Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Following the Rust Coreutils presentation from FOSDEM this weekend, Rust Coreutils 0.6 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust programming language re-implementation of GNU Coreutils.

With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla's new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a "modern AI browser", the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser's settings.

Microsoft in Windows 11 22H2 introduced a new ACPI Device Specific Method (DSM) "Turn On Display" notification that the Linux 7.0 kernel will be adding support for in dealing with some otherwise problematic laptop behavior.

Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China's Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.

While we might see Git 3.0 released around the end of 2026, Git 2.53 is out today as the latest feature release and continuing to make changes with an eye toward that big Git 3.0 milestone.

While many open-source enthusiasts like to flaunt RISC-V as not having the security challenges as x86_64 CPUs have seen over the past several years with various speculative execution / side-channel attacks and arguing for the benefits of an open-source ISA in stronger security, in practice it's not so clear-cut. Security researchers at Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found current RISC-V CPU implementations coming up short for their actual security.

Early, experimental code for implementing 1GB PUD-level THPs in the Linux kernel are showing positive benchmark results but other upstream stakeholders were surprised by this patch series appearing and it looking like it could be a while until if/when the patches are mainlined for helping to reduce transaction lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure without resorting to Hugetlbfs.

Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year's talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10's adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.

Ahead of Dell's new XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" expected to be shipping in volume beginning in March, more of the Linux support for these premium Panther Lake laptops continues to be finished up.

Linux From Scratch was one of the holdouts continuing optional SysVinit init system support through 2026, but that's now ending. Linux From Scratch "LFS" and Beyond Linux From Scratch "BLFS" are ending their System V Init support moving forward.

Last year Raspberry Pi announced price increases due to memory demand. Today they have announced another round of increased prices as a result of the memory shortages going on industry-wide.

After Steam on Linux gaming hit a record high in December of 3.58%, the January 2026 numbers are now published.

While typically the stable Linux kernel would come after the -rc7 release a week prior, for Linux 6.19 the release is being dragged out by an extra week not due to any scary bugs but rather due to the holiday downtime at the end of the year. As such Linux 6.19-rc8 is out today with the stable v6.19 release expected next Sunday.

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.

1 February 09:25 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME Resources 1.10

GNOME Resources 1.10 was christened today as the newest version of this modern system monitoring app for the GNOME desktop that is now used by default on the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. With GNOME Resources 1.10 they have added AMD Ryzen AI NPU monitoring support and other new capabilities.

1 February 07:05 AM EST - AI - b4 Kernel Developer Tool

The b4 tool used by Linux kernel developers to help manage their patch workflow around contributions to the Linux kernel has been seeing work on a text user interface to help with AI agent assisted code reviews. This weekend it successfully was dog feeding with b4 review TUI reviewing patches on the b4 tool itself.

A new BSD distribution I only learned about for the first time this weekend is smolBSD, a project built atop the netbsd-MICROVM kernel coming with NetBSD 11 for providing insanely fast booting micro-VMs intended for micro-services and similar environments.

Upstreamed for the Linux 6.19 kernel is the Uniwill laptop platform driver for exposing more features/settings for laptops made by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM, including the laptops from TUXEDO Computers. Coming for the next kernel cycle is further extending the Uniwill platform driver for now having support for adjusting the custom total graphics power "cTGP" for those laptops with a dedicated GPU.

During the last month on Phoronix were 296 original news articles from the Linux/open-source perspective as well as another 18 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews in the Linux world over the past month.

For newer Framework devices like the Framework 13 AMD that make use of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller (EC), the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel is adding fan target support as well as fan temperature threshold handling.

Introduced to the mainline Linux kernel last year was "sheaves" as an opt-in per-CPU array-based caching layer. Sheaves was merged back in Linux 6.18 and while it started as an opt-in caching layer, the plan is to replace more CPU slabs / caches with sheaves. Queued up for slated introduction in the upcoming Linux 7.0 cycle is replacing more of those caches with sheaves.

Shotcut 26.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform video editing solution. Shotcut 26.1 is finally defaulting to GPU hardware accelerated video decoding by default for all platforms sans NVIDIA GPUs on Linux.

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon.

Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January.

31 January 12:36 PM EST - BSD - FreeBSD Gaming 2026

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD.

31 January 06:37 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME 50 + VRR = Stable

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature.

31 January 06:21 AM EST - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7

KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year.

For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired.

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings.

Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments.

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.

30 January 12:23 PM EST - Ubuntu - Linux 6.20 + Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release.

30 January 11:57 AM EST - RISC-V - User-Space CFI For RISC-V

Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support.

Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension.

Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.

Linux's user-space block device driver framework "ublk" for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure.

In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year.

This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux "AGX" DRM kernel driver still isn't positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers.

30 January 05:53 AM EST - Intel - Duty Cycle Control

Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window.

Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM.

Microsoft posted a patch series for introducing Hyper-V integrated scheduler support into the Linux kernel for enhancing vCPU scheduling behavior for virtual machines running within Microsoft's virtualized environment.

With the incredible market demand around DDR5 memory and significantly elevated pricing on the more premium DDR5 memory modules, as part of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D launch there's been some communication that thanks to 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache, using lower memory speeds like DDR5-4800 can be suitable without much of an impact to the gaming performance. But what about for Linux gaming? And other workloads with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D? Complementing yesterday's Linux review of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D are benchmarks of DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 performance with Ubuntu Linux and this new 3D V-Cache 8-core / 16-thread desktop processor.

Libcamera 0.7 was published today for this modern software library for image signal processors (ISPs) and embedded cameras under Linux. The standout change with libcamera 0.7 is initial plumbing for GPU acceleration in the software ISP "SoftISP" for delivering better performance than just CPU-based.

Slated for introduction in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.20~7.0) is introducing large receive buffer support for IO_uring's zero-copy receive code path. This large receive buffer support can be very beneficial for those with higher-end networking hardware capable of handling the larger buffers for some significant performance and efficiency wins.

29 January 09:39 AM EST - GNU - libgcrypt 1.12

Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software.

Following NVIDIA's announcement back at CES of their GeForce NOW game streaming service coming to Linux as a native desktop application, today's the day. The GeForce NOW Linux-native build is being published and the review embargo has lifted.

29 January 06:36 AM EST - Radeon - GCN 1.1 AMD APU Improvements

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former "Radeon" kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends not being able to use the modern AMDGPU DC "Display Core" code. But new patches from Timur take care of those limitations.

29 January 06:19 AM EST - Intel - Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11

With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops.

29 January 05:57 AM EST - NVIDIA - NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA's NVDEC.

28 January 08:31 PM EST - GNU - GNU gettext

Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released.

Wasmer 7.0 is out today for this WebAssembly "WASM" run-time for enabling lightweight containers that can run "anywhere" from the desktop to cloud and the edge. The security-minded and extensible WASM runtime provided by Wasmer has already proven to be quite robust while with Wasmer 7.0 has become even more featureful.

28 January 03:45 PM EST - GNOME - Discrete GPU Detection

The upcoming release of GNOME 50 to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 will feature improved discrete GPU detection within the GNOME Shell. This effort has been two years coming and finally merged this week.

28 January 01:03 PM EST - Mesa - Mesa 26.0-rc2

Following last week's code branching / feature freeze and first release candidate of Mesa 26.0, Mesa 26.0-rc2 is now available with an initial batch of bug fixes for this quarter's feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The widely-used FreeType library used for rendering text onto bitmaps has landed a significant optimization for its LCD filtering code path for Microsoft ClearType-like rendering. Thanks to the improvement, the rendering can be around 40% faster.

28 January 06:24 AM EST - KDE - SonicDE - X11 Fork Of KDE Code

In light of Plasma 6.8 looking to go Wayland-exclusive and retire their X11 session support, SonicDE (formerly "KDE-Lite") is getting off the ground as a fork of the relevant X11 support within the KDE desktop.

Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it's being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue.

Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module.

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network.