Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

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.

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

12 Hours Ago - 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.

12 Hours Ago - 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.

Last year at Tech Tour Arizona, Intel announced Clearwater Forest as the Xeon 6+ series. Details were rather light then while for Computex, Intel is announcing that Xeon 6+ is now "launching" beginning tomorrow, 1 June. In addition to Xeon 6+, the new Intel Ethernet E835 is also launching while there are updates on Crescent Island and Diamond Rapids.

31 May 08:14 PM EDT - Hardware - Dell XPS 13 With Wildcat Lake

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.

AMD is kicking off the busy Computex 2026 week with some new product announcements. The embargo is now up so meet the Radeon RX 9070 GRE and other new wares coming out this summer and later in the year from AMD.

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.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel due out on Sunday, this week's round of USB fixes have been merged with various new device quirks added as well as some patches as a result of scanning tools.

Rust Coreutils 0.9 was tagged today as the latest major update to this GNU Coreutils implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust Coreutils 0.9 is up to a 90.4% pass rate against the GNU test suite!

NixOS 26.05 is out today as the latest version of this Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager.

On Friday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD pull request landing more kernel graphics/compute driver improvements in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window happening in mid-June.

30 May 06:47 AM EDT - AMD - Larger AMD Zen 6 Family

The latest open-source/Linux patch activity around AMD's next-gen Zen 6 processors is expanding the range of the CPU models detected by the Linux kernel.

30 May 06:44 AM EDT - AI - Open Source AI

Ahead of the 52nd G7 Summit being held in Evian, France next month, the recently conducted G7 Digital and Technology Ministers’ Meeting came to agreement on shared language around open-source AI and on the importance of open-source in AI.

GNOME Circle as the initiative for third-party/independent software applications and libraries extending the GNOME desktop ecosystem is taking a stand against AI slop. The GNOME Circle policy has been updated to reject low-effort, vibe coded applications/libraries where the developer is not able to take responsibility for the work.

30 May 05:57 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Next Month

KDE released Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 this week while the current Plasma 6.6 stable series continues seeing fixes as does Plasma 6.8 for what will be the follow-on feature release to Plasma 6.7.

Genode OS 26.05 is out this week as the latest update for this original open-source operating system framework. With Genode OS 26.05, they have taken various features of their general purpose Sculpt OS operating system and turned them into reusable framework features.

Valve tonight released their beta version of SteamOS 3.8.6 that contains a number of notable enhancements, including native HDMI Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support in initial form.

29 May 08:14 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 1

Canonical today released the first monthly snapshot of the Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" release.

Wine 11.10 marks the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Fresh off the funding round from HP, Fwupd 2.1.4 was christened today as the newest stable update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

AMD's ROCm open-source compute stack is up to version 7.2.4 stable as it continues seeing new fixes while on the tech preview feature side is the recent ROCm 7.13 release.

The new System76 Thelio Major powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and optionally with the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card for an all-open-source AMD Linux stack is a mighty powerful workstation. If desiring even more compute potential out of this high-end desktop/workstation, CachyOS works pretty darn well on this new system with lofty leads over upstream Arch Linux as well as Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and the stock Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution.

Last week's collection of networking subsystem fixes for Linux 7.1 noted craziness continuing with no end in sight with a large pull request of fixes with many of them spurred on by AI/LLM coding agents. This week it's "significantly bigger" than prior kernel cycles for this late stage of kernel development due to this assistance of large language models.

A change coming on the way for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is yielding a significant improvement to the direct I/O write performance. While a big gain, technically it's a regression fix after a change mistakenly dropped the behavior several years ago.

Introduced in Linux 7.1 is a dedicated CRTC background color property for DRM graphics/display drivers. The "BACKGROUND_COLOR" property can be used with capable drivers and display controllers as the default background color when not covered by any plane or from transparent regions of higher planes. With the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle, the Intel DRM driver will begin supporting this background color property.

One of the Fedora 45 change proposals under consideration at the moment is making adding PURL "Package-URL" to Fedora's package metadata for simplifying the mapping between upstream projects and Fedora packages.

For those still making use of Intel Sandy Bridge processors from 15 years ago, the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is bringing a fix for an engine reset issue when using the old integrated graphics with Sandy Bridge.

29 May 05:32 AM EDT - Radeon - Radeon Software For Linux 26.12

While most Linux enthusiasts and desktop users/gamers are comfortable just riding the latest upstream Linux kernel and Mesa drivers shipped by their distribution, for those enterprises preferring the officially blessed and QA'ed driver packages from AMD, last week marked the release of the Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver.

28 May 08:51 PM EDT - Intel - Directed Package Thermal Interrupts

Back in March was an initial patch series out of Intel for Linux support for Directed Package Thermal Interrupts as a new feature of recent Intel CPUs. There wasn't much to report over the past three months on this work but today a second iteration of the patches emerged on the Linux kernel mailing list.

Sent out today was the last drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window getting underway in June. As part of this last batch of small Direct Rendering Manager graphics/accelerator driver changes is finally enabling the NVIDIA GA100 within the Nouveau driver.

In recent weeks we have been exploring different areas of the Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics performance on Linux from various OpenCL and Vulkan to Level Zero compute benchmarks, scaling up to four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards, comparing to NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell, and other relevant tests. While not intended for gaming, many Phoronix readers keep raising requests for seeing the Arc Pro B70 performance for Linux gaming given the lack of any consumer BMG-G31 GPU. So for those curious, here is a look at the Linux gaming performance with the Arc Pro B70 graphics card.

Arm today announced the open-sourcing of Metis, an agentic AI security framework that delivers context AI-powered security analysis in looking out for software vulnerabilities.

The QEMU processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack had a policy that forbid any contributions including or derived from AI-generated content. But there are now second thoughts with a proposed patch that will permit AI/LLM contributions in non-critical areas.

For competing with the Apple MacBook Neo, Google Chromebooks, and other entry-level laptops, Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon C series SoCs.

Ahead of Computex, Intel today announced the introduction of the Arc G-Series. While taking on the "Arc" branding, this isn't a new graphics card from Intel but rather their new processors with integrated graphics for handheld gaming devices.

28 May 09:09 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Beta

Building off the KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta release earlier in May, a second beta was declared today in preparing for the Plasma 6.7 stable debut in mid-June.

While there has been talk of potentially branching off the older Mesa graphics drivers, the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver just won't die yet. The R300 Gallium3D driver for supporting ATI R300 through R500 graphics cards saw a big rework merged today in restructuring the driver's intemediate representation (IR) handling.

KRAID is a new Rust-written shader compiler currently being developed for the Panfrost/PanVK open-source Arm Mali driver code. KRAID is designed for Mali's Valhall graphics processors and new as a modern, clean sheet design.

It's been nearly five years already since the start of O3DE as the Open 3D Engine that began as Amazon's Lumberyard project spun into an open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Out this week is O3DE 26.05 for shipping the latest improvements to this cross platform game engine.

The upcoming GTK 4.23.1 development release is introducing a new feature called Snapping, which should enhance the experience when dealing with fractional scaling on today's high resolution displays.

Eric Engestrom announced the release of Mesa 26.0.8 today as the latest stable point release of that Q1'2026 driver series and the last planned update for that stable series.

NVIDIA on Tuesday released CUDA 13.3 as another significant advancement for their unified GPU programming stack for NVIDIA hardware.

27 May 01:05 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 26.10 + Linux 7.2

Canonical's kernel team confirmed today their intention of shipping the Ubuntu 26.10 release with what will be the Linux 7.2 kernel.

27 May 12:58 PM EDT - Valve - VKD3D-Proton + Descriptor Heaps

Valve's VKD3D-Proton component to Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API has landed its descriptor heap (VK_EXT_descriptor_heap) support as a big step forward.

The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn't enjoy much adoption over the years and is now looking at possible removal from the Linux kernel.

The Raspberry Pi hardware monitoring driver "RASPBERRYPI-HWMON" is being extended to allow exposing voltage measurements on these ARM single board computers.

27 May 06:07 AM EDT - Intel - Intel TDX Module Runtime Updates

A feature that has been worked on for a while now by Intel Linux engineers is for allowing run-time updates of the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) module without having to reboot the running server. For Linux 7.2 it looks like that feature will be all-set for allowing the easier roll-out of security updates and the like for this confidential computing capability on modern Intel Xeon servers.

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today the release of Workshop as their new Snap-based application for launching development environments with ease.