Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Back in March, Martin Wimpress stepped down as the longtime Ubuntu MATE leader and was looking for contributors to keep this Ubuntu derivative going with its GNOME2-derived desktop. That change in leadership paired with no Ubuntu MATE 26.04 release having occurred led to some concerns among users, but the plan is still for Ubuntu MATE to continue moving forward.

Following the official Fedora 44 images released one month ago, Fedora 44 RISC-V images were published today for those wanting to run this newest Fedora Linux on RISC-V hardware.

Linux's ufshcd-pci as the Universal Flash Storage host controller PCI driver has supported a variety of Intel devices to this point while for Linux 7.2 the first AMD device is set to be added.

Last week I ran benchmarks of CachyOS with the BORE scheduler using its "linux-cachyos-bore" kernel option. The results didn't end up being as enticing as anticipated but the developer behind the BORE scheduler commented in the forums that he recently received reports from users experiencing game stuttering while using BORE that was attributed to CachyOS' default use of Ananicy-Cpp. So over the weekend I did another CachyOS BORE run without that CachyOS default.

Recent testing of the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage desktop graphics card has shown that the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is delivering superior graphics performance over the current stable Linux 7.0 kernel.

The belated "This Month in Redox" was posted today for covering improvements made to this open-source, Rust-based operating system during the month of May. Most notable in May is seeing the Xfce desktop ported over to Redox OS.

Canonical engineers are again evaluating the impact of building the Ubuntu Linux archive for the x86-64-v3 "amd64v3" micro-architecture feature level for its performance benefits on modern Intel and AMD systems. An amd64v3 archive is available of Ubuntu 26.10 for testing with the packages targeting this level that allows for AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU x86_64 ISA capabilities of the past decade.

Ahead of NVIDIA Vera ramping up, the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is adding the ACPI CPPC v4 support authored by a NVIDIA engineer.

Flatpak 1.18 is out today for providing the latest improvements to this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech.

An interesting quandary has arose on the Linux kernel mailing list over maintainership of old, unmaintained code within the Linux kernel. Someone has stepped up to maintain an old, very rare file-system driver but admittedly doesn't even use it and just submitted basic fixes. Or is it just better removing that old code?

As the discussions continue among developers over potentially branching off some of the older Mesa drivers, the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits on Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.

As a friendly reminder, if you wanted to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate to show your support for the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com during these difficult times in the web publishing space, that special is ending later today.

In addition to the SpacemiT K1 and K3 RISC-V SoC Device Tree updates sent out last week, the RISC-V T-HEAD Device Tree "DT" changes were also sent out last week ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel merge window.

Last week Linux 7.1-rc6 was larger than Linus Torvalds wished for and for Linux 7.1-rc7 it has come in still heavier than typically seen this late in the cycle, but is shrinking and making Linus comfortable in hopefully releasing Linux 7.1 stable next Sunday.

As an exciting development for GPU-accelerated video decoding within the Mozilla Firefox web browser, initial support for Vulkan Video has landed in the web browser!

Simon Ser just published Wayland Protocols 1.49 as the latest version for this primary set of Wayland protocol definitions.

A month ago I wrote about Linux scheduler work to help boost gaming performance on old "potato" hardware with Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra noting that Linux cgroup scheduling has continued to be "a pain in the arse." This work continues advancing with a third iteration of these "flatten the pick" patches being posted.

7 June 06:47 AM EDT - Mesa - VK_GOOGLE_display_timing for KHR_display

The VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension for obtaining display timing information that can be useful for frame-pacing and eliminating micro-stuttering in games now has direct display mode support with KHR_display for the Mesa Vulkan drivers. This now merged addition immediately benefits the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers as well as the PowerVR, Turnip, and V3DV drivers too.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc7 test kernel release due out later today, a pull request has been submitted of some "x86 fixes" for this kernel release. Most notable with this pull request is acknowledging some additional AMD Zen 6 CPU models.

Broadcom V3D 3.3 and V3D 4.1 graphics IP is set to be deprecated and removed from the V3D kernel graphics/display driver after the Mesa driver support was removed two years ago already. The situation in both cases amount to lack of hardware by developers for testing and with that likely no other known users of these particular Broadcom graphics in selects SoCs.

FreeBSD 15.1 was supposed to be out at the start of June but a second release candidate pushed it back by a week and now a third needed release candidate has pushed out the stable release by an additional week.

GNOME Sushi as the file previewer component for the GNOME Files (Nautilus) file manager has now been adapted to make use of GTK4 as well as delivering other enhancements for a nicer file previewing experience on GNOME.

OpenCV 5.0 released today as a major update to this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library.

Daniel Schürmann of Valve's Linux team has posted a new VK_AMD_anti_lag implementation for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

Ape is a new open-source Vulkan driver written in the Zig programming language and not dependent upon any Mesa code.

KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU's GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years.

Today marks 22 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. It's been quite a journey from the early state of Linux hardware support...

It's unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week's DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year.

5 June 04:02 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.10 Desktop Features

Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team today posted a roadmap of many development items they are hoping to tackle for Ubuntu 26.10 due out in October. Some of these desktop plans are more ambitious and will take multiple release cycles to fully realize, but it goes to show their continued investment into the Ubuntu desktop.

Last month CUDA-Oxide was introduced as an experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler. From pure Rust programming language code, one can write CUDA GPU kernels in a "safe(ish)" manner with the CUDA-Oxide compiler emitting NVIDIA PTX output directly. Out today is the second update to CUDA-Oxide.

NVIDIA's Vera CPU is delivering the fastest ARM performance I have ever seen. For putting it into perspective how far the ARM server CPU hardware has come in just the last decade and for some "fun" benchmarks as part of Phoronix marking 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, here are some benchmarks showing the Ampere eMAG from September 2018 to the performance now with NVIDIA Vera. Not even factoring in the many software optimizations across the stack over the period, from simply the hardware side the ARM server CPU performance has advanced by more than 7x in eight years and in some workloads nearly 15x faster.

After three weeks without any Vulkan API spec updates, Vulkan 1.4.353 was released today to deliver the latest documentation updates for this high performance graphics/compute API as well as introducing three new extensions.

In addition to Apple M3 Device Trees for Linux 7.2, the SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs are seeing some notable Device Tree improvements with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape.

In addition to AMDGPU finally seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL support in Linux 7.2, another change worth noting in this week's AMDGPU pull request is the continued work on enhancing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver support for non-4K page size kernel builds. In particular this helps out with AMD graphics and ROCm for the likes of ARM and POWER.

EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter.

4 June 05:25 PM EDT - Radeon - Linux 7.1 + Mesa 26.1

With this week's launch day review of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Ubuntu 26.04 with its Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0 default driver stack was used for testing. That choice was made since the Ubuntu 26.04 release is still fresh, the RDNA4-based RX 9070 GRE was working without issue there, and from other RDNA4 testing knowing there isn't much uplift from the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel or the current stable Mesa 26.1 OpenGL RadeonSI / Vulkan RADV drivers. But for those interested, here are those tests.

4 June 11:35 AM EDT - Apple - Linux 7.2 On Apple M3

The upcoming Linux 7.2 mainline kernel is expected to be able to boot on Apple M3 devices including the M3-powered iMac and MacBook products. But before getting too excited it's still a long ways to go before it will actually be useful for any Apple M3 daily usage under Linux with the overall support at this stage still being very limited for these 2~3 year old Apple Macs.

4 June 10:48 AM EDT - Arm - Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11

For those interested in the prospects of running Snapdragon X2 laptops on Linux rather than Windows 11 on ARM, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 has emerged as one of the initial X2 laptops with tentative Device Tree handling to allow Linux to boot on this latest-generation Qualcomm-powered laptop,

Blender 5.2 is now available in beta form for this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

4 June 09:30 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Multi-Device AI

AMD's GAIA open-source project geared for building AI agents that run locally on your PC is out with a significant new feature release for Windows and Linux systems.

In addition to Intel adjusting their Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids targets in GCC this week to deal with APX realities, AMD this week also adjusted some tuning bits for their Zen 6 "znver6" target.

The stable release of systemd 261 is quickly approaching for being found in H2'2026 Linux distributions.

It's happening! The long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for handling higher resolutions and higher refresh rates on modern AMD Radeon graphics cards with the upstream AMDGPU open-source driver has been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of this month's Linux 7.2 merge window!

While not as well known as the likes of the Godot or O3DE open-source game engines, Crown Engine continues advancing as an open-source, C++-based game engine.

4 June 06:06 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM + Zstd Compressed Binaries

The LLVM project will begin offering Zstd-compressed archives of their binaries in addition to the existing XZ-compressed releases. LLVM developers are finding Zstd working out great with "significantly reduced" download sizes.

Back in March Steam on Linux skyrocketed to 5.33% with more than double the Steam gaming marketshare of macOS. Then for April Steam on Linux pulled back to a still-great 4.52%, well above the times when Steam on Linux was at 2% or less for many years. Now the May 2026 figures have been published overnight by Valve.