Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

With just a few weeks to go until the official Fedora 44 release, there is already feature planning and activity beginning for Fedora 45 that will be released toward the end of 2026. Among the early feature approvals is a new web front-end feature to the DRM Panic "Blue/Black Screen of Death" functionality with a specialized QR code for kernel errors.

Building off the release of ROCm 7.2 from January, ROCm 7.2.1 is now available with Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS support as well as various bug fixes to this open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack.

In testing thus far on Ubuntu 26.04, the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop with the Wayland session is working pretty darn well and delivering a performance edge across many games/graphics workloads compared to the default GNOME 50 desktop. At least as far as AMD Radeon graphics are concerned, Plasma 6.6 is in quite impressive shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

Alongside announcing the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake parts with vPro for commercial PCs and the Xeon 600 workstation processors, Intel finally announced their professional "big Battlemage" BMG-G31 graphics card with the Arc Pro B70 as well as the Arc Pro B65.

FreeCAD 1.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source CAD application.

Earlier this month with the release of the Lemonade SDK 10.0 and FastFlowLM 0.9.35, using AMD Ryzen AI NPUs for running LLMs on Linux finally became feasible. AMD XDNA 2 NPUs can now run on Linux well for LLM workloads! Released on Tuesday was Lemonade 10.0.1 with a few improvements for the setup process of this local LLM open-source solution on Linux.

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking to strip the signed GRUB bootloader features to the bare minimum for the Ubuntu 26.10 release later this year. Dropping support for XFS, ZFS, Btrfs, LVM, md-raid (except RAID1), LUKS-encrypted disks, and other features is being looked at in the name of security.

With the recent Fedora 44 beta release, Mesa 25.3 graphics drivers were in use rather than the newest Mesa 26.0 series. The good news is that there is now approval for getting Mesa 26.0 drivers to land in time for next month's official Fedora 44 release.

Unvanquished 0.56 is out today as the latest major update to this prominent open-source, community-driven shooter game. Unvanquished continues progressing after more than a decade in development for this open-source game and with today's v0.56 release features improved visuals, OpenMP for CPU-based rendering of skeletal models, and other enhancements.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems enabled a new feature called BTP+BTI RCC Keying. You may be wondering what it means or stands for, but long story short it helps with the performance of Direct3D 12 (DX12) games running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play with Proton + VKD3D-Proton.

24 March 04:50 PM EDT - Oracle - Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2

Days after Oracle celebrated their RHEL-based Oracle Linux distribution turning 20 years old, today they announced Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 "UEK 8.2" as their alternative to the RHEL-clone kernel with Oracle Linux.

24 March 03:58 PM EDT - AMD - AMD + Rocky Linux

AMD and CIQ jointly announced today that AMD-optimized Rocky Linux builds are being worked on for this RHEL-derived operating system. The AMD-optimized Rocky Linux will focus on AI and HPC workloads and be nicely integrated with ROCm.

24 March 02:08 PM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Fellowship Program

Following last week's big GNOME 50 release, the GNOME Foundation today formally announced the creation of the GNOME Fellowship program.

Arm announced their first silicon product in history with today's AGI CPU. The Arm AGI CPU complements their existing IP offerings into a production-ready silicon product for AI data centers.

While having the new System76 Thelio Mira desktop in the lab, I took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see how Pop!_OS 24.04 is currently performing relative to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for which it is based as well as looking ahead at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in its current near-final development form is looking on the same hardware.

Building off the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux beta driver that brought DRI3 v1.2 support and new Vulkan capabilities, the NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver released this morning as the first stable Linux driver build in the R595 release branch.

Proposed code for Blender's EEVEE engine can lead to both the OpenGL and Vulkan performance doubling in instancing-heavy scenes that are CPU bottlenecked.

Krita 6.0 debuted today as the Qt6 port of this digital painting program aligned with KDE/Qt development. Krita 6.0 also brings improved Wayland support while Krita 5.3 is being simultaneously released for running on the mature Qt5 toolkit.

A limitation affecting various gaming headsets, graphic tablets, wireless earbuds, multi-device receivers and more with Linux has been not being able to report multiple batteries per HID device. After patches were proposed last year for dealing with the increasingly common scenario these days of having multiple batteries per device, the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is set to address this limitation.

OpenBLAS 0.3.32 is now available for this optimized open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library. Notable with the OpenBLAS 0.3.32 release is improving CPU auto-detection for newer Intel processors.

Back in February AMD engineers introduced a new GFX1170 GPU target in LLVM for their AMDGPU shader compiler and was marked with new "RDNA 4m" branding. It's part of the GFX11 family associated with RDNA3 but carrying this new "4m" branding. In follow-up commits they made further ISA changes distinguishing it from existing RDNA 3 GPUs. Now there are two more RDNA 4m targets being added.

24 March 05:55 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA + Open-Source

KubeCon Europe is running this week in Amsterdam and NVIDIA used the event to talk up their open-source work around AI and newest open-source contributions.

The GTK 4.0 toolkit released in December 2020 while the GTK3 toolkit has continued to be maintained given a lot of software still relying on that older version. GTK 3.24.52 was released yesterday and with this version it's now shifting its release cadence to just one new update per year.

23 March 05:03 PM EDT - Intel - Intel FRED By Default

Following today's article exploring the performance benefits of Intel Flexible Return and Event Delivery "FRED" with Panther Lake and also pointing out the rather obscure nature of FRED being disabled-by-default, an Intel Linux kernel engineer posted a patch to now enable FRED by default for better performance.

Cloudflare's technical blog posts about their hardware and software efforts are always a treat to read. Their latest fascinating technical content is on their newest "Gen 13" server platform based around AMD EPYC Turin where they are now achieving 2x throughput and 50% better performance-per-Watt thanks to these latest-generation AMD EPYC server processors paired with software improvements too.

23 March 01:30 PM EDT - AI - Modern XMMS

Longtime Linux desktop users will likely remember the glorious days of the XMMS music player inspired by Winamp. It's been about two decades since the last official release but thanks to AI there is now a modern port of the codebase to GTK4 and GStreamer/PipeWire.

With Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop SoCs, the Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics and much improved CPU performance capture much of the spotlight. One new capability with Panther Lake that isn't featured as much though is the new FRED capability with Flexible Return and Event Delivery. Today's Intel Panther Lake testing is looking at the very interesting performance impact of FRED on Linux.

Firefox 149.0 release binaries are now available with a wide assortment of improvements for this month's update to the cross-platform Mozilla web browser solution.

A change to the Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" for allowing nifty scheduler implementations via BPF programs will begin to prioritize SMT siblings to help with better performance.

Qt 6.11 is out as the latest version of this cross-platform toolkit used by the KDE desktop and widely by both open-source and closed-source applications.

23 March 06:27 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Canonical + Rust Foundation

Canonical announced today that they have joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member.

One of the core Linux infrastructure improvements that AMD engineers have been working on recently is pghot as a hot-page tracking and promotion subsystem. This proposed addition to the Linux kernel could be quite beneficial especially for those using modern AMD EPYC servers with CXL and multiple memory tiers.

23 March 05:55 AM EDT - Mesa - Arm Ethos U85

Merged overnight for Mesa 26.1 is enabling the Arm Ethos U85 NPU within the EthosU Gallium3D driver so that with Mesa's TEFLON framework can begin taking on AI workloads.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 7.0-rc5 as we inch toward the stable Linux 7.0 kernel release in April.

D7VK is the open-source project that began as a Direct3D 7 implementation atop the Vulkan API for Linux gamers and with time expanded to support all the way back to Direct3D 3. Out today is D7VK 1.6 with continuing to enhance this D3D compatibility layer atop Vulkan for enhancing retro/vintage gaming on Linux.

The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported.

For years Electron apps were notorious for continuing to depend upon X11/XWayland and not jive well with the modern Wayland experience on modern Linux desktops. But for the past several months, Wayland has been well supported out-of-the-box on upstream Electron. An Electron blog post this week outlined the technical work done for achieving good Wayland support.

Building off Friday's exciting release of Wine 11.5 with Syscall User Dispatch support, Wine-Staging 11.5 is now available for this experimental/testing build of Wine that at the moment is some 228 patches atop the upstream code.

The Loongson Direct Rendering Manager driver for handling the display controller on LS7A/LS2K SoCs is no longer orphaned with new Loongson engineers stepping up to maintain the code moving forward.

Open-source developer Derek Clark of Valve's Linux engineering team has been responsible for many improvements for gaming handheld devices. Such as Lenovo Legion improvements for Linux, Ayn gaming handheld improvements, and most recently Linux 7.1 set to introduce the new Lenovo Legion Go HID drivers. With the latest Lenovo Legion driver work wrapped up for Linux 7.1, Derek Clark today posted a set of patches providing a OneXPlayer Configuration HID Driver.

21 March 08:22 PM EDT - AI - Sashiko Covering Rust-For-Linux

A few days ago Google engineers went public with Sashiko with their agentic AI code review for the Linux kernel. The Google Gemini Pro powered AI code review service is automatically monitoring the Linux kernel mailing list for new patch submissions and has proven useful already. Interest continues to build by upstream Linux kernel stakeholders around Sashiko and the latest addition is now covering the Rust-For-Linux mailing list submissions.

21 March 10:29 AM EDT - Hardware - Pulsar Gaming Mouse Linux Driver

A Linux HID driver is being developed for Pulsar branded gaming mice to expose additional information and capabilities.

LibreOffice 26.8 merged initial support for adding a donation banner to its Start Center. This initial UI when launching LibreOffice aims to make users aware of the community-driven focus of the project and to hopefully solicit additional donations from the community.

Merged overnight for Linux 7.0 and set to be back-ported to existing Linux stable kernel versions is a fix for aging AMD GCN 1.0 "Hainan" GPU models. This closes a 2021 bug report that was long neglected and ended up being just a small tweak to fix the issue reported of GPU hangs.

In addition to releasing Plasma 6.6.3 this week, KDE developers remain quite busy working on new features for the Plasma 6.7 desktop while also already queuing some changes for the next Plasma 6.6.4 point release.

21 March 06:29 AM EDT - SUSE - Agama 19 Installer

The modern Agama OS installer for SUSE/openSUSE is out with its first new release since November. With the time since the prior release, SUSE engineers have been making key improvements to Agama and enhancing its architecture to more align with their original vision for it.

For any holdouts still running SysV Init instead of systemd or other alternatives like OpenRC, SysV Init 3.16 is out as the first release in a half-year and bringing a few refinements.

Cambalache 1.0 released today after more than five years in development as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) application for creating and editing user interfaces for both GTK3 and GTK4.

OpenShot 3.5 hit the web today for this open-source non-linear video editor that describes the new version as one of their "biggest releases" ever in its 18+ year history.

Wine 11.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release for this software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Most exciting with Wine 11.5 is the introduction of the Syscall User Dispatch feature on Linux.

20 March 11:24 AM EDT - Hardware - Dell XPS 13 9345 (2024) Laptop

When it comes to using Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops on Linux, one of the big challenges have involved the need to extract the necessary firmware from the Windows 11 partition due to most vendors not providing the firmware in an easily redistributable and public form. The one exception has been the Lenovo ThinkPad with X1 Elite having upstream firmware in linux-firmware.git while now the Dell XPS model has joined the party too.

20 March 10:23 AM EDT - Valve - SteamOS 3.8 Preview

In addition to last night's Steam client beta with Steam Runtime container support for the client and that SteamRT3 client now a 64-bit build, Valve also released a big preview update to the forthcoming SteamOS 3.8. The SteamOS 3.8 preview release brings initial support for Steam Machine hardware, various handheld gaming device support improvements, various other Steam Deck updates, improved compatibility with newer Intel and AMD platforms, and its KDE Plasma desktop is now using Wayland by default.

Asahi Linux developers have been working for a while now on porting Asahi Linux to the Apple M3 hardware that launched back in 2023. Sent out today to the Linux kernel mailing list were finally Device Tree files for booting Linux on Apple M3 hardware but it's far from functional for end-users.

20 March 08:16 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - Stealing Tasks To Improve Utilization

Huawei engineer Chen Jinghuang posted the latest request for comments (RFC) patches for stealing tasks from overloaded CPUs in the same last level cache (LLC) in order to improve overall CPU utilization with today's large core count servers.

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today MicroCloud Cluster Manager that is now in beta as a new cloud platform for managing lightweight cloud clusters.

Vulkan 1.4.347 made its debut overnight as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. Beyond the usual maintenance churn over the past week, Vulkan 1.4.347 brings three new extensions.

It's been nearly three years since the release of Mageia 9 for this Linux distribution who's lineage traces back to the glorious Mandrake Linux. Following the Mageia 10 alpha release back in January, Mageia 10 beta builds are now available.

Sent out today was the latest weekly round of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window that is set to happen in mid-to-late April.

An interesting new Steam client beta dropped overnight from Valve with some exciting low-level enhancements.