Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world.

It wasn't on my bingo card for the week but merged to Git ahead of today's Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel release are a number of fixes for the SEGA Dreamcast drivers.

The staging driver fixes that were sent out this week ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 release is predominantly made up of hardening the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. In particular, a number of fixes for addressing out-of-bounds behavior when connecting to "bad" WiFi hosts.

Debian 13.6 is out today as the newest point release of Debian Trixie to ship the latest security fixes and other maintenance updates.

Sent out today was this week's round of x86 (x86_64) fixes ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel test candidate due out on Sunday.

11 July 06:12 AM EDT - LLVM - x86 Lightweight Fault Isolation

Stanford researchers have been developing Lightweight Fault Isolation "LFI" compiler passes and targets for LLVM as a means of efficient, native code sandboxing. The AArch64 LFI target was previously upstreamed while this week the x86/x86_64 LFI target was also upstreamed for this means of in-process sandboxing.

11 July 05:51 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.8 Features

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop.

11 July 04:00 AM EDT - Mesa - Rusticl + Panfrost

A change upstreamed to Mesa by an Arm engineer now enables the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics to work with the Rusticl driver by default.

System76 developers have for the past number of weeks been working on developing a "frosted glass" appearance for the COSMIC desktop environment featured on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. For Pop!_OS users this frosted glass feature is now available and will become more widespread for other Linux distributions once the next COSMIC release is formally tagged.

Wine 11.13 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software enabling support for running Windows games and applications on Linux.

With KDE Plasma 6.7 now having seen a few point releases to further polish this last version with X11 support ahead of Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-only, here are some NVIDIA Linux gaming benchmarks between the X11 and Wayland sessions on Plasma 6.7.2 using the popular Arch Linux based CachyOS.

AMD on Thursday sent out another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver updates to DRM-Next of new feature material ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window.

10 July 06:26 AM EDT - Apple - Linux + Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra

Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was initial support for booting Linux on the Apple M3 SoC devices. But just the barebones suppport for booting with not yet any accelerated graphics or other typical function needed for daily use of M3 Apple devices on Linux, just booting to a console. Now this work is complemented by additional Device Tree patches for also booting M3 Pro / Max / Ultra devices on Linux.

After two years being on the TODO list for a possible performance optimization, the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has now merged an HiZ plane optimization that can yield up to a few percent frame-rate improvement for Linux gaming/graphics on newer Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Earlier this week NVIDIA confirmed some basic details around their next-gen Rosa CPU that succeeds Vera. Among the public confirmation was that it will feature a "Rigel" Armv9.2-A core iterating on their Olympus core design. With the basic details published, NVIDIA immediately introduced Rigel core support into the GCC compiler. Now they have also upstreamed their initial Rigel core enablement into the LLVM Clang compiler.

10 July 05:41 AM EDT - Intel - Intel-Scaler-vLLM 0.21

Released this morning was Intel's newest version of Intel-Scaler-vLLM as their Docker-based solution providing an optimized vLLM stack for execution on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware.

For those that enjoy the daily flow of original open-source/Linux news on Phoronix along with all of the original Linux hardware reviews and performance benchmarking, but haven't yet subscribed to Phoronix Premium to help keep the site going after 22 years, the summer sale ends tonight.

Today's batch of AMDGPU Display Code "DC" updates bring a few noteworthy items for benefiting modern hardware under Linux.

After originally announcing Graviton5 last December, recently AWS finally made the M9g and M9gd instances generally available as the first featuring these new in-house ARM server processors for the EC2 cloud. Graviton5 makes use of Arm Neoverse-V3 cores compared to Neoverse-V2 with Graviton4, support up to 192 cores, and feature a higher 3.3GHz clock speed compared to 2.8GHz on the prior-generation Graviton CPUs. Here is an initial look at how the Graviton5 processor performs over Graviton4.

In addition to Weston 16 nearing release and its release candidate out today, the Wayland 1.26 release candidate was just issued with a few notable changes on top of the more typical bug fixing.

Going back to February there was a bug report around the xHCI controller dieing on resume from s2idle when using an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop. In turn all USB devices behind the xHCI controller are lost on resume, but unbinding and binding the driver can restore the functionality without a reboot. After months of back and forth communication, it looks like a solution has been figured out and comes down to a nuance of the PCI spec with needing a brief wait.

9 July 09:02 AM EDT - Hardware - USB-C Security Restricted Mode

Newer Lenovo ThinkPad systems feature a security feature called USB-C Security Restricted Mode that is in the process of being wired up for reporting under Linux.

With the Linux 7.2 kernel there is initial support for booting the Apple M3 SoC on Linux but it's not yet functional for end users with just booting to a simple console. There are now Device Tree files posted for booting the Apple M4 on Linux but also not yet useful for any typical Apple Mac/MacBook usage on Linux.

9 July 06:13 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI Halo

The AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC powered by Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" began shipping this week. It features very nice Linux support out-of-the-box with the Debian-based Ryzen AI Developer Platform operating system. For those wishing to run their own x86_64 Linux distribution, one of the only caveats in the Linux support is quite small... No mainline kernel support yet for controlled the RGB LED light strip on the driver. But that driver is coming and will hopefully be mainlined soon.

Zlib-rs 0.6.6 was just released by the Trifecta Tech Foundation. Just weeks after the prior release with a fix for Intel Raptor Lake and bringing new SIMD optimizations, zlib-rs 0.6.6 is about delivering updated Zlib API compatibility.

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS platform had a very eventful June with many new features implemented and more software ported over to run on this from-scratch operating system.

The Document Foundation today announced the first beta release of the LibreOffice 26.8 open-source office suite set for its stable debut in August.

The OpenMandriva project put out a statement today concerning an attempted distribution sabotage effort. Part of the OpenMandriva GitHub repository was deleted and there was an empty package push made to OpenMandriva's Cooker repository in trying to obsolete all GNOME and COSMIC packages.

Given today's pricing environment around system memory, a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some benchmarks to quantify the performance difference from single to dual channel memory. In considering a new computer build, he is contemplating whether to go for a single stick of DDR5 memory until memory prices hopefully subside in the future. For those in a similar boat, here are some benchmarks of single versus dual channel memory on an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus "Arrow Lake" desktop.

8 July 09:37 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Open-Source Archivals

Intel has formally archived some more of their now-unmaintained open-source projects this week.

AMD ZenDNN 6.0 released today as a significant update to this open-source deep neural network library for helping to accelerate inferencing on AMD Zen processors from Ryzen to EPYC.

The Linux Mint distribution has published their June development summary that most notably includes work on Cinnamon's Wayland support where it's now ready to graduate.

Introduced to the Linux kernel nearly six years ago was the Syscall User Dispatch feature to help with Linux gaming. Specifically, Syscall User Dispatch was developed to help Windows games run on Linux more efficiently. While it was upstreamed in Linux 5.11 for more efficiently intercepting system calls from Windows software under Wine, now in the name of security there are patches working their way to the mainline kernel to more easily disable it.

Two more security issues were made public today concerning the X.Org Server codebase and in turn XWayland also being affected.

Proton 11.0-1 was just released as stable as the newest major version of this downstream of Wine that powers Valve's Steam Play to provide for a great Windows gaming experience across conventional Linux systems plus the popular Steam Deck and brand new Steam Machine.

AMDGPU kernel driver maintainer Alex Deucher of AMD sent out a set of 30 patches today working on clearing out all of the BUG() usage within this Linux kernel graphics driver.

7 July 11:45 AM EDT - NVIDIA - GCC 17 + NVIDIA Rigel

That didn't take long... Mere minutes after NVIDIA confirmed some basic Rosa CPU details and its "Rigel" CPU core, merged to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial enablement on the NVIDIA Rigel core.

In a blog post today talking up the single threaded CPU performance of their Vera CPU with Olympus cores, NVIDIA confirmed a few basic details of their next-gen Rosa CPU featuring their "Rigel" core.

NVIDIA today published their latest stable driver update for Linux customers in their newest R610 release branch.

7 July 08:06 AM EDT - Debian - TUXEDO Computers + Debian

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced they are switching from Ubuntu to Debian as the base for their TUXEDO OS platform.

The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface was deprecated in Linux 7.2. This interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API has proven to be a "massive attack surface" due to a variety of security concerns. With its deprecation in Linux 7.2, some AF_ALG features are already removed and for Linux 7.3 this interface is being further restrained.

One of the original developers behind the work to allow the Linux kernel to be compiled using LLVM/Clang as an alternative to the GCC compiler is now back in the saddle working on LLVM Linux support. LLVM/Clang support for building the Linux kernel has been important for improving code portability and addressing GCC'isms, making use of LLVM compiler features not yet found with the GNU toolchain, evaluating the performance between GCC and Clang, and all the more important these days with the Linux kernel Rust integration.

In 2026 it's not too surprising when seeing old PCMCIA and ISA drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel source tree and old very low-speed network interfaces, with arguably the most surprising fact being how long they lasted in the mainline kernel. Meanwhile for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, one of the first 10Gb Ethernet drivers is already set for retirement from the mainline Linux kernel.