latest on the AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 enabling path is enabling Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM) as well as HDMI Variable Rate Refresh!

With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer's certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I had run some graphics benchmarks to see how Nouveau+NVK was performing for this Razer Blade RZ09-0582 with the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU.

It's been about a decade since seeing any new games released on the visually-impressive, Linux-friendly Unigine Engine. Unigine Corp has mostly been focusing on Unigine Engine usage for simulations and other professional applications, but coming as a surprise today is a new game being developed on their latest Unigine 2 engine technology.

The Linux Foundation hosted Open Programmable Infrastructure "OPI" announced its first coordinated release with OPI Abstraction v0.1. The work of the Open Programmable Infrastructure is hoping to standardize the data processing unit (DPU) and infrastructure processing unit (IPU) ecosystems.

30 July 10:12 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen Master For Linux?

In an interesting twist, patches this week posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are enabling AMD Zen 6 client desktop and laptop SoCs for the HSMP driver. Up to now the AMD HSMP Linux driver was just used for modern EPYC server processors while now we are seeing this HSMP driver supporting the upcoming Medusa and Olympic Ridge client platforms... Including mentions of overclocking and even noting "Ryzen Master" as the Windows-only software for overclocking and system management.

The Xen Project today released Xen 4.22 as the newest feature release of this open-source hypervisor popular for open-source virtualization in automotive systems and other embedded use-cases as well as the cloud.

30 July 06:18 AM EDT - Mesa - Huawei Mesa Vulkan Driver

A Huawei engineer posted to the Mesa mailing list today over potentially upstreaming a Vulkan driver they have developed for an in-house GPU. However, at least in current form, this new in-house GPU Vulkan driver is likely dead in the water from being upstreamed into Mesa.

30 July 06:05 AM EDT - Intel - Intel HuC For DG2 On Xe

The Intel Arc A-Series graphics (DG2) remains in a bit of an awkward state on Linux due to the transition period moving from the i915 kernel driver to more modern and feature capable Xe kernel driver. It's only post-Alchemist where the Intel Xe driver is officially supported and used by default while those opting for the Xe driver with the A-Series can often enjoy better performance and functionality. Except one of the caveats in using the Xe driver on Alchemist GPUs has been the lack of proper media acceleration support.

Last week Debian developers began considering a general resolution over AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian project. They are now up to weighing five different proposals for how to permit or block AI/LLM usage in the Debian space.

Over the past few Intel VA-API Media Driver releases we have seen preparations made for Nova Lake video acceleration. That has continued today with the Intel Media Driver and Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime releases today with their new quarterly feature releases.

The System76 and Pop!_OS developers continue quickly iterating on their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment.

29 July 04:47 PM EDT - Radeon - DRM Format Modifiers For GFX6 To GFX8

Sent out today was another week's worth of features and other code changes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver. We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material for next month's Linux 7.3 kernel but there is some nice feature work in store for this week.

Today's Steam client beta update brings some new game streaming enhancements for Linux gamers.

29 July 09:12 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Peak Bandwidth Threshold

Intel today sent out their latest batch of kernel graphics driver updates that are ready for staging ahead of next month's Linux 7.3 merge window.

Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to Microsoft Windows.

A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest.

A few weeks ago there was excitement in the FreeBSD camp with FreeBSD 16 set to retire the last of its GPL code from the base system. While the retiring of the dialog code proclaimed that it was the last remaining piece of GPL software in the base system for FreeBSD, it turns out now that there is some GPL code within the FreeBSD kernel.

29 July 05:43 AM EDT - GNU - No AI Contributions

The GCC Steering Committee announced today that they have accepted the recommended policy of the GCC AI Policy Working Group, which means no "legally significant" code contributions made via AI/LLM agents will be accepted into this open-source compiler.