Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs.

Earlier this year AMD disclosed the RMPOPT instruction that given the timing will seemingly be introduced with upcoming Zen 6 EPYC "Venice" processors. The RMPOPT feature amounts to a performance optimization for AMD EPYC SEV-SNP enabled servers by cutting down on the associated Reverse Map Table (RMP) overhead. Linux enablement of AMD RMPOPT remains ongoing and out this week is the latest iteration of the enablement.

Red Hat has contributed new system-wide tunables infrastructure to the GNU C Library "glibc" that allows specifying system-wide tunables via the new /etc/tunables.conf configuration file.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues taking special focus on AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era GPUs for enhancing the open-source graphics driver support for these aging graphics cards.

For those that prefer waiting until the first bug-fix/point release before upgrading to a major new feature series, GCC 16.2 is being planned for an early August release for delivering back-ported bug fixes to the GCC 16 compiler.

The Asahi Linux project published a new blog post outlining recent development efforts in getting Apple Silicon hardware working with their downstream Linux distribution. There is ongoing work on bringing up Apple M3 support, fixing boot support for macOS 27 beta systems, Apple Video Decoder (AVD) support progress, and more.

Last month on Phoronix there were 294 original news articles and 18 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Beyond Phoronix.com turning 22 years old in June, there were also a lot of exciting Linux hardware and open-source software developments worth recapping.

With modern laptops, proper platform/WMI drivers are becoming more depended upon not only for supporting all typical functionality from keyboards to backlights and other handling, but also for achieving proper performance. For many laptop vendors, the Linux platform drivers are maintained by the open-source community and actual customers. The latest example of the challenges of the community-maintained support rather than from the vendor is with the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop seeing inappropriate power values set in the open-source driver that were incorrect and led to lower power/performance than Windows.

NVIDIA engineers have been developing a new binary format for their GPU firmware images for use with the in-development, open-source Nova kernel driver. With this new TLV binary firmware format it aims to be easier to parse by their Rust-based driver code.

As the last planned article on Phoronix of Q2, here is a look back at what excited readers the most in the second quarter. There were 872 original news articles this quarter as well as 54 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is what excited readers the most over these past three months.

Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76.

GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow.

Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change.

Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today's feature overview.

30 June 12:05 PM EDT - Apple - Apple DockChannel

While Linux 7.2 introduces the ability to boot on Apple M3 Macs, it's not yet remotely useful for end-users wanting to use an Apple Mac/MacBook as their daily system. As it stands now, the M3 Macs boot to a simple console and that's about it with the lack of proper GPU acceleration and functionality like the keyboard on MacBooks not working either. Posted to the kernel mailing list today was the new driver patches for enabling the internal keyboard on more recent Apple MacBooks.

30 June 10:36 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7.2

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month.

30 June 10:22 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Linux Highlights Q2-2026

With Q2'2026 drawing to a close, as part of the different quarterly recaps of popular areas on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the quarter.

30 June 08:48 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Canonical + Trifecta Tech Foundation

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical continues making more inroads in the Rust infrastructure space. Canonical announced today they have become the first gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation that works on projects like sudo-rs for building more open infrastructure in the Rust programming language.

Intel has dropped AMX-TF32 before its debut in Xeon Diamond Rapids. The latest Intel programming reference manual has dropped AMX-TF32 and Intel engineers are already moving ahead to strip out the AMX-TF32 support that existed in the GNU Compiler Collection.

Released last week was the Servo 0.3 browser engine release along with their latest Servoshell demo browser. Today the project has published their monthly development recap to highlight all of the interesting changes made. Here's a look at what they accomplished over the past month while doing so on less than $8k in monthly donations.

30 June 06:10 AM EDT - GNU - SpacemiT X100

The newest GCC 17 compiler code has landed support for -mcpu=spacemit-x100 and -mtune=spacemit-x100 targeting for the SpacemiT X100 RISC-V core.

Wine 11.12 fell off the bi-weekly release rhythm with not making it out last Friday, but it managed to ship today. Wine 11.12 brings fractional scaling support to its Wayland driver and various other enhancements.

The Bcachefs file-system already makes use of the Rust programming language in the user-space tools for this CoW file-system and they have been planning to make use of Rust within the kernel module too. Beginning in the next Bcachefs release, v1.38.7, they are looking at beginning to include Rust code now in their kernel driver.

Git 2.55 is out today as the latest stable update to this distributed version control system.

I have begun testing out Linux 7.2 on more hardware following the winding down of the merge window and culminating with yesterday's Linux 7.2-rc1 release. Today's tests are looking at how Linux 7.2 in its early development state is comparing to Linux 7.1 stable on AMD Ryzen Threadripper.

Microsoft today shipped the first public preview of WSL Containers "WSLC" as their latest extension of the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11.

29 June 10:36 AM EDT - Arm - AArch64 Linux Desktop Experiment

Red Hat senior software engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz of Red Hat's ARM Team had been dogfeeding with an AArch64 Linux desktop being used as his primary, personal system for nearly the past year. But now he shared he has gone back to using his AMD Ryzen desktop instead over AArch64 Linux issues encountered with his Ampere Altra desktop.

The Infinity Scheduler is another attempt at improving the CPU scheduling behavior under Linux and created by the developer behind the existing "scx_flow" sched_ext scheduler. But Infinity Scheduler isn't taking the approach of using sched_ext and is rather patched into the Linux kernel in modifying CFS and RT behavior.

29 June 06:32 AM EDT - AMD - Low-Power CPU Core

A new Linux kernel patch series posted to the kernel mailing list minutes ago is introducing a new "Low Power" CPU core type for AMD heterogeneous processors. The x86 topology code in the Linux kernel already supports the notion of Performance and Efficiency type cores while now a new "Low Power" core type is being introduced for AMD heterogeneous platforms.

ZLUDA as a reminder is the open-source project that began as drop-in CUDA support for Intel graphics hardware and then was quietly funded by AMD for years as a drop-in CUDA replacement on AMD GPUs that went open-source after losing funding. That was then taken down and since late 2024 ZLUDA then began focusing on multi-GPU CUDA focused on AI after beginning to receive funding from an unspecified party. Now, unfortunately, funding has once again been cut from that unnamed party but in turn ZLUDA is focusing on PhysX and better Windows support.

It's not clear that any games have yet to deploy this open-source anti-cheat system but TLAC is a new open-source project that aims to provide a privacy-respecting alternative to kernel-level anti-cheat systems like Denuvo, Easy Anti-Cheat, and BattlEye.

29 June 05:35 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default.

OpenAPV, the Academy Software Foundation project that provides a reference implementation of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec is out with a new feature update.

Mageia 10 ISOs are now available for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva Linux and in turn the legendary Mandrake Linux.

Ahead of the July 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, a new Archinstall 4.4 release has been tagged for this text-based and very convenient installer for Arch Linux.

As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it's off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10.

28 June 02:49 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Open-Source/Linux In Q2

With Q2'2026 working toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux and open-source news for the quarter.

CachyOS is out today with a new feature release for this Arch Linux powered distribution that delivers stellar out-of-the-box performance.

While the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window is only ending later today to cap off the feature work on this next version of the Linux kernel, already for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle later in the year there is one notable feature on the way: the DRM color format property is being introduced and being first supported by the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

With Q2'2026 quickly coming to an end, here's a recap of the most popular Linux kernel news over the past three months on Phoronix.

Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines.

For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches.

The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it's a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering "infinite" zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace.

Linux kernel developer and Bytedance engineer Qi Zheng sent out a request for comments (RFC) patch series on a new feature called Reserved THP to combine the best of HugeTLB and THP kernel functionality.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches.

In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

27 June 06:29 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma This Week

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

27 June 06:02 AM EDT - GNOME - COSMIC System Monitor

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too.

Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution.

One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver's high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn't work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport "DP MST" connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming.

The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it's mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.

26 June 09:25 AM EDT - GNOME - Per-Monitor Backgrounds For GNOME

One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop.

26 June 08:59 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Vulkan Descriptor Heaps

Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window.

26 June 06:19 AM EDT - Intel - Intel ISPC 1.31

Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware.

The input subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.2, which is seeing its merge window wrap up on Sunday. Most notable with the input updates is the introduction of the "wacom_w9000" for supporting newer, pen-enabled touchscreens.