Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.1 as the newest feature release as well as being their first time bumping the minor version number since the December release of COSMIC 1.0.

The 46-year-old BASIC09 programming language has new compiler support with a front-end having been developed for the LLVM compiler stack. BASIC09 was developed in 1980 for the Motorola 6809 CPU running with the OS-9 operating system. With this LLVM compiler front-end, you can write BASIC09 code for modern software and hardware.

While the Linux 7.2 merge window doesn't wrap up until this weekend as the feature cut-off for new material, I have already begun some early benchmarks of the code currently staged for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 7.2 already was looking quite exciting with cache aware scheduling and other exciting new features while an unexpected surprise in my early testing this week was seeing some local network/socket performance improvements.

Over the years while working at Red Hat, Hans de Goede was known for driving many wonderful Linux laptop improvements benefiting AMD/Intel x86_64 hardware. Hans left Red Hat last year and ended up joining Qualcomm to advance their open-source/Linux support. Today he is out with a significant new patch series for consideration that has the potential of significantly improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptop Linux support and also important indicators for better Snapdragon laptop support on Linux moving forward.

For those that happen to still be running a 22+ year old Apple Power Mac such as those from 2004 with an IBM PowerPC processor and ATI Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 XT graphics, there are open-source driver improvements for Linux still happening in 2026 to benefit this vintage hardware.

The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the

While the Fwupd 2.1 series is the latest stable channel for this open-source firmware updating solution, Fwupd 2.0.21 was released today to backport fixes for more than 250 potential security issues recently uncovered in the codebase.

The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel.

A seemingly new generation of Hygon x86 processors are on the way with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing support today for the Hygon Model 8 "Suzhou" c86-4g-m8 processors.

Along with the many x86/x86_64 improvements and some ARM64 architecture improvements (albeit slowed down by the AI/LLM noise affecting the development pace), the RISC-V architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel development.

Following last week's major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes.

As part of today's USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers.

22 June 02:45 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Optimization Zone 1.1

Back in March Intel announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative for helping server administrators and developers better maximize the performance of different workloads running on Intel hardware. Out today is the Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 release with more workloads now covered for squeezing out the most performance on Intel CPUs.

Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end.

Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.

Over the past half-year, Xfwl4 has been developed as a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. Released this weekend was the first preview release of Xfwl4 in alpha form.

It's been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status.

Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support.

Miracle-WM 0.10 released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor. With this new release is also acknowledgement they are hoping to cross the "1.0" milestone later in the year.

22 June 06:33 AM EDT - Mesa - Ray-Tracing Inspector

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" as a new GUI created by developers on Valve's open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming.

The HID subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 7.2 kernel with some treats that will excite Linux gamers and other desktop users.

Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext's sub-scheduler support.

Early AMD Radeon Graphics Core Next "GCN" GPUs are seeing work to improve the GPU recovery process in the event of hangs. This work is yet another improvement for older AMD GPUs being led by Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team.

As a follow-up to last week's article around Firefox leveraging zlib-rs and some nice upstream improvements to this Rust-based Zlib implementation, the zlib-rs 0.6.4 release is now available to ship all of these latest enhancements.

Last month Qualcomm engineers posted patches bringing up the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 laptop on Linux. Sent out this weekend were a new set of patches from Qualcomm for bringing up the HP EliteBook X G2q laptop model powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC.

21 June 08:49 AM EDT - Mesa - Vulkan Present Timing

Mesa's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for present timing support "VK_EXT_present_timing" with X11 and XWayland.

Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn't be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while discussions are ongoing in getting the vendor to provide a proper firmware fix.

21 June 05:55 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA Blackwell-Next

When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn't too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning "Blackwell-Next" enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel.

KUnit as the unit testing framework for the Linux kernel and was inspired in part by Java's JUnit when originally conceived, is now finally able to output to the JUnit format for better interoperability with other CI systems and the like that standardize on that common format.

Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win.

Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy interface within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated.

20 June 07:19 AM EDT - Arm - More Performance

Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM.

The open-source world waited long enough for the GIMP 3.0 release that finally came last year with its GTK3 port and more, but for those with time on their hands this weekend and want to relive GIMP's past from long ago, GIMP 0.54 has been adapted for Flatpak to work on modern Linux desktops. What makes this version of GIMP from 1996 notable is that it was the last to use the Motif toolkit.

In addition to open-source developer Namjae Jeon serving as maintainer for the new NTFS Linux driver, he also continues serving as maintainer to the exFAT file-system for that other Microsoft file-system popular with removable storage media.

With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release.

Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the "NTFS resurrection" with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support.

With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play.

Barco, the Europeean technology company that manufactures the AMD GPU based MXRT graphics cards for for multi-display medical imaging systems (and also MXRV for their NVIDIA based graphics cards), have to date only seen Windows drivers published for their professional-grade graphics cards even with using Radeon Pro derived GPUs. But a patch published today to the AMD graphics mailing list is opening the door for Linux support.

Systemd 261 is out as stable today with a number of new features and ready to coincide with H2'2026 Linux distributions.

19 June 11:51 AM EDT - AMD - AMD ACP 7.x Audio Driver

It looks like AMD's next-gen SoCs not only will be exciting on the CPU side with the much anticipated Zen 6 cores but the AMD Audio Co-Processor "ACP" IP looks to be going through some significant updates.

The networking subsystem changes have been merged for Linux 7.2 with a lot happening around the core networking code as well as the many wired and wireless networking device drivers.

Raspberry Pi engineers have released their first update to Raspberry Pi OS since April. With this new version comes the upgrade to the latest Linux 6.18 LTS kernel.

Just shy of 1,000 new patches were merged on the SoC side for the Linux 7.2 kernel. Among all those patches are enabling five more SoCs to work with the mainline Linux kernel -- including the long-awaited Apple M3 support.

19 June 06:31 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Bash Coding Agent

Just days after AMD engineers released a new Lemonade AI server with MCP server integration to make it much more useful, they have now released a new release of their GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" open-source software. With AMD GAIA 0.21.2, they have introduced a bash coding agent is their latest big ticket item in the AI space.

19 June 06:18 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Trust Domain Extensions

For those interested in Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with modern Intel Xeon processors for confidential computing but also view system uptime as critical, beginning in Linux 7.2 the TDX support is now much more practical with allowing live updates without the need to reboot the running system in the event of security updates and similar.

For those that enjoy keeping an eye on all their system vitals from temperatures to voltages, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" updates have seen many device additions for Linux 7.2.

The media subsystem changes were merged tonight for the Linux 7.2 merge window and it includes the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver now in the mainline kernel.. This ISP4 driver is what completes the loop for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops.

The Linux kernel has dropped the last of its architecture-specific optimized MD5 hashing algorithm implementations.

Godot 4.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.

The EXT4 file-system improvements were merged today for Linux 7.2 with some enticing optimizations.

The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster.

A bug in the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver leading to some laptop displays freezing after periods of use may finally be close to being resolved. Given the length and quantity of bug reports and one of the problematic commits being tracked back to 2017, it's a heavy hitting issue for some Linux users. With the help of Claude Code, it looks like a fix is on the way to the Linux kernel.

The cryptographic subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window.

18 June 08:39 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Beta Requirement

Canonical and the Ubuntu Release Team have implemented an important policy change for Ubuntu flavors moving forward. If they are to have an official release, they must now successfully submit a beta release.

With the ongoing work around the AMD GFX1250 (and GFX1251) in the open-source AMD Linux driver stack, it's led to a lot of speculation about these parts in the GFX12 series associated with RDNA4. RDNA4 refresh? Or a lot of signals have pointed to GFX125x being possible AI/HPC accelerators such as for the upcoming Instinct MI400 series. Adding to the intrigue is GFX1251 being an APU. The latest LLVM compiler activity is further pointing to GFX1250/GFX1251 being for enterprise hardware.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) drivers, such as for dealing with ECC memory error reporting, are heavy on the Intel side with Linux 7.2 in preparing for upcoming hardware.

Overnight Valve released SteamOS 3.8.10 into the stable channel. for succeeding SteamOS 3.7. There's a lot happening across the board to their in-house Linux platform for the likes of the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine hardware.

There are a number of time(r) core subsystem changes for the Linux 7.2 kernel to better harden the kernel.