Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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...

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.

CachyOS ships with a good Linux kernel configuration by default balancing the different features as well as performance. But they also ship a variety of other kernel builds for those preferring a more leading-edge kernel or the current LTS series, a hardened kernel configuration, and more. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution with some of its main kernel flavors.

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.

On 5 June marks 22 years since starting Phoronix.com for covering the Linux hardware space and open-source news.

1 June 08:34 PM EDT - X.Org - X.Org Server + XWayland

There are nine new security vulnerabilities impacting the X.Org Server as well as the XWayland component. Yep, more than a decade after X.Org Server security issues began coming to light with a security research acknowledging it's a disaster and "it's worse than it looks", it continues holding true.

Yesterday AMD kicked off Computex 2026 in announcing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE alongside a number of other product announcements. With the Radeon RX 9070 GRE going on sale today, the review embargo has now lifted on this new RDNA 4 consumer graphics card slated to be priced around $549 USD. Here is an initial look at the Linux performance benchmarks of this new AMD graphics card offering.

Ahead of Intel Diamond Rapids server processors launching in 2027, the Linux kernel continues getting into shape for these next-gen Xeon processors. The latest enablement work taking place for Diamond Rapids is readying the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver support for propagating memory errors/correction information under Linux.

1 June 09:35 AM EDT - Intel - Intel IWLWIFI WiFi 8

Intel open-source software engineers have been busy beginning to prepare their upstream IWLWIFI wireless driver in the Linux kernel for supporting their next-gen WiFi adapters supporting the WiFi 8 "Ultra High Reliability" standard.

The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface for user-space applications to directly access the Linux kernel's built-in cryptographic engine is proceeding with a quick deprecation cycle due to a "massive attack surface" with increased vulnerabilities coming to light due to AI/LLM-based tooling.

1 June 06:14 AM EDT - Intel - Advanced Performance Extensions

Some compiler tuning merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is disabling some features of Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) for upcoming Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids processors as they are not proving worthwhile for performance.

An open-source developer has created NBD-VRAM as a way to create swap space on your consumer NVIDIA GPU's video memory under Linux.

1 June 05:46 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 15.1-RC2

A second release candidate of FreeBSD 15.1 was warranted and in turn released this weekend which now pushes the stable release back by one week.

Jensen Huang used his Computex keynote today to formally announce RTX Spark as their new superchip for compact desktop PCs and laptops.

May 2026 is now in the books after writing 275 original Linux/open-source minded news articles and another 20 featured-length benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There was a lot of exciting topics in May to keep the month interesting and as we approach the Phoronix 22nd birthday this week.

Dell is using Computex to announce their new XPS 13 that comes at their lowest price ever of $599 USD for students and $699 for everyone else. The new Dell XPS 13 aims to compete directly with the Apple MacBook Neo while leveraging the new Intel Wildcat Lake processors as cut-down from Panther Lake.

The Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel is now available for closing out the month of May and approaching the Linux 7.1 stable release that should be out by mid-June.

With the end of the month comes a new KDE Linux status report from prominent KDE developer Nate Graham.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 test kernel due out later today, this week's batch of input subsystem fixes have been sent out that includes enabling a few newer input devices.

Going back to early 2023 there were efforts to disable all the Linux drivers for Microoft's RNDIS protocol. Remote NDIS has proven to be a real security concern while superior, modern alternatives exist.

31 May 07:28 AM EDT - WINE - Wine-Staging 11.10

Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.10 is now the Wine-Staging 11.10 experimental/testing flavor with nearly 300 additional patches atop that upstream code.

For ending out the month of May is a new monthly release of Servo, the open-source, Rust-based browser engine being developed by Linux Foundation Europe stakeholders and the open-source community. There are many nice enhancements on the desktop side with Servo 0.2 while also improving the Android browser UI experience with Servo too.

Zrythm is a wonderful open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) application. Zrythm 1.0 released back in 2024 for this software catering from beginners to audio professionals. It's been a GTK-based application for years but the developers have been porting it to Qt6/QML. Released this weekend is the first Zrythm 2.0 alpha release that moves from GTK to Qt/QML.

The clearcpuid= kernel parameter can be used to disable specific CPUID features for the kernel by specifying the targeted bit numbers of the feature(s) to disable or their flags from the /proc/cpuinfo output. The clearcpuid parameter, for example, has been useful for carrying out AVX-512 comparison benchmarks for apps that check for the presence of the AVX-512 extensions via /proc/cpuinfo. But moving forward the documentation on clearcpuid is being removed to discourage its use.

As expected given AOM Video Model indications last week, the AV2 v1.0 specification was officially released on Friday.