Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced the release of Fwupd 2.1.1 as the newest feature update to this solution for deploying system firmware updates and other device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. Paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), Fwupd has made firmware updating a breeze on Linux for an increasing number of devices.

Linux consulting firm Igalia announced this week Moonforge, a new in-house Linux distribution by them based on Yocto and OpenEmbedded.

OBS Studio 32.1 is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop screen recording app that is also popular with game live-streaming and other uses.

It has been eight years already since System76 announced Thelio as their own built-in-the-USA, custom-engineered cases for desktops and workstations. System76 Thelio is an open hardware design and built exceptionally well out of their facilities in Colorado. System76 Thelio has served them well for their range of desktop systems over the years from ARM64 developer workstations to high-end AMD Linux systems. Now though they are preparing to introduce their next-generation Thelio design. Ahead of the announcement next week, here is an exclusive first look at the next-gen Thelio hardware.

11 March 12:21 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI NPUs + LLMs + Linux

Over the past two years AMD has developed the AMDXDNA accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. But when it comes to user-space software on Linux actually able to leave the Ryzen AI NPUs it's been... extremely limited with nothing really useful besides some niche bits of code. Even AMD's own software like their GAIA on Linux has used Vulkan with their iGPUs rather than any NPU support. But finally today there is a significant shift with the Ryzen AI NPUs becoming useful on Linux and able to handle LLMs.

With GNOME 50 that is being used by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, you may be curious about the out-of-the-box performance especially compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases -- especially with Mutter 50 having some NVIDIA optimizations. In today's article is a first look at how the NVIDIA Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 26.04 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.10 release.

The open-source D7VK project began to implement Direct3D 7 over Vulkan similar to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton providing support for newer Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan. With succeeding releases D7VK was extended to Direct3D 6 too and then Direct3D 5 support. Now with today's D7VK 1.5 release, Direct3D 3 is implemented for faster acceleration using Vulkan.

11 March 09:19 AM EDT - Intel - Adaptive Sync SDP

Posted today were new Intel kernel graphics driver patches for Linux to enable Adaptive Sync SDP (Secondary Data Packet) handling for Panel Replay and Auxless Adaptive Link Power Management (ALPM) modes.

Currently the Linux IPv6 networking stack can be built into the Linux kernel, built as a loadable kernel module, or not built at all. With proposed patches from a SUSE engineer, the IPv6 networking stack would be limited to being a kernel built-in or not at all. In doing away with IPv6 as a loadable kernel module would allow simplifying some code and lowering the Linux networking maintenance burden.

Developers behind AlmaLinux as this popular community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) have drafted some new goals for 2026.

Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) debuting with Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids is ready with Linux 6.16+ and recent open-source compilers. One piece of the support puzzle still coming together though that will be especially important for Xeon Diamond Rapids is the KVM virtualization support. New patches there were posted this week.

Microsoft on Tuesday released Azure Linux 3.0.20260304 as the newest monhtly update to their in-house Linux platform.

10 March 08:37 PM EDT - Fedora - Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process

Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta announced a new proposal for "A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora." With the help of Google's Gemini AI, Spaleta laid out a proposal to help Fedora make greater accommodations for experimental concepts and building more interest around innovative ideas without a firm commitment to integrate them into Fedora proper until they can be assured of sustainability.

10 March 03:22 PM EDT - RISC-V - Current RISC-V Is Slow

The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There's hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 -- and that's with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process.

The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It's interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 4.0 is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.0 they are removing support for SSLv3 that has been deprecated for over one decade while also dropping OpenSSL engines and other removals while also adding in some new features.

Over the past two decades SUSE Linux has been passed around several times. From Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in 2003 to then being acquired by The Attachmate Group to then merging with Micro Focus and then the SUSE business being acquired by private equity firm EQT back in 2018. A report out today indicates that EQT may now be looking to sell off SUSE.

The Linux ZRAM module for creating compressed block devices in RAM could be on the edge of a nice I/O compression performance boost.

The Free Software Foundation is hiring a new engineering and certification manager for leading the Respect Your Freedom "RYF" hardware certification program. The FSF RYF program is about certifying hardware that respects the user's freedom and privacy for control over the device, such as no proprietary firmware blobs needed to be loaded at run-time, no digital rights management / digital restrictions, and complies with their other free software ideals.

10 March 09:35 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Projects Archived

Following Intel archiving various open-source projects that they are no longer maintaining amid open-source setbacks due to reduced staffing and other corporate restructuring, another round of Intel open-source projects were formally archived on Monday.

10 March 08:20 AM EDT - Intel - Directed Package Thermal Interrupts

Intel Linux engineers are preparing the Linux kernel's Intel Thermal driver for supporting Directed Package Thermal Interrupts as a new feature of recent Intel CPUs.

10 March 06:25 AM EDT - Mesa - Mesa More Per-Game Tuning

RADV Radeon Vulkan driver developers on Valve's Linux graphics team are evaluating the idea of greater use of per-game/app profiles within this open-source driver and for Mesa drivers at large. Currently for Mesa drivers with DriConf there is the ability to provide per-game/app workarounds while the consideration now is extending that to allow for more per-game optimizations.

For those making use of Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux, tagged today was exfatprogs 1.3.2 as the newest update to these open-source user-space programs for going along with the Linux kernel's exFAT file-system driver.

The Fedora 44 Beta release is out today on schedule in working toward the official Fedora 44 release around mid-April.

9 March 08:30 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE

FreeBSD 14.4 is out today as the latest update to the aging FreeBSD 14 series for those not yet ready to upgrade to FreeBSD 15 that debuted as stable last year.

Last week was a statement by System76 regarding recent age verification laws in California and Colorado among other US states that could have a profound impact on Linux distributions and other open-source software. The Colorado legislation is especially pressing to System76 considering that is where they are based. Fortunately, they aren't taking this lightly and there is some hope that at least in Colorado open-source software could be excluded.

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 Linux driver beta as their first release in the R595 series for Linux and it's running very well in initial testing. Today as part of their Vulkan developer beta program, they have released the NVIDIA 595.44.02 driver that brings some new Vulkan API features.

With CUDA 13.2 that is now shipping, NVIDIA has provided official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions/downstreams like AlmaLinux to CUDA. With this official NVIDIA CUDA support for these RHEL-compatible distributions, NVIDIA is also allowing the NVIDIA packages to be distributed directly from the OS package repositories.

9 March 11:45 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.04 LTS + Authd

Canonical for a while has been developing Authd as an authentication service for external cloud-based identity providers. Authd was designed from the ground-up to provide secure management of identity and access for Ubuntu systems while only with next month's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release is it actually hitting the universe archive.

Intel just published the XeSS 3.0 SDK to GitHub as the newest version of their Xe Super Sampling AI-enhanced upscaling technology for gamers. Sadly though it remains proprietary software and only with native support for Windows.

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 beta Linux driver as their first public build in the R595 release branch. The NVIDIA R595 Linux driver is bringing a number of Vulkan driver improvements, HDR enhancements, DRI3 v1.2 support, and a variety of other improvements. Benchmarking the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux driver the past few days on GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" have been showing some nice incremental performance improvements over the current NVIDIA 590 driver stable series.

9 March 10:10 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100

AMD announced back at CES the Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series with initially the models up to six Zen 5 cores launching while the eight through twelve core models would be available later in H1. Today AMD formally announced those higher-tier Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series parts.

A set of patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week introduce a new driver for enhancing the upstream/mainline Linux kernel support for Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices. This new driver is Synology Microp and is making use of the Linux kernel's modern Rust programming language support.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a new status report on the state of GCC 16 development. Regression fixing has been going slow but they are hoping to publish a release candidate by mid-April.

Rust Coreutils 0.7 released on Sunday as a performance-focused update to this popular alternative to GNU Coreutils that is still striving for 100% compatibility against the GNU Test Suite.

Linux 7.0-rc3 is out as the latest weekly test candidate in leading up to the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April.

The March 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is now available for new installations and upgrading from existing CachyOS installs.

FFmpeg developers are preparing to soon release FFmpeg 8.1 with some great new features and other improvements.

Merged this week for Mesa 26.1 are the initial Nova Lake P "NVL-P" device bits for Intel's ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. But this support isn't yet exposed by default and not yet ready for end-users with more driver changes still to be published.

This week's batch of "x86/urgent" patches that were merged overnight for Linux 7.0 contain some fixes and other adjustments worth highlighting for both AMD and Intel.

The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the "developers" claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

8 March 07:05 AM EDT - KDE - digiKam 9.0

The KDE/Qt-aligned digiKam software for managing RAW digital photos is out today with the big digiKam 9.0 release.

Merged back in 2018 for Linux 5.0 was support for the Apple Magic Trackpad 2. Merged this week for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel is fixing battery reporting for those using the Magic Trackpad 2 under Linux.

The Linux event poll "epoll" code for efficient I/O multiplexing and monitoring of file descriptors for seeing when I/O is possible has a new optimization merged today for Linux 7.0.

Out today is Budgie 10.10.2 as the latest minor update to this open-source desktop environment that began as part of the Solus Linux project.

7 March 10:07 AM EST - AMD - AMD GAIA 0.16

AMD's GAIA open-source framework for building AI agents that run locally on Ryzen AI hardware via the Radeon iGPUs and/or NPUs is up to version 0.16. With this new GAIA release is support for developing AI agents purely in C++ with no longer needing to depend upon Python.

7 March 07:13 AM EST - BSD - FreeBSD On Laptops

The effort around improving FreeBSD on laptops continues full speed ahead in 2026. The upcoming FreeBSD 15.1 remains on track with not only having a KDE desktop option from FreeBSD's text-based installer UI but also improved Realtek WiFi adapter support is on the way, updating of the graphics drivers from Linux, and more.

Maui.Gtk is a new open-source project providing a GTK4 Linux back-end for Microsoft's .NET MAUI.

In addition to the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm porting Coreboot with AMD openSIL to an EPYC 9005 "Turin" Gigabyte motherboard, their developers have also been working on a similar Coreboot + openSIL port to an AM5 Ryzen consumer motherboard.

Resources, the modern GNOME GTK4/libadwaita-based GUI application for system resource monitoring and an alternative to GNOME System Monitor, is out with a new update. Resources 1.10.2 brings some nice improvements for those running GNOME on modern Intel hardware.