Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

One of the most exciting developments in recent times for the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is HDMI 2.1 FRL support for the AMDGPU driver along with Display Stream Compression support as they work toward providing full HDMI 2.1 support for this open-source AMD Radeon driver. The details how AMD managed to pull this feat off given prior resistance from the HDMI Forum remains to be confirmed, but it's moving ahead and out today is the latest iteration of the HDMI 2.1 FRL+DSC patches.

As a very exciting development ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window opening in about one month's time, it looks like the long-awaited Cache Aware Scheduling support will finally be merged! CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE has made it into a TIP branch with all the Cache Aware Scheduling code for helping with Linux performance on modern CPUs sporting multiple last level caches.

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser's settings area.

One of the RISC-V SoCs we have been most looking forward to this year is the SpacemiT K3 that features the X100 RISC-V cores that are RVA23 compliant and among the first readily available RVA23 RISC-V platform for running on the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. In this article is a preview of some very early benchmarks of the SpacemiT K3 with the new Pico-ITX single board computer offering.

20 May 10:25 AM EDT - Intel - Intel XMM6260 + Linux

While it has been nearly seven years since Apple acquired the Intel Mobile Communications' smartphone modem business and fifteen years since Intel acquired the wireless solutions division of Infineon, in 2026 we might see mainline Linux kernel support for the out-of-date XMM6260 modem.

20 May 09:51 AM EDT - Red Hat - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2

Red Hat today announced the releases of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 as well as RHEL 9.8.

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time away from his duties as Linux's second-in-command as stable maintainer, various subsystem maintainer, and recent hobby of using AI/LLMs for uncovering Linux kernel bugs to present at the Rust Week conference.

That didn't take long. Mere days after Dell and Lenovo began sponsoring the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as premiere sponsors in contributing $100k+ annually to this open-source firmware updating initiative, HP is also now a premiere sponsor.

FFmpeg already supports CPU-based decoding for Samsung's APV as the Advanced Professional Video Codec. FFmpeg also has APV encode support too while now an interesting addition was merged this week: Vulkan-based acceleration for APV.

20 May 06:18 AM EDT - Intel - llm-scaler-vllm PV 1.4

Intel software engineers today rolled out the llm-scaler-vllm PV v1.4 as the Docker build of their latest software stack for those wishing to run vLLM in a pre-configured, performant setup on their Arc (Pro) Graphics hardware.

Valkey 9.1 released on Tuesday as the latest version of this popular fork of the Redis in-memory, key-value database.

The GTK-based GUI version of the Vim text editor, gVim, now has support in place for the modern GTK4 toolkit as an alternative to its long present GTK2/GTK3 support.

A year after SUSE decided to remove its Deepin desktop packages over ongoing security concerns, Fedora Linux is now also removing their Deepin packages over similar concerns and lack of activity in maintaining the packages.

19 May 11:25 AM EDT - AMD - AMD EPYC 8005 Sorano

Back in late February AMD announced the EPYC 8005 "Sorano" series to succeed EPYC 8004 Siena. At the time details were light while today AMD published the SKU table and more details on the EPYC 8005 series.

Theo de Raadt announced the release today of OpenBSD 7.9 as the latest feature update to this unique BSD platform.

Following the ISOs dropping a few days ago, today the Mageia 10 release candidate was officially announced for those fond of this Linux distribution with its roots tracing back to Mageia and Mandrake Linux.

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical today released Ubuntu Core 26.

19 May 06:00 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Bartlett Lake

The fix is set to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel so the P-core-only Bartlett Lake processors will not report bogus maximum frequency values.

One of the newest interfaces being worked on for the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel is an Untrusted Data API for data received into the kernel from user-space.

The latest Linux gaming handheld driver work by Derek Clark of Valve's Linux efforts is the OneXPlayer Configuration Driver that is now set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle.

18 May 06:00 PM EDT - Intel - Intel OSS Projects Archived

Yet more open-source Intel software projects have been formally archived. Over the past year Intel has formally discontinued a number of open-source projects it formally maintained. Many of them were already dormant and not too noteworthy but there were also some more notable ones discontinued like their legendary Clear Linux, Software Defined Silicon, Optane Memory software projects, and then other efforts like open ecosystem community/evangelism. This past week yet more Intel software projects were formally disbanded.

The latest Intel Xe kernel graphics driver patches for Linux now indicate multiple PCI IDs for the upcoming Crescent Island "CRI" accelerators rather than just a lone model.

Among the VFS patches queued into "-next" branches ahead of next month's Linux 7.2 merge window is the code for introducing the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call.

The Linux 7.1 kernel performance has been looking quite good on the various Intel/AMD systems I have tested over the past three weeks. Linux 7.1 does bring some solid improvements over Linux 7.0 prior in different workloads and haven't encountered any worrisome regressions compared to the current Linux 7.0 stable kernel. For those wondering the longer-term picture, here are benchmarks of Linux 7.1 Git compared to recent Linux LTS kernel series going back to 2023 for providing a picture at how the upstream Linux kernel has netted 13% faster performance (geo mean) on the same hardware in less than three years.

18 May 08:46 AM EDT - Mozilla - Document Picture-in-Picture API

Firefox 151 release binaries are now available as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's open-source web browser.

Given all the recent Linux kernel security concerns and new bugs being discovered, the Linux cryptographic subsystem is proactively dropping zero-copy functionality from AF_ALG due to growing security concerns.

With yesterday's Linux 7.1-rc4 release are some additional comments by Linux creator Linus Torvalds around AI tooling and the surge in security bug reporting to the Linux kernel due to said LLM-powered tooling.

The Lemonade SDK for "refreshingly fast local AI" that is largely developed by AMD engineers as an open-source project continues advancing quite rapidly for serving optimized LLMs on GPUs and NPUs.

18 May 12:00 AM EDT - AI - gkh_clanker_2000

As first reported on Phoronix in early April, Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has been leveraging new AI fuzzing tools for uncovering Linux kernel bugs. Prominent due to his position within the Linux kernel community and also being the primary Linux stable maintainer. His AI-assistance for fixing Linux kernel bugs is based on a Framework Desktop powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max. The "gkh_clanker_t1000" continues assisting in Linux kernel development along with the less frequent "gkh_clanker_2000" references

It was another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space that has culminated with the release of Linux 7.1-rc4.

Similar to Canonical engineers having published "Ubuntu Concept" ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops to provide the very latest hardware-specific support that hasn't yet worked its way to the mainline Linux kernel and other packages, Canonical has begun providing Ubuntu Concept ISOs for the CIX P1 as an "AI" focused platform.

A new open-source project called low_latency_layer is an implicit Vulkan layer that enables AMD Anti-Lag 2 and NVIDIA Reflex 2 to reportedly work in a hardware-agnostic manner so that AMD and Intel graphics cards can both enjoy Reflex or Anti-Lag 2 working on non-AMD graphics cards as well.

17 May 06:20 AM EDT - WINE - Adobe Lightroom CC

An open-source developer with the assistance of Claude Code has managed to get the Adobe Lightroom CC software working on Linux under Wine.

Last year the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg multimedia library introduced Apple ProRes video acceleration using shaders with the Vulkan API. Now FFmpeg has taken it a step further and can support Apple ProRes RAW Vulkan-based video decoding.

Ahead of the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro laptops beginning to ship in June, an audio microphone fix was merged this weekend to the mainline Linux kernel for these new Intel Panther Lake powered devices.

Released this week was FluidX3D 3.7, the latest feature update to this computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is CPU/GPU accelerated by way of OpenCL.

In working toward the stable FreeBSD 15.1 release in early June, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 3 is out this weekend as the latest weekly test candidate.

The current GNOME System Monitor is on track to be replaced by the GNOME Resources app for as soon as the GNOME 51 desktop release.

Memtest86+ 8.10 is out today as a significant update to this legendary open-source RAM testing software.

Debian 13.5 is out today as the newest point release to Debian Trixie for incorporating all of the latest security fixes affecting the Linux kernel and dozens of user-space packages.

It seems that Valve isn't done expanding their open-source Linux graphics driver team and securing top talent for enhancing the Linux GPU drivers for a better gaming experience. One of the foremost leading Mesa developers has left AMD to join Valve.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 kernel test release due out on Sunday, a new round of x86 platform driver fixes were submitted for the week.

This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma's built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week.

A few days ago the widely-used SDL library added support for the new Steam Controller without depending upon the Steam client. Now another improvement for the new Steam Controller has been merged to this widely-used library for cross-platform games/apps with software/hardware abstractions.