Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

While there is the Linuxulator as a kernel-level solution on FreeBSD for running unmodified Linux binaries that can even work for gaming on FreeBSD, running BSD applications on Linux isn't talked about as much. But developers have found that for those wanting to run BSD applications in Linux environments, the urunc lightweight container runtime can work out rather well for efficiently handling BSD apps on Linux.

A few months ago at SIGGRAPH was a demo of Blender with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) integration. The pull request is now open for landing NVIDIA DLSS support into Blender for better quality upscaling/denoising and performance but concerns persist over the licensing due to NVIDIA DLSS binaries.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on the latest batch of Fedora 44 change proposals as they work toward nearing the end of feature work for this spring update to Fedora Linux. Plus some early changes for Fedora 45 have also been granted.

In time for next month's GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit.

For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" performance on Linux, today's the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux software stack in with around 300 benchmarks.

Merged four years ago to the Linux kernel networking subsystem's Shared Memory Communications (SMC) code was TCP Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) support for allowing applications to replace TCP with the SMC protocol in-place as a transparent replacement. Except for the next kernel cycle it's set to be reverted after realizing it's "fundamentally broken."

OpenIndiana as the open-source project built atop Illumos that is continuing to maintain and advance the former OpenSolaris code is working on a big ambitions of modernizing the Image Packaging System (IPS) package management solution. As part of that they are working to move from a C and Python codebase over to Rust.

Announced back in October was NTFS Plus as a new Linux driver for NTFS based on the former NTFS kernel driver prior to Paragon Software contributing the NTFS3 driver code. The intent with this new driver is for better performance. more features, public user-space utilities around it, and all-around a nice step forward for those reliant on this Microsoft file-system. Out this week is the sixth iteration of this remade NTFS driver.

The X.Org Foundation has announced that this year's X.Org Developers Conference will be taking place in Toronto, Canada and hosted by Arm.

Following the Rust Coreutils presentation from FOSDEM this weekend, Rust Coreutils 0.6 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust programming language re-implementation of GNU Coreutils.

With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla's new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a "modern AI browser", the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser's settings.

Microsoft in Windows 11 22H2 introduced a new ACPI Device Specific Method (DSM) "Turn On Display" notification that the Linux 7.0 kernel will be adding support for in dealing with some otherwise problematic laptop behavior.

Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China's Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.

While we might see Git 3.0 released around the end of 2026, Git 2.53 is out today as the latest feature release and continuing to make changes with an eye toward that big Git 3.0 milestone.

2 February 12:19 PM EST - RISC-V - RISC-V Insecurities

While many open-source enthusiasts like to flaunt RISC-V as not having the security challenges as x86_64 CPUs have seen over the past several years with various speculative execution / side-channel attacks and arguing for the benefits of an open-source ISA in stronger security, in practice it's not so clear-cut. Security researchers at Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found current RISC-V CPU implementations coming up short for their actual security.

Early, experimental code for implementing 1GB PUD-level THPs in the Linux kernel are showing positive benchmark results but other upstream stakeholders were surprised by this patch series appearing and it looking like it could be a while until if/when the patches are mainlined for helping to reduce transaction lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure without resorting to Hugetlbfs.

Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year's talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10's adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.

Ahead of Dell's new XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" expected to be shipping in volume beginning in March, more of the Linux support for these premium Panther Lake laptops continues to be finished up.

Linux From Scratch was one of the holdouts continuing optional SysVinit init system support through 2026, but that's now ending. Linux From Scratch "LFS" and Beyond Linux From Scratch "BLFS" are ending their System V Init support moving forward.

Last year Raspberry Pi announced price increases due to memory demand. Today they have announced another round of increased prices as a result of the memory shortages going on industry-wide.

2 February 05:18 AM EST - Valve - Steam January 2026

After Steam on Linux gaming hit a record high in December of 3.58%, the January 2026 numbers are now published.

While typically the stable Linux kernel would come after the -rc7 release a week prior, for Linux 6.19 the release is being dragged out by an extra week not due to any scary bugs but rather due to the holiday downtime at the end of the year. As such Linux 6.19-rc8 is out today with the stable v6.19 release expected next Sunday.

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.

1 February 09:25 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME Resources 1.10

GNOME Resources 1.10 was christened today as the newest version of this modern system monitoring app for the GNOME desktop that is now used by default on the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. With GNOME Resources 1.10 they have added AMD Ryzen AI NPU monitoring support and other new capabilities.

1 February 07:05 AM EST - AI - b4 Kernel Developer Tool

The b4 tool used by Linux kernel developers to help manage their patch workflow around contributions to the Linux kernel has been seeing work on a text user interface to help with AI agent assisted code reviews. This weekend it successfully was dog feeding with b4 review TUI reviewing patches on the b4 tool itself.

A new BSD distribution I only learned about for the first time this weekend is smolBSD, a project built atop the netbsd-MICROVM kernel coming with NetBSD 11 for providing insanely fast booting micro-VMs intended for micro-services and similar environments.

Upstreamed for the Linux 6.19 kernel is the Uniwill laptop platform driver for exposing more features/settings for laptops made by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM, including the laptops from TUXEDO Computers. Coming for the next kernel cycle is further extending the Uniwill platform driver for now having support for adjusting the custom total graphics power "cTGP" for those laptops with a dedicated GPU.

During the last month on Phoronix were 296 original news articles from the Linux/open-source perspective as well as another 18 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews in the Linux world over the past month.

For newer Framework devices like the Framework 13 AMD that make use of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller (EC), the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel is adding fan target support as well as fan temperature threshold handling.

Introduced to the mainline Linux kernel last year was "sheaves" as an opt-in per-CPU array-based caching layer. Sheaves was merged back in Linux 6.18 and while it started as an opt-in caching layer, the plan is to replace more CPU slabs / caches with sheaves. Queued up for slated introduction in the upcoming Linux 7.0 cycle is replacing more of those caches with sheaves.

Shotcut 26.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform video editing solution. Shotcut 26.1 is finally defaulting to GPU hardware accelerated video decoding by default for all platforms sans NVIDIA GPUs on Linux.

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon.

Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January.

31 January 12:36 PM EST - BSD - FreeBSD Gaming 2026

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD.

31 January 06:37 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME 50 + VRR = Stable

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature.

31 January 06:21 AM EST - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7

KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year.

For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired.

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings.

Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments.

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.

30 January 12:23 PM EST - Ubuntu - Linux 6.20 + Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release.

30 January 11:57 AM EST - RISC-V - User-Space CFI For RISC-V

Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support.

Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension.

Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.

Linux's user-space block device driver framework "ublk" for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure.

In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year.

This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux "AGX" DRM kernel driver still isn't positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers.

30 January 05:53 AM EST - Intel - Duty Cycle Control

Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window.

Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM.

Microsoft posted a patch series for introducing Hyper-V integrated scheduler support into the Linux kernel for enhancing vCPU scheduling behavior for virtual machines running within Microsoft's virtualized environment.

Libcamera 0.7 was published today for this modern software library for image signal processors (ISPs) and embedded cameras under Linux. The standout change with libcamera 0.7 is initial plumbing for GPU acceleration in the software ISP "SoftISP" for delivering better performance than just CPU-based.

Slated for introduction in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.20~7.0) is introducing large receive buffer support for IO_uring's zero-copy receive code path. This large receive buffer support can be very beneficial for those with higher-end networking hardware capable of handling the larger buffers for some significant performance and efficiency wins.

29 January 09:39 AM EST - GNU - libgcrypt 1.12

Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software.

29 January 06:36 AM EST - Radeon - GCN 1.1 AMD APU Improvements

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former "Radeon" kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends not being able to use the modern AMDGPU DC "Display Core" code. But new patches from Timur take care of those limitations.

29 January 06:19 AM EST - Intel - Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11

With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops.

29 January 05:57 AM EST - NVIDIA - NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA's NVDEC.