Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

As an exciting development for GPU-accelerated video decoding within the Mozilla Firefox web browser, initial support for Vulkan Video has landed in the web browser!

Simon Ser just published Wayland Protocols 1.49 as the latest version for this primary set of Wayland protocol definitions.

A month ago I wrote about Linux scheduler work to help boost gaming performance on old "potato" hardware with Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra noting that Linux cgroup scheduling has continued to be "a pain in the arse." This work continues advancing with a third iteration of these "flatten the pick" patches being posted.

7 Hours Ago - Mesa - VK_GOOGLE_display_timing for KHR_display

The VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension for obtaining display timing information that can be useful for frame-pacing and eliminating micro-stuttering in games now has direct display mode support with KHR_display for the Mesa Vulkan drivers. This now merged addition immediately benefits the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers as well as the PowerVR, Turnip, and V3DV drivers too.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc7 test kernel release due out later today, a pull request has been submitted of some "x86 fixes" for this kernel release. Most notable with this pull request is acknowledging some additional AMD Zen 6 CPU models.

Broadcom V3D 3.3 and V3D 4.1 graphics IP is set to be deprecated and removed from the V3D kernel graphics/display driver after the Mesa driver support was removed two years ago already. The situation in both cases amount to lack of hardware by developers for testing and with that likely no other known users of these particular Broadcom graphics in selects SoCs.

6 June 08:23 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 15.1

FreeBSD 15.1 was supposed to be out at the start of June but a second release candidate pushed it back by a week and now a third needed release candidate has pushed out the stable release by an additional week.

GNOME Sushi as the file previewer component for the GNOME Files (Nautilus) file manager has now been adapted to make use of GTK4 as well as delivering other enhancements for a nicer file previewing experience on GNOME.

OpenCV 5.0 released today as a major update to this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library.

Daniel Schürmann of Valve's Linux team has posted a new VK_AMD_anti_lag implementation for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

Ape is a new open-source Vulkan driver written in the Zig programming language and not dependent upon any Mesa code.

KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU's GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years.

Today marks 22 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. It's been quite a journey from the early state of Linux hardware support...

It's unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week's DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year.

5 June 04:02 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.10 Desktop Features

Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team today posted a roadmap of many development items they are hoping to tackle for Ubuntu 26.10 due out in October. Some of these desktop plans are more ambitious and will take multiple release cycles to fully realize, but it goes to show their continued investment into the Ubuntu desktop.

Last month CUDA-Oxide was introduced as an experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler. From pure Rust programming language code, one can write CUDA GPU kernels in a "safe(ish)" manner with the CUDA-Oxide compiler emitting NVIDIA PTX output directly. Out today is the second update to CUDA-Oxide.

NVIDIA's Vera CPU is delivering the fastest ARM performance I have ever seen. For putting it into perspective how far the ARM server CPU hardware has come in just the last decade and for some "fun" benchmarks as part of Phoronix marking 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, here are some benchmarks showing the Ampere eMAG from September 2018 to the performance now with NVIDIA Vera. Not even factoring in the many software optimizations across the stack over the period, from simply the hardware side the ARM server CPU performance has advanced by more than 7x in eight years and in some workloads nearly 15x faster.

After three weeks without any Vulkan API spec updates, Vulkan 1.4.353 was released today to deliver the latest documentation updates for this high performance graphics/compute API as well as introducing three new extensions.

In addition to Apple M3 Device Trees for Linux 7.2, the SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs are seeing some notable Device Tree improvements with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape.

In addition to AMDGPU finally seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL support in Linux 7.2, another change worth noting in this week's AMDGPU pull request is the continued work on enhancing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver support for non-4K page size kernel builds. In particular this helps out with AMD graphics and ROCm for the likes of ARM and POWER.

EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter.

Earlier this week I ran benchmarks of different CachyOS Linux kernel flavors that proved interesting from the performance overhead of their hardened kernel build to various other interesting performancr takeaways. One kernel flavor I hadn't tested though was their build with the BORE scheduler. Given the interest and feedback from Phoronix readers, here is an article focused on looking at the performance of the BORE scheduler for the Linux kernel on CachyOS.

4 June 05:25 PM EDT - Radeon - Linux 7.1 + Mesa 26.1

With this week's launch day review of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Ubuntu 26.04 with its Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0 default driver stack was used for testing. That choice was made since the Ubuntu 26.04 release is still fresh, the RDNA4-based RX 9070 GRE was working without issue there, and from other RDNA4 testing knowing there isn't much uplift from the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel or the current stable Mesa 26.1 OpenGL RadeonSI / Vulkan RADV drivers. But for those interested, here are those tests.

4 June 11:35 AM EDT - Apple - Linux 7.2 On Apple M3

The upcoming Linux 7.2 mainline kernel is expected to be able to boot on Apple M3 devices including the M3-powered iMac and MacBook products. But before getting too excited it's still a long ways to go before it will actually be useful for any Apple M3 daily usage under Linux with the overall support at this stage still being very limited for these 2~3 year old Apple Macs.

4 June 10:48 AM EDT - Arm - Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11

For those interested in the prospects of running Snapdragon X2 laptops on Linux rather than Windows 11 on ARM, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 has emerged as one of the initial X2 laptops with tentative Device Tree handling to allow Linux to boot on this latest-generation Qualcomm-powered laptop,

Blender 5.2 is now available in beta form for this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

4 June 09:30 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Multi-Device AI

AMD's GAIA open-source project geared for building AI agents that run locally on your PC is out with a significant new feature release for Windows and Linux systems.

In addition to Intel adjusting their Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids targets in GCC this week to deal with APX realities, AMD this week also adjusted some tuning bits for their Zen 6 "znver6" target.

The stable release of systemd 261 is quickly approaching for being found in H2'2026 Linux distributions.

It's happening! The long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for handling higher resolutions and higher refresh rates on modern AMD Radeon graphics cards with the upstream AMDGPU open-source driver has been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of this month's Linux 7.2 merge window!

While not as well known as the likes of the Godot or O3DE open-source game engines, Crown Engine continues advancing as an open-source, C++-based game engine.

4 June 06:06 AM EDT - LLVM - LLVM + Zstd Compressed Binaries

The LLVM project will begin offering Zstd-compressed archives of their binaries in addition to the existing XZ-compressed releases. LLVM developers are finding Zstd working out great with "significantly reduced" download sizes.

Back in March Steam on Linux skyrocketed to 5.33% with more than double the Steam gaming marketshare of macOS. Then for April Steam on Linux pulled back to a still-great 4.52%, well above the times when Steam on Linux was at 2% or less for many years. Now the May 2026 figures have been published overnight by Valve.

The libinput input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland environments on modern Linux desktops is out with a new security fix release. A new vulnerability is now public allowing for arbitrary root code execution.

Following thr 3mdeb consulting firm's recent release of their Dasharo build of Coreboot and AMD openSIL for the Gigabyte MZ33-ARI1 EPYC 9005 series motherboard, the same engineers continue working on their port of Coreboot and the openSIL CPU silicon initialization library to a Ryzen 9000 series consumer motherboard.

COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 was released today and while it doesn't yet contain the new "Frosted Glass" option for the desktop UI, COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 does contain some other notable enhancements.

After announcing the AMD EPYC 8005 "Sorano" series back in February, AMD recently began shipping these Zen 5 successors to the EPYC 8004 "Siena" line-up. With the EPYC 8005 product stack ranging from 8 to 84 cores and being drop-in upgrades for EPYC 8004 servers after a BIOS update, these are quite some interesting processors for those after a single socket, performant server. Up today are benchmarks of the EPYC 8635P as the flagship 84 core Sorano CPU.

Along with some GCC compiler tuning for Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids to deal with some new APX capabilities not proving beneficial for performance, new patch activity today is preparing GCC for function multi-versioning (FMV) for the AVX10.2 and APX instruction set extensions.

3 June 07:44 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Stable Release Updates

As noted back in April, with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS it's now possible to simply "apt install rocm" on Ubuntu Linux for installing AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. But as prominently noted there, what's shipped right now in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is already months out of date compared to upstream ROCm. Fortunately, Canonical shared today that moving forward they plan to ship newer ROCm versions as stable release updates (SRUs).

3 June 06:26 AM EDT - NVIDIA - Hopper + Blackwell For Nova

While the upstream, open-source Nouveau driver already supports NVIDIA's Hopper and Blackwell graphics processors with the GPU System Processor (GSP) code path, the bring-up of the Rust-written Nova driver remains ongoing. Out this week is the 12th iteration of the Hopper and Blackwell enablement for this future open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

3 June 06:17 AM EDT - Intel - Plus Updated Intel Linux NPU Driver

Intel this week rolled out new versions of their open-source XPU Manager and Linux NPU driver software.

As another interesting takeaway from this week's Microsoft Build 2026 conference beyond their open-source Intelligent Terminal project is Coreutils for Windows. Microsoft is maintaining a fork of Rust Coreutils for Windows to ease the developer experience across Windows / WSL / macOS / Linux.

As a follow-up to the article last week about KRAID as a new compiler for modern Arm Mali graphics, that initial code has now been merged to Mesa 26.2 for benefiting the Panfrost and PanVK open-source drivers.

2 June 08:50 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Snap'ed Up Steam For ARM64

At the beginning of the year Canonical announced a Steam Snap package for Ubuntu ARM64 that leverages the FEX emulator for running x86/x86_64 games on ARM64. After months of testing and improvements, they now consider their Steam Snap for ARM64 to be stable.

Marek Olšák who had been a longtime AMD Linux driver engineer specializing in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, recently began working for Valve on their Linux graphics driver team. His focus has understandably shifted to working on the RADV Vulkan driver and one of his early optimizations now with the Valve hat on is up to a 100% pixel throughput optimization for the RADV driver, which is already quite well optimized thanks to years of investment from Valve, Red Hat, and others.

2 June 03:18 PM EDT - AI - Microsoft Intelligent Terminal

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source creation... Under the MIT license it's the Intelligent Terminal.

2 June 10:24 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma Wayland

KDE developers are sticking to their plans for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in dropping X11 support. Meanwhile it turns out 95% of current Plasma 6.6 users are running already on Wayland.

Now that the Linux kernel has been removing Intel 486 CPU support and also proceeding to drop other vintage CPUs like the AMD K5 CPU support and AMD Elan, the Linux kernel is ready to make the TSC support unconditional for x86 processors.

Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver now has mesh shader support as another significant step forward for this driver in being able to handle modern Linux gaming and other workloads.

Canonical today released Mir 2.27 as the latest version of this set of compositor libraries for easily building Wayland-based shells on Linux and fitting into the Ubuntu Linux paradigm.

ASUS ZenVision is a feature of some ASUS laptops like the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition where there is a 3.5-inch monochrome screen embedded into the top lid of the laptop. From this mini display embedded into the top lid of the laptop it's possible to display animated themes, show the current date/time, battery status, or customized messages and the like. The practicality is rather limited as primarily it's for showing off to people around you besides when your laptop lid is closed, but now with experimental code it's now possible to use ZenVision on Linux.

Some of the latest feature work for the Rust and Wayland based COSMIC desktop environment is on creating their new "Frosted Glass" appearance. It's getting closer to release and giving off Windows Aero vibes for that design language from the Windows Vista days.

Shotcut 26.6 is now available in beta form as this latest feature update for this popular, open-source and cross platform video editor.