Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

17 May 12:00 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 15.1

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.

ROCm 7.13 was released today as the newest ROCm Core SDK Preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0 later in the year.

Wine 11.9 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release and nearing the half-way point of the development cycle toward Wine 12.0.

Merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel is some new documentation surrounding what qualifies as a security bug as well as around responsible use of AI for finding kernel bugs.

A new patch for the Linux kernel posted today by Intel has outed "Panther Lake R" as a ruggedized variant of Panther Lake intended for harsh environments.

Following yesterday's disclosure of the ssh-keysign-pwn vulnerability that allows unprivileged users to read root-owned files, a slew of new stable kernel releases are out today to address this latest Linux security issue.

Earlier this year we reviewed the ZimaBoard 2 for building a Linux home storage server. That was a nifty little device but for those looking for a more polished product than assembling your storage devices in cardboard cut-outs and the like, IceWhale has launched the ZimaCube 2. The ZimaCube 2 is a nice and polished, literal cube, to serve as your personal cloud / network attached storage (NAS) device.

In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner.

15 May 07:17 AM EDT - AMD - Open Firmware

3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!

For what originally began as an open-source Intel software project, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing robust development outside the confines of Intel Corp these days with ongoing improvements driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Ant, and other organizations for this Rust-based VMM for cloud workloads.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 release due out on Sunday, a variety of HID subsystem patches were merged overnight to Linux Git.

15 May 06:07 AM EDT - Vulkan - NVIDIA Cooperative Matrix Decode Vector

Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support.

Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn.

14 May 08:46 PM EDT - Valve - SDL + Steam Controller 2026

Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam.

14 May 06:46 PM EDT - AMD - AMD P-State Dynamic EPP

Dynamic EPP is one of the new AMD P-State features in Linux 7.1, but, unfortunately is causing some fallout in early usage of this power-savings related functionality.

14 May 01:32 PM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma Big Screen

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release.

One of the latest Linux gaming handheld drivers being worked on is the MSI Claw Configuration Driver for controller configuration.

With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the user-space ROCm components from the end of last summer to the latest ROCm 7.2.3 milestone.

Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver.

14 May 08:23 AM EDT - Intel - Cache Aware Scheduling

I have been writing about the Cache Aware Scheduling work led by Intel engineers on the Linux kernel for more than a year. I've also tested out Cache Aware Scheduling on both Intel and AMD CPUs with the patched Linux kernel to great success. And thus very happy to see the Cache Aware Scheduling patches inching closer to the mainline Linux kernel.

14 May 07:31 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Beta

In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7.

Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge.

Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers.

The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported.

13 May 01:03 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Silicon Security Engine

Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI).

Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability.

Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client.

In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate.

KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack.

13 May 05:30 AM EDT - Arm - Arm FEAT_D128

A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later.