Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

76 Minutes Ago - BSD - Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio

Besides the FreeBSD graphics and WiFi drivers lagging behind Linux and other operating systems, the FreeBSD audio driver support and handling of audio streams with FreeBSD on the desktop can be problematic depending upon the hardware/system. One of the most active mailing list threads this week in the FreeBSD camp was over the "tragic state" of FreeBSD audio/sound support.

Auto-CPUFreq is one of the open-source projects striving to be a CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux systems to improve battery life without making any real compromises to the user experience. Out today is v3.1 as the newest feature release of Auto-CPUFreq.

Since 2017 in Linux 4.12 has been the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver where it was introduced into the staging area and remains there nearly a decade later. The rtl8723bs driver for this Realtek 802.11n WiFi SDIO driver has seen a lot of code cleaning over the years and all these years later still is needing lots of code clean-ups from unnecessary code abstractions to dealing with malicious WiFi APs for what Greg Kroah-Hartman has called a "beast of a driver". The latest twist is there now being patches for adding Realtek RTL8723BS and RTL8723B onto the existing RTW88 driver.

Firewire still isn't dead yet on Linux. Current plans call for maintaining IEEE-1394 Firewire on Linux at least through 2029 and with today's Linux 7.2-rc5 kernel release is a fix for those wanting to leverage IPv4 networking over Firewire.

Following last month's beta release, Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS derived mobile operating system for select smartphones and tablets.

25 July 12:37 PM EDT - Fedora - Fedora Conflict of Interest

Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project.

25 July 07:00 AM EDT - GNOME - New Kiwi Menu Update

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME.

GNU developers today released GNU C Library "glibc" 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms.

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too.

Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project.

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward.

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as "broken" and "harmful" due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine "QCE" driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it's even worse than anticipated.

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window.

24 July 10:20 AM EDT - Ubuntu - /etc/os-release Is Better

Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file.

Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition.

24 July 08:14 AM EDT - AMD - Open-Source At AMD

At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in "open" mentions and a ramp that's been building each year at the AMD events.

At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under Linux now and against the AMD/Intel competition. Unfortunately, it's regressed even further than the last round of testing.

23 July 03:16 PM EDT - AMD - AMD EPYC Zen 8 Ravenna

After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development.

In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers.

While AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 "Venice" for taking their server offerings to the next level in the agentic AI era.

23 July 12:59 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Instinct MI455X + Helios

Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack.

23 July 12:25 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD Frozen

The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things.

23 July 09:52 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora Atomic Desktop + Remote Install

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images.

23 July 07:58 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen AI Software 1.8

Ahead of Lisa Su's keynote this morning at the AMD Advancing AI event, tagged on GitHub just now was the Ryzen AI Software 1.8 release for helping to deploy AI models on Ryzen AI PCs.

23 July 07:50 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM 23.1-rc1

Following the recent code branching for the LLVM 23 series, LLVM 23.1-rc1 was released today in working toward the next stable release of this open-source compiler stack.

While the VideoLAN developers are busy these days working on dav2d for AV2 video decoding, they haven't let up work on dav1d and recently released dav1d 1.5.4 for continuing to enhance this leading open-source, CPU-based AV1 decoder.

Just one week after releasing Lemonade 11.0, the Lemonade 11.5 local AI server was released today for this open-source AMD backed project during their AMD Advancing AI event.

Sam Lantinga of Valve and SDL fame has landed HDR10 rendering support into the Simple DirectMedia Library.

System76 developers today released COSMIC Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment.

Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage.

For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage.

22 July 08:16 AM EDT - Intel - Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupt

Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent out this week's batch of sound fixes that he describes as "A collection of fixes that have been accumulated recently. The amount is still "new normal", but all small fixes. Mostly hardware-specific quirks, but including a few core fixes, too." The "new normal" has been a common phrase recently to reflect the increased tempo of patches as well as security/bug disclosures all due to the increased pace of AI/LLM activity.

Following the launch of the 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the 5-inch display variant, Raspberry Pi announced today the addition of a 10-inch model.

Linux's cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface.

Canonical today disclosed three new Snap security vulnerabilities affecting snapd. Two are rated high impact vulnerabilities while the third is considered medium but covers all Ubuntu releases of the past decade going back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Following recent Linux kernel patches enabling the Snapdragon X2 Elite powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 and HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite laptops to boot outside of Windows 11 on ARM, Qualcomm engineers have now posted a new patch series for getting the X2 Elite Extreme powered ASUS Zenbook A16 working on Linux.

21 July 11:38 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Enterprise Store

For months the Enterprise Store "enterprise-store" has been mentioned in some Ubuntu documentation and other elements while today it was formally announced by Canonical. The Enterprise Store is for helping to manage Ubuntu Linux deployments particularly within enterprise organizations that may have their computers air-gapped or otherwise strict Internet controls.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the latest batch of features for the upcoming Fedora 45 release.

21 July 08:00 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen AI Halo LED Driver

For those that have picked up one of the neat AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PCs, the LED driver allowing for customization of the LED lighting bar is set to be mainlined for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

21 July 06:23 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Open-Source GPU Compute

Going in-step with last week's release of the Intel Graphics Compiler 2.38.2, out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.27.39122.11. Most intriguing with the new release is Intel continuing to build out the still-experimental LEO feature.

21 July 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Zen 6 Instruction Based Sampling

Among the recent patch series in preparing Linux for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors is making the kernel aware of additional EILVT registers to be found with at least EPYC Venice platforms.

InputPlumber is out with its newest feature release. As a reminder, InputPlumber is the open-source input router and remapper daemon for combining various input devices from gamepads to mice and keyboards as well as the ability to emulate them.