Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages.

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems.

While the Linux support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake is largely in good shape as shown in my numerous articles over the past month and a half, there are occasional missing remnants landing in the kernel. As the latest example, or the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel, the unified Panther Lake C-States table is being added for the Intel Idle driver.

After going through five rounds of review under a Request For Comments (RFC) flag, today the latest round of Kernel API Specification Framework patches were sent out with the RFC flag removed.

Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands.

FreeRDP as this open-source and cross-platform Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is out with FreeRDP 3.24 to ship new security fixes as well as other improvements.

A fix is on the way to the Linux 7.0 kernel today for addressing an idle power issue with AMD RDNA4 GPUs reporting high power consumption and full utilization even after being "idle" following compute workloads like Llama.cpp.

For going along with the Intel IVPU kernel accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel is the Intel NPU driver support in user-space. Released yesterday was the Intel NPU Driver 1.30 milestone for advancing the Intel NPU user-space support on Linux with this open-source support for Core Ultra SoCs.

GNOME's GitLab infrastructure has already been using Anubis for a while to help fend off bots and AI scraper traffic from wreacking havoc on their server resources and also their hosting budget. GNOME recently began redirecting some GitLab traffic to their GitHub repositories as another step in dealing with bots/scrapers. Now they have taken an added step of using the commercial, closed-source Fastly in their battle with bots.

16 Hours Ago - Intel - LLM-Scaler vLLM 0.14.0-b8.1

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage.

Last year TrueNAS unified their SCALE and CORE offerings as part of solidifying their enterprise storage efforts around Linux from their prior FreeBSD base. This year the developers at iXsystems have another change in store with announcing TrueNAS Connect as a new bridge for accessing TrueNAS enterprise storage features without having to invest in their hardware.

The AppArmor Linux kernel security module used notably by Ubuntu Linux and currently maintained by Canonical has been affected by several vulnerabilities made public today.

The cpupower tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has squeezed in a few improvements today for the ongoing Linux 7.0 development cycle.

Google has shared exciting news with us today that they are bringing their Chrome web browser to ARM64 Linux devices.

The first release candidate of systemd 260 arrived in late February with the new mstack feature, dropping System V service scripts support, and other changes. A week after that systemd 260-rc2 released with a few more changes and now another week later is systemd 260-rc3.

12 March 01:11 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Software Updates

AMD today released ZenDNN 5.2 as the latest versio nof their deep nueral network library that now introduces their next-generation runtime architecture. ZenDNN 5.2 is designed to deliver better performance and geater scalability over earlier versions of this AMD library that began as their take on Intel's open-source oneDNN.

Over the past month on Phoronix there have been a lot of benchmarks of Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of Panther Lake not explored yet is around the CPU security mitigation impact, which is the focus of today's benchmarking. The performance tests today are not only looking at the impact of the Core Ultra X7 SoC at its default versus running in a "mitigations=off" configuration but also comparing the overall CPU security mitigation impact with the run-time toggle going back all the way to Intel Haswell era laptops.

EndeavourOS Titan is out today as the latest ISO refresh for this Arch Linux powered distribution. There is a lot of updates as part of this routine ISO refresh as well as some new tooling and GPU driver integration enhancements.

Introduced with Linux 6.19 was the long in development DRM Color Pipeline API while it's not the end of the road yet on enhancing the Linux desktop for modern high dynamic range (HDR) displays and color pipeline handling. AMD engineer Harry Wentland has more improvements pending for the AMDGPU driver as well as example compositor/desktop-side integration with KDE's KWin.

12 March 09:19 AM EDT - AI - AMD, OpenAI & Others Form The Optical Sc

AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced today the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) optical scale-up consortium.

12 March 09:09 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect

In Mesa 26.1 the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has finally landed support for the VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect extension that was introduced to the Vulkan API last year.

Mesa 26.0.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly stable point release for this set of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems.

12 March 08:12 AM EDT - Qt - Qt Creator 19

Qt developers today released Qt Creator 19 as the newest version of this cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE).

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced the release of Fwupd 2.1.1 as the newest feature update to this solution for deploying system firmware updates and other device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. Paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), Fwupd has made firmware updating a breeze on Linux for an increasing number of devices.

Linux consulting firm Igalia announced this week Moonforge, a new in-house Linux distribution by them based on Yocto and OpenEmbedded.

OBS Studio 32.1 is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop screen recording app that is also popular with game live-streaming and other uses.

It has been eight years already since System76 announced Thelio as their own built-in-the-USA, custom-engineered cases for desktops and workstations. System76 Thelio is an open hardware design and built exceptionally well out of their facilities in Colorado. System76 Thelio has served them well for their range of desktop systems over the years from ARM64 developer workstations to high-end AMD Linux systems. Now though they are preparing to introduce their next-generation Thelio design. Ahead of the announcement next week, here is an exclusive first look at the next-gen Thelio hardware.

11 March 12:21 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI NPUs + LLMs + Linux

Over the past two years AMD has developed the AMDXDNA accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. But when it comes to user-space software on Linux actually able to leave the Ryzen AI NPUs it's been... extremely limited with nothing really useful besides some niche bits of code. Even AMD's own software like their GAIA on Linux has used Vulkan with their iGPUs rather than any NPU support. But finally today there is a significant shift with the Ryzen AI NPUs becoming useful on Linux and able to handle LLMs.

With GNOME 50 that is being used by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, you may be curious about the out-of-the-box performance especially compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases -- especially with Mutter 50 having some NVIDIA optimizations. In today's article is a first look at how the NVIDIA Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 26.04 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.10 release.

The open-source D7VK project began to implement Direct3D 7 over Vulkan similar to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton providing support for newer Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan. With succeeding releases D7VK was extended to Direct3D 6 too and then Direct3D 5 support. Now with today's D7VK 1.5 release, Direct3D 3 is implemented for faster acceleration using Vulkan.

11 March 09:19 AM EDT - Intel - Adaptive Sync SDP

Posted today were new Intel kernel graphics driver patches for Linux to enable Adaptive Sync SDP (Secondary Data Packet) handling for Panel Replay and Auxless Adaptive Link Power Management (ALPM) modes.

Currently the Linux IPv6 networking stack can be built into the Linux kernel, built as a loadable kernel module, or not built at all. With proposed patches from a SUSE engineer, the IPv6 networking stack would be limited to being a kernel built-in or not at all. In doing away with IPv6 as a loadable kernel module would allow simplifying some code and lowering the Linux networking maintenance burden.

Developers behind AlmaLinux as this popular community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) have drafted some new goals for 2026.

Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) debuting with Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids is ready with Linux 6.16+ and recent open-source compilers. One piece of the support puzzle still coming together though that will be especially important for Xeon Diamond Rapids is the KVM virtualization support. New patches there were posted this week.

Microsoft on Tuesday released Azure Linux 3.0.20260304 as the newest monhtly update to their in-house Linux platform.

10 March 08:37 PM EDT - Fedora - Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process

Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta announced a new proposal for "A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora." With the help of Google's Gemini AI, Spaleta laid out a proposal to help Fedora make greater accommodations for experimental concepts and building more interest around innovative ideas without a firm commitment to integrate them into Fedora proper until they can be assured of sustainability.

10 March 03:22 PM EDT - RISC-V - Current RISC-V Is Slow

The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There's hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 -- and that's with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process.

The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It's interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 4.0 is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.0 they are removing support for SSLv3 that has been deprecated for over one decade while also dropping OpenSSL engines and other removals while also adding in some new features.

Over the past two decades SUSE Linux has been passed around several times. From Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in 2003 to then being acquired by The Attachmate Group to then merging with Micro Focus and then the SUSE business being acquired by private equity firm EQT back in 2018. A report out today indicates that EQT may now be looking to sell off SUSE.

The Linux ZRAM module for creating compressed block devices in RAM could be on the edge of a nice I/O compression performance boost.

The Free Software Foundation is hiring a new engineering and certification manager for leading the Respect Your Freedom "RYF" hardware certification program. The FSF RYF program is about certifying hardware that respects the user's freedom and privacy for control over the device, such as no proprietary firmware blobs needed to be loaded at run-time, no digital rights management / digital restrictions, and complies with their other free software ideals.

10 March 09:35 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Projects Archived

Following Intel archiving various open-source projects that they are no longer maintaining amid open-source setbacks due to reduced staffing and other corporate restructuring, another round of Intel open-source projects were formally archived on Monday.

10 March 08:20 AM EDT - Intel - Directed Package Thermal Interrupts

Intel Linux engineers are preparing the Linux kernel's Intel Thermal driver for supporting Directed Package Thermal Interrupts as a new feature of recent Intel CPUs.

10 March 06:25 AM EDT - Mesa - Mesa More Per-Game Tuning

RADV Radeon Vulkan driver developers on Valve's Linux graphics team are evaluating the idea of greater use of per-game/app profiles within this open-source driver and for Mesa drivers at large. Currently for Mesa drivers with DriConf there is the ability to provide per-game/app workarounds while the consideration now is extending that to allow for more per-game optimizations.

For those making use of Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux, tagged today was exfatprogs 1.3.2 as the newest update to these open-source user-space programs for going along with the Linux kernel's exFAT file-system driver.

The Fedora 44 Beta release is out today on schedule in working toward the official Fedora 44 release around mid-April.

9 March 08:30 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE

FreeBSD 14.4 is out today as the latest update to the aging FreeBSD 14 series for those not yet ready to upgrade to FreeBSD 15 that debuted as stable last year.

Last week was a statement by System76 regarding recent age verification laws in California and Colorado among other US states that could have a profound impact on Linux distributions and other open-source software. The Colorado legislation is especially pressing to System76 considering that is where they are based. Fortunately, they aren't taking this lightly and there is some hope that at least in Colorado open-source software could be excluded.

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 Linux driver beta as their first release in the R595 series for Linux and it's running very well in initial testing. Today as part of their Vulkan developer beta program, they have released the NVIDIA 595.44.02 driver that brings some new Vulkan API features.

With CUDA 13.2 that is now shipping, NVIDIA has provided official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions/downstreams like AlmaLinux to CUDA. With this official NVIDIA CUDA support for these RHEL-compatible distributions, NVIDIA is also allowing the NVIDIA packages to be distributed directly from the OS package repositories.

9 March 11:45 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.04 LTS + Authd

Canonical for a while has been developing Authd as an authentication service for external cloud-based identity providers. Authd was designed from the ground-up to provide secure management of identity and access for Ubuntu systems while only with next month's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release is it actually hitting the universe archive.

Intel just published the XeSS 3.0 SDK to GitHub as the newest version of their Xe Super Sampling AI-enhanced upscaling technology for gamers. Sadly though it remains proprietary software and only with native support for Windows.

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 beta Linux driver as their first public build in the R595 release branch. The NVIDIA R595 Linux driver is bringing a number of Vulkan driver improvements, HDR enhancements, DRI3 v1.2 support, and a variety of other improvements. Benchmarking the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux driver the past few days on GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" have been showing some nice incremental performance improvements over the current NVIDIA 590 driver stable series.

9 March 10:10 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100

AMD announced back at CES the Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series with initially the models up to six Zen 5 cores launching while the eight through twelve core models would be available later in H1. Today AMD formally announced those higher-tier Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series parts.

A set of patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week introduce a new driver for enhancing the upstream/mainline Linux kernel support for Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices. This new driver is Synology Microp and is making use of the Linux kernel's modern Rust programming language support.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a new status report on the state of GCC 16 development. Regression fixing has been going slow but they are hoping to publish a release candidate by mid-April.

Rust Coreutils 0.7 released on Sunday as a performance-focused update to this popular alternative to GNU Coreutils that is still striving for 100% compatibility against the GNU Test Suite.

Linux 7.0-rc3 is out as the latest weekly test candidate in leading up to the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April.

The March 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is now available for new installations and upgrading from existing CachyOS installs.

FFmpeg developers are preparing to soon release FFmpeg 8.1 with some great new features and other improvements.

Merged this week for Mesa 26.1 are the initial Nova Lake P "NVL-P" device bits for Intel's ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. But this support isn't yet exposed by default and not yet ready for end-users with more driver changes still to be published.

This week's batch of "x86/urgent" patches that were merged overnight for Linux 7.0 contain some fixes and other adjustments worth highlighting for both AMD and Intel.

The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the "developers" claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

8 March 07:05 AM EDT - KDE - digiKam 9.0

The KDE/Qt-aligned digiKam software for managing RAW digital photos is out today with the big digiKam 9.0 release.

Merged back in 2018 for Linux 5.0 was support for the Apple Magic Trackpad 2. Merged this week for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel is fixing battery reporting for those using the Magic Trackpad 2 under Linux.