Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

6 March 08:24 PM EST - KDE - KDE Plasma Fixes

Nate Graham and John Veness are out today with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma. Notable for KDE Plasma 6.6.x~6.7 development this week were a lot of bug fixing -- including multiple crash fixes -- and some UI polishing too.

Wine 11.4 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for Windows games and applications to run on Linux and macOS.

Ahead of the GNOME 50 desktop release coming up in less than two weeks, GTK 4.22 is out today as the newest stable version of the GTK4 toolkit.

A pull request sent out today and already merged to Linux Git ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc3 has some new hardware driver support additions for the likes of ASUS, HP, Dell, and OneXPlayer.

For those looking for a low-power, well-built small office / home office Linux server with interesting connectivity options, the ZimaBoard 2 is an interesting option that has been available for some months now and powered by the Intel N150 processor. Besides the interesting single board hardware and well built aluminum chassis, the offering is rounded out by being preloaded with ZimaOS as a Linux-based "personal cloud OS" to easily get hosting for your own SOHO server needs.

Sent out today was this week's batch of Slab allocator fixes for the Linux 7.0 development kernel. Making this pull notable is fixing a "severe performance regression" with a ~64% performance drop having been noted in late February.

6 March 08:28 AM EST - AMD - AMD CPPC Performance Priority

Patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for enabling a new feature called AMD CPPC Performance Priority as a new hardware feature being found with "future AMD processors".... Which given the timing of these patches, almost certainly means the upcoming Zen 6 processors.

6 March 08:17 AM EST - Ubuntu - Intel Xeon + Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Canonical engineer Serkan Uygungelen published a post outlining some of the Intel Xeon CPU features to be supported by the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, some Xeon features already supported by the existing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and some features only partially supported for still not having packaged user-space libraries/support within the Ubuntu archive.

Four years ago Oracle announced Solaris CBE as the "Common Build Environment" version of Solaris 11.4. Oracle Solaris CBE is made available as free for open-source developers and other non-production use. Oracle this week released a new version of Solaris CBE for those wanting this free* version of Solaris.

6 March 06:15 AM EST - BSD - NetBSD 11.0

The big NetBSD 11.0 release continues on approach with NetBSD 11.0-RC2 having been released as the latest test candidate.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project had an eventful February with a number of driver improvements and a variety of other enhancements.

Vulkan 1.4.345 released overnight as the latest routine spec update to this graphics and compute API. There is one new extension besides a handful of different clarifications and corrections to various elements of the spec.

Simon Ser announced the release today of Wayland 1.25 RC1 (Wayland v1.24.91) in working toward this next stable release.

GNOME 50.rc was christened today as the release candidate for the GNOME 50 desktop.

System76 published a statement today regarding the recent laws coming about in California and likely Colorado and New York too around requiring age verification on operating system accounts and ultimately exposing the information (or at least age brackets) to apps and websites. System76's position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution and COSMIC desktop environment.

Rust 1.94 was rolled out today as the newest routine stable update for the Rust programming language.

The layoffs and restructuring at Intel in 2025 caused unfortunate hits to their Linux/open-source engineering including various driver maintainers leaving and even their CPU temperature driver being orphaned for lack of maintainers. Sent out today were a number of additional updates to the MAINTAINERS file for the Linux kernel to reflect other Intel departures in recent months. Plus some of the Altera drivers have also been orphaned now for having no upstream maintainers.

Following the recent NVIDIA R595 driver release for Windows, NVIDIA today released the 595.45.04 driver for Linux users as a beta version in the R595 release stream.

Debian Project Leader "DPL" Andreas Tille provided an update today on various happenings within the project and personal reflections on some recent topics. Among the topics in today's DPL updates were around AI contributions, Debian's need to become more diverse with its contributors, and needing more "thank yous" to show appreciation for contributions.

There were some fairly exciting improvements made by the Redox OS developers over the course of February. They have the Vulkan API working on Redox OS for the first time along with more COSMIC desktop software and even Node.js.

AMD has begun staging AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver improvements for the upcoming Linux 7.1 cycle.

The Intel IVPU accelerator driver will be introducing limits on Intel NPU resource usage by non-root user-space programs beginning with the Linux 7.1 kernel.

The AMD Host System Management Port (HSMP) Linux driver that provides access to various system management features on modern EPYC server processors is preparing for the upcoming EPYC Zen 6 "Venice" processors.

Approaching twenty years after Intel's Poulsbo platform began giving Linux users nightmares due to its Imagination PowerVR SGX graphics IP that blocked open-source 3D driver support, the GMA500 driver that ended up coming about to provide open-source display support at least is still seeing occasional upstream activity for the Linux kernel.

The Alliance For Open Media on Wednesday released libavif 1.4, the latest version of this reference library for encoding and decoding AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) content.

This week at MWC 2026, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 as one of their new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" powered laptops alongside other products. With Panther Lake running rather well on Linux, the new ThinkPad T14 G7 should be in good standing on Linux and especially with a pending Xe graphics driver fix that is on the way.