Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

9 Hours Ago - AMD - AMD P-State Features

A few Linux kernel releases have passed since there have been any new features to talk about for the AMD P-State driver for CPU frequency scaling / power management with modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. But for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel there are some new features now ready for mainline.

Sent out today were the networking subsystem fixes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel. These networking fixes in time for Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc7 release include addressing performance issues within the Qualcomm Ath11k and Ath12k WiFi drivers that have always existed ever since the drivers were upstreamed.

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source (MIT-licensed) software project.. the Agent Governance Toolkit. Microsoft is trying their hand at coming up with runtime security governance for autonomous AI agents.

2 April 11:26 AM EDT - Intel - Linux Cache Aware Scheduling

Just over one year ago Intel Linux engineers began working on cache-aware load balancing for Linux or more commonly referred to as Cache Aware Scheduling. The functionality for helping modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors especially hasn't yet been upstreamed to the Linux kernel but yesterday the fourth version of these patches were posted for review.

With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here's a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 since its launch last year in going from Ubuntu 25.04 to Ubuntu 26.04.

Following this morning's announcement of IBM working with Arm on "dual architecture" hardware, we have some more details on at least what's happening from the software side... It's improving Arm virtualization on IBM Z Systems (s390).

2 April 08:30 AM EDT - Arm - IBM Dual Architecture

IBM announced today a strategic collaboration with Arm around new dual-architecture hardware.

The CentOS project has established the Accelerated Infrastructure Enablement "AIE" special interest group with a focus on providing a "fast lane" for "in-flight" patches. This CentOS AIE SIG is particularly focused on carrying the code needed for enabling NVIDIA AI factories.

2 April 06:13 AM EDT - WINE - Zink Driver By Default

A CodeWeavers engineer opened a merge request yesterday for Wine to use Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver by default. This would build Zink as a Windows Portable Executable (PE) for allowing OpenGL to go straight to the Vulkan API with the host Vulkan drivers.

2 April 06:01 AM EDT - AI - KTransformers 0.5.3

KTransformers 0.5.3 released today for this framework for efficient inferencing and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) with a focus on CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. With this release, KTransformers 0.5.3 is now more applicable for CPUs lacking Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) and AVX-512 in now providing some AVX2-only kernels too.

Libinput devised a Lua-based plug-in system for modifying devices/events. The Lua plug-in support was introduced last year with libinput 1.30 but unfortunately some security issues have now come to light with the implementation.

If Valve's latest Steam Survey monthly figures are accurate, Steam on Linux enjoyed a very wild month of March. Steam on Linux is now above the 5% threshold and more than twice the size of the Steam on macOS marketshare.

With Linux 7.0-rc6 having released on Sunday, we are hitting the point of the cut-off of new feature material being allowed into the Direct Rendering Manager's DRM-Next tree of queuing new graphics/display/accelerator feature code ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. As presumably the last AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature pull ahead of Linux 7.1, today's pull request from AMD contains some noteworthy final enhancements.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" this week rejected a change proposal for Fedora 45 that would use systemd's environment generator functionality for managing per-user environment variables.

1 April 03:56 PM EDT - NVIDIA - Per-Plane DRM Color Pipeline API

Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions.

Cloudflare continues to be full of open-source surprises. Today Cloudflare announced EmDash as an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress with an emphasis on better security.

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library.

What's more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools' Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual.

KDE Linux as the in-house, leading-edge Linux distribution for showcasing the latest KDE Plasma innovations has promoted itself as being an atomically updated Linux distribution. But these atomic updates didn't quite work out as planned recently with some users finding their system(s) unbootable. But improvements are being made now for better robustness moving forward.

The Rust-For-Linux crew is preparing to raise the minimum supported Rust version for building the Linux kernel and and similarly also bumping the minimum supported version of bindgen, the tool for generating Rust FFI bindings for C code in the kernel.

Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols.

Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop. This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support.

Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to "deprecate legacy IP" support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing "legacy" IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build.

Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options.

Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the latest Pidgin, Gaim 3 is under development.

AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month's update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements.

31 March 06:50 PM EDT - BSD - MidnightBSD 4.0.4

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 is out today as the newest update to this desktop-minded BSD operating system. Notable with this update is introducing the Aged daemon and Agectl program for handling age verification and age attestation given the increasing number of US states pursuing laws around age verification at the OS user level.

A merge request for Wayland Protocols was opened today for introducing "xx-fractional-scale-v2" as an experimental protocol to address current shortcomings with current Wayland fractional scaling. There is also a KDE KWin compositor merge request already out for review that implements this xx-fractional-scale-v2 protocol.

After KDBUS failed to make it into the mainline Linux kernel more than one decade ago as an in-kernel version of D-Bus, BUS1 was proposed as a clean sheet design for in-kernel, capability-based inter-process communication (IPC). BUS1 didn't gain enough traction to make it to the mainline kernel and then many of the same developers devised Dbus-Broker as a more performant D-Bus user-space implementation. Well, as a big surprise now, a new version of BUS1 is being worked on for the Linux kernel.

Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable.

With Q1 wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter that excited Linux readers the most. During this quarter on Phoronix were 881 original news articles thus far and 61 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles.

One of the latest Linux kernel optimizations being worked on by Meta's large kernel engineering team is making reading of /proc/interrupts less costly. Due to monitoring of their servers frequently reading /proc/interrupts, it's actually become a noticeable cost over time with their massive fleet of systems.

Servo 0.0.6 is out today to round out the month with many great improvements made in recent weeks to this Rust-based browser engine advancing with its servoshell implementation and many prospects around using it for embedded browser use cases.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is just three weeks out for release with many great features in tow from the GNOME 50 desktop to the very leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel and many other package updates. One feature that many had been looking forward to is Canonical's plans to ship AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu archive for a much cleaner experience for those wanting to make use of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. As a common question in recent weeks from readers, it remains to be seen if that milestone will be achieved for the Ubuntu 26.04 launch day.

31 March 06:07 AM EDT - LVFS - LVFS Sponsors Needed

Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow the next phase of their transition to encourage vendors to support the open-source project goes into effect.

In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel.

30 March 08:20 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Optimization Zone

Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware.

Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library.

For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD's ROCDXG "librocdxg" library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL.

30 March 01:29 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI NPU

Hitting the mailing list today are patches providing initial support for AMD's next-gen NPU "AIE4" platform, complete with SR-IOV support.

While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state is performing relative to Ubuntu 25.10 with this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.

Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs.

30 March 10:46 AM EDT - Radeon - OpenCL 3.0 Conformance

The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015.

Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to enable FRED by default. Now this week that patch appears all-set for merging with the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window.

30 March 09:42 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM RVCC Compiler

A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration "RVCC" as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal.

After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going.

Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system.

30 March 08:56 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV Vulkan Video Low-Latency

The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added new low-latency Vulkan Video encode/decode options for those seeking better performance.

30 March 06:32 AM EDT - Intel - Panel Replay Disable

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week's drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling.

30 March 06:03 AM EDT - AMD - AMD vIOMMU

Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed.

SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams.

Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes.

Here's something that wasn't on my bingo card for this year of the "MKISS" driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn't seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago.

29 March 09:56 AM EDT - Intel - QuickAssist QAT Gen6 Wireless

Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware.

Ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due to be released later today, quite a number of EXT4 file-system fixes were sent out this morning.

Sent out this week was another drm-misc-next pull heading to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. Notable with this week's Direct Rendering Manager code changes was introducing per-process buffer object "BO" memory usage query support for user-space.

Released this week was Nginx 1.29.7 as the newest mainline version of this HTTP(S) web server. Releasing alongside Nginx 1.28.3 stable, it fixed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and some other vulnerabilities. Making Nginx 1.29.7 more exciting though is that it landed Multipath TCP support.

It's fairly rare for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to hit OpenGL rendering game bugs these days as besides more games going opting for Vulkan API use, RadeonSI is rather robust and very mature at this stage. Recently though a Linux gamer that upgraded to a Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card noticed that the open-source EDuke32 Duke Nukem 3D build and its derivatives were failing to render properly with the RadeonSI driver.