Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

The Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel was just released for concluding the Linux 7.1 merge window. A lot of new features are in tow for this next kernel version that will then be out as stable in mid-June.

The April 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux based CachyOS is now available with a variety of refinements, new hardware support, and other polishing.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines.

13 Hours Ago - AI - gregkh_clanker_t1000

Earlier this month on Phoronix we were the first to draw attention to a new fuzzing tool / AI bot uncovering kernel bugs by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the "second in command" for Linux kernel development and stable maintainer. Greg has now shared more light on the "gregkh_clanker_t1000" for this tool that has been uncovering more Linux kernel bugs the past few weeks.

A new progress report from the Asahi Linux project is now published that highlights recent upstreaming work for the Linux 7.0 kernel release as well as the latest additions to the downstream Asahi Linux code. The Asahi Linux project also pushed out their first updated Asahi installer in nearly two years.

The legacy xf86-video-nv driver for user-space mode-setting on old NVIDIA GPUs is out with a rather rare release and the first in over two years with a collection of different bug fixes.

LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend.

Niri 26.04 is out today as the latest feature update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Microsoft's in-house Azure Linux operating system used within Azure and for WSL and other purposes is reportedly pursuing an overhaul where it would be derived from Fedora Linux.

Following last week's Linux 7.1 sound subsystem feature pull that added bus keeper support in working toward better Apple Silicon support along with a variety of other new audio hardware support, a secondary set of sound updates were merged as we approach the end of the Linux 7.1 merge window.

With the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out tomorrow to cap off the Linux 7.1 merge window, one of the most notable additions this cycle is the introduction of the new NTFS driver that aims to provide better performance and more modern features than the existing NTFS3 in-kernel driver that was originally contributed by Paragon Software.

After being deemed not ready for debuting this week as an early release target, Fedora stakeholders have decided that Fedora 44 will be ready to officially debut next Tuesday.

Merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.1 merge window are a number of enhancements to the LoongArch architecture support for that Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V.

Godot 4.7 reached its beta milestone on Friday for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.

25 April 06:25 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7

KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It's a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7.

Linus Torvalds did it! He merged the pull request to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters. This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development.

Fwupd 2.1.2 is out today as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that allows for updating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux.

With the Linux 7.1 merge window winding down ahead of the planned Linux 7.1-rc1 release on Sunday, I have begun testing out the Linux 7.1 Git state on various systems in my lab. So far Linux 7.1 appears to be looking good in the performance department with seeing a number of performance improvements in different areas but also a few possible regressions.

As usual in recent years, there were many x86 platform driver changes merged this cycle for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops. A variety of new features and laptop hardware support additions were merged for Linux 7.1.

The Linux kernel continues getting ready for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors.

Beyond Linux looking to remove old drivers due to the surge of AI/LLM bug reports, the Linux 7.1 kernel is also removing some old hardware drivers simply on the basis of long obsolete hardware. The input subsystem saw several drivers removed this week for decades old hardware.

Merged recently to the latest LLVM/Clang compiler development tree is the Arm C1-Ultra scheduling model for helping with delivering optimal binaries for that flagship next-gen Arm mobile CPU.

It was just days ago we reported on a proposal to drop old network drivers due to AI-driven bug reports becoming a burden on upstream kernel developers. Last night that culminated with an initial pull request to clear out some old, unused networking drivers plus also clearing out the entire ISDN subsystem and more.

While the AMDGPU open-source driver has struggled with HDMI 2.1 support due to the HDMI Forum blocking open-source implementations, HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) as a feature of the HDMI 2.1 specification is enjoying success now with the open-source Nouveau graphics driver on Linux for NVIDIA GPUs.

Last month Opera released the Opera GX gaming-focused web browser for Linux. It rolled out in RPM and Debian package format support while now for those interested is also available via Flatpak and Snap sandboxed app formats.

In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia's Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers.

Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software.

The official release ISOs of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, and the various other Ubuntu flavors are now available for download.

The upcoming Godot 4.7 open-source, cross-platform game engine release is rolling out support for high dynamic range (HDR).

With this week's launch of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition I've found some of the commentary quite surprising among those arguing it's really not a competitive or interesting product. While the cost may be hard to justify at $899 USD compared to the existing Ryzen 9000 series products or Intel's new Core Plus CPUs, particularly for developers, technical computing, etc the performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is quite interesting. I've had much enjoyment benchmarking the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 for technical use-cases. In this article is a complementary look to my launch day AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 review to better condense the 300+ benchmarks I've run to date on this flagship processor.

23 April 11:23 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Better Out-Of-Box Experience

Ubuntu LTS releases on the desktop have automatically installed OEM vendor kernels where needed and hardware enablement "HWE" kernels in later point releases by default. This provides a better out-of-the-box experience for Ubuntu desktop users and one less chore post-install if desiring a newer/better kernel. With Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, the server installer is finally doing the same.

Following the recently-launched Thelio Mira redesign, System76 today announced the new Thelio Major workstation with improved thermals and more performance.

Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic.

OpenBLAS 0.3.33 is out today as the latest update to this vendor-neutral, optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library.

Ready to go ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window closing at week's end are numerous new USB device support additions and other USB subsystem enhancements.

23 April 06:12 AM EDT - Apple - Apple SMC Power Driver

The Linux Multi-Function Device "MFD" subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 ahead of the merge window closing on Sunday.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has introduced experimental AV1 codec support.

All of the SoC updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Most of the activity as usual is on the Arm side but also with some RISC-V additions too for the Linux 7.1 kernel.

22 April 04:28 PM EDT - Intel - Intel GitHub Projects Archived

Over the past number of months there has been a steady flow of Intel open-source projects archived on GitHub amid the corporate restructuring at the company and realigning of their open-source focus. This week another batch of Intel open-source projects were formally archived.

Ahead of tomorrow's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, Canonical published a blog post today outlining the state of Rust Coreutils for its premiere in this long-term support (LTS) version. Canonical also commissioned a security audit recently of Rust Coreutils that turned up 44 CVEs and 113 issues in total.

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is nearly ready for its official debut as this year's major feature release for this open-source compiler.

FreeBSD is out today with their Q1-2026 status report to outline the many different development initiatives their open-source developers have participated in over the past quarter. There is a lot of hardware enablement efforts ongoing as well as continuing to make a more compelling desktop experience and also improving GUI and management options for FreeBSD systems.

KMSCON 9.3.4 is out today for this virtual terminal (VT) emulator in user-space that runs atop the Linux DRM/KMS APIs for those wanting to enjoy a CONFIG_VT=n Linux kernel experience.

Merged recently to Linux Git were the big set of networking changes for the Linux 7.1 kernel.

Canonical is out with a new blog post today outlining toolchain changes to Ubuntu Linux from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due for release tomorrow. While those changes over the past two years aren't too news worthy if you have been following the interim Ubuntu releases, what's interesting is their road ahead on the Ubuntu toolchain front for developers.

22 April 08:54 AM EDT - Intel - LLM-Scaler vllm-0.14.0-b8.2

As part of Intel's LLM-Scaler initiative for AI inferencing on Intel Arc hardware, out today is their vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 update that includes officially supporting the Arc Pro B70 graphics card.

22 April 08:26 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Media Driver 2026Q1

Intel today published their official quarterly feature release to their open-source Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux.

Since Ubuntu 25.04 Ptyxis has been the default terminal emulator after it initially became available in Ubuntu 24.10. For the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, Ptyxis remains the default but Ghostty is now available too.

The QEMU 11.0 emulator is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window that will wrap up on Sunday. This follows earlier merges for the XFS and EXT4 drivers too.

21 April 03:45 PM EDT - AI - AI Bug Reports

Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users.

At Framework Computer's next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop.

21 April 02:15 PM EDT - Hardware - Framework OCuLink Dev Kit For eGPUs

In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops.

The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act.

Coming today as a big surprise -- one week after the new NTFS file-system driver was merged for Linux 7.1 and separately the existing NTFS3 kernel driver seeing some fixes -- is a new release of the NTFS-3G driver providing a FUSE-based user-space driver for NTFS on Linux and other platforms.

The IRDMA driver as Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware.

21 April 08:24 AM EDT - Radeon - VK_EXT_host_image_copy

Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default.

21 April 06:35 AM EDT - Arm - C1-Pro Bug

Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation.

Recently sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list was the initial patches for implementing the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) as a vendor-neutral architecture for memory-to-memory data movement offload.

Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel.