Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

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.

6 Hours Ago - 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 long-in-development work on Cache Aware Scheduling looks like it will come to a head soon with it looking like Cache Aware Scheduling will land for Linux 7.2. Ahead of the upcoming merge window I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at different areas where this feature is shining.

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.

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project working to implement binary compatibility for computer programs and drivers for Microsoft Windows now has experimental support for running on 64-bit ARM.

It looks like Google's Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" could finally be enjoying nice native Wayland support soon!

NVIDIA's Vera data center CPU isn't ramping up until later this year but I recently had the opportunity to try out this new ARM-based CPU designed for agentic AI workloads. NVIDIA's Vera CPU with its in-house-designed Olympus CPU cores ends up packing a heavy-hitting punch with competitiveness to Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs that I have never seen out of any other ARM or non-x86_64 processors. Continue on with these early benchmarks of the NVIDIA Vera CPU on Linux.

The AlmaLinux project announced the releases today of both AlmaLinux OS 9.8 and AlmaLinux OS 10.2.

GlobalPlatform announced today the launch of Pavona as an open-source silicon ecosystem backed by founding members such as Meta, Qualcomm, Tenstorrent, Winbond, and the University of Oxford, among others.

NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch.

A set if 17 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for introducing a new tool in the kernel source tree, pmtctl. This new pmtctl tool is for interfacing with Intel Platform Monitoring Technology.

The past few Linux kernel cycles there has been experimental support for large folios with Btrfs while for Linux 7.2 it looks like this modern file-system will be taking things further with huge folios.

Linux cryptography expert Eric Biggers of Google posted a set of patches on Monday for providing proof-of-concept support for ML-KEM and X-Wing for post-quantum cryptography.

Back in 2021 Facebook open-sourced CacheLib as a new caching engine. Back in 2021 it was done to help scale services with non-volatile memory caching to offset increasing DRAM costs at the time. Now in 2026, DRAM memory prices are astronomical compared to 2021 pricing given the AI surge. And, surprisingly, Meta is out with a new CacheLib release after being absent the past two years.

In addition to the release today of Sway 1.12 for that i3-inspired Wayland compositor, Labwc 0.20 is also out today as another wlroots-based Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.12 is out today as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor powered by the wlroots library.

Merged today for what will become Mesa 26.2 next quarter is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now supporting the VK_KHR_shader_fma extension.

An exciting Intel innovation expected to be added for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is introducing the new USB4STREAM protocol for USB4/Thunderbolt as a "super simple" way to "basically just transfer raw packets from one host to another". This can be useful for quickly backing up a system from one host to another, sharing of web cameras or other peripherals across systems, or other environments where not having networking or wanting to avoid the traditional Linux networking stack.

With Linux 7.1 ISDN, ham radio, and other old network code was removed in lightening the kernel source tree by around 138 thousand lines of code. Some additional Linux networking code cleaning is expected for Linux 7.2 with the ISA and PCMCIA hardware around ARCnet set to be removed.

Redis 8.8 reached GA today for the Redis open-source project providing a high performance, in-memory data store.

While not as good as repealing AB 1043 outright for requiring operating system providers to ask for a user's age or birth date at device setup, open-source Linux distributions and other open-source OSes may end up seeing some reprieve before this law goes into effect at the start of 2027.

In the road to releasing Linux 7.1 in June, out today is Linux 7.1-rc5 that continues coming on heavy with fixes.

24 May 12:39 PM EDT - AI - Linux Kernel AI

For those curious about the growing use of AI and coding agents within the Linux kernel, this week there was another large batch of new patches fixed that were generated or co-authored by agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.

24 May 10:02 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD On Laptop

With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops.

Following the process of phasing out Intel 486 CPU support and other old hardware drivers that were dropped in the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle for reducing the kernel maintenance burden, the upcoming Linux 7.2 cycle is continuing the trend of phasing out some of the old hardware support that is very obsolete, likely having no users on the latest upstream kernels, and no one formally maintaining the obsolete drivers.

Multikernel Technologies Inc has been working on a multi-kernel architecture for the Linux kernel while in addition to that they have been developing KernelScript as a domain-specific language for carrying out Linux kernel customizations and app-specific optimizations.

While in the past decade or so Linux desktop/laptop users likely have little to complain about boot times and there hasn't been much emphasis around trying to make boot times even faster on the Linux desktop especially in an era where many systems are always-on and suspend/resume working more reliably these days, boot times are still an important factor in the embedded Linux world. Boot-Time Wizard is one of the new efforts aiming to help embedded Linux makers cut-down on their boot times.