Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects.

While since GNOME 48 Decibels is the new audio player of the GNOME desktop, there is no shortage of other GNOME/GTK-aligned music players. Last month was the big Amerbol music player update and there are Lollypop and others. The latest GNOME-aligned music player now hitting the 1.0 milestone is Nocturne.

Hyprland 0.55 is out today as a big feature update for this Wayland-based compositor.

FEX 2605 is out this weekend as the newest monthly feature release to this emulator for running Linux x86_64 binaries on ARM64 (AArch64) devices. This is the open-source project sponsored by Valve and planned for use with the upcoming Steam Frame as well as being relevant to Linux gaming on other 64-bit ARM laptops and other devices.

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution.

The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that's motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA's packaged Linux driver.

Merged as part of the perf subsystem fixes overnight is enabling Auto Counter Reload (ACR) functionality for upcoming Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. This ACR enabling for Diamond Rapids "DMR" is happening in time for Linux 7.1-rc3 on Sunday while the work is also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernels.

8 May 08:53 PM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing additional Plasma 6.7 desktop features ahead of the stable release due out in mid-June.

FreeBSD 15.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in June. Out today is FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2.

In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I've been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to convenient LVFS/Fwupd support and delivers stellar performance with the Zen 5 Threadripper and NVIDIA Blackwell combination.

A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs.

Queued for merging as part of the DeviceMapper changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is the new dm-inlinecrypt target for leveraging inline block device encryption.

The Qt Group released the Qt Creator 20 Beta today for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE). In building off the trends of recent releases of Qt Creator and development tools at large, AI integration continues to be a big area of focus.

Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there's finally a new OpenZL software release available.

8 May 06:12 AM EDT - AMD - AMD GAIA + Gmail

AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account.

With Intel's recently-launched Bartlett Lake P-core-only processors intended for the embedded market, there is a rather surprising oversight under Linux: the Intel P-State driver reporting a 7.0+ GHz clock speed. While many would yearn for a 7GHz CPU, the Core 9 273PE where this issue was discovered in reality can only boost up to 5.7GHz for its maximum turbo frequency.

One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this "Dirty Frag" vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated.

Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors.

The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek's out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.

7 May 11:21 AM EDT - Radeon - Video Acceleration Only Drivers

Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver.

The Flattened Image Tree "FIT" 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file.

While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series.

Merged for the current Linux 7.1 cycle was beginning to phase out the Intel 486 processor support from the mainline kernel moving forward. That initial step with Linux 7.1 was dropping the various Kconfig options to allow compiling Linux kernel builds for targeting various i486 platforms. As part of that, the AMD Elan SoC configuration patches were dropped. The next step is proceeding on the AMD Elan side with beginning to remove the actual driver code.

7 May 06:29 AM EDT - KDE - Better Shared Memory Buffer Experience

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.

7 May 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - Ryzen AI SR-IOV

AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units.

Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project.

D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API.

Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more.

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

6 May 01:30 PM EDT - Radeon - AMDGPU DC Power Module

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows.

When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to reach the limelight.

6 May 09:53 AM EDT - Intel - VK_EXT_device_generated_commands

Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.

Dell and Lenovo have stepped up to become premier sponsors for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that provides for seamless system firmware and device/component firmware updating under Linux with the Fwupd client.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API.

Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware.

For those with fond memories of the AMD Geode x86 embedded processors, the Linux kernel is set to orphan these since discontinued and obsolete CPUs.

Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.

6 May 06:06 AM EDT - AMD - AVX-512 Optimizations

Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it's not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged.

Last month a Fedora Linux change proposal was shared proposing that Fedora 45 be built with x86_64-v3 packages to complement the generic x86_64 (v1) packages currently being compiled. This has the possibility of providing greater performance out of packaged Fedora software but comes with the cost of greater burdens on web mirrors, QA / testing, and related infrastructure impact. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" decided today to wait on coming to a decision over this Fedora 45 change proposal.

Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.

5 May 04:00 PM EDT - Intel - VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

After the merge request was open the past three months for code originally authored eight months ago, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is now advertising support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. But for the moment at least it's treated as experimental.

The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 3.1 as the first major spec update in six years and incorporating various features into the core spec for enhancing AI and HPC capabilities. As a very exciting development, Rusticl as Mesa's lead OpenCL driver implementation is ready to go with same-day OpenCL 3.1 support pending.

The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won't be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel.

5 May 08:57 AM EDT - Intel - Out Of Memory Behaviro

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make use of this new interface.

The preview release of the Arch Linux powered Manjaro 26.1 is now available for testing.

An improvement on the way for the AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver and the Linux ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) code at large is supporting a new "HighestFreq" register to be standardized by a future revision of the ACPI specification.

Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group.

5 May 06:08 AM EDT - Qt - QML Profiler For AI Agentic Development

The Qt Group announced today the QML Profiler Skill for Agentic Development. This new "skill" can delegate code performance profiling to AI agents for 2D Qt Quick applications.

AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own.

4 May 04:29 PM EDT - NVIDIA - AutoFDO Profiling For GCC Toolchain

NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance.

Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack.

For those eager to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller, the gaming controller is now shipping.

Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update.

CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance.

The growing number of file-systems within the Linux kernel source tree is causing an ongoing burden for upstream developers maintaining the virtual file-system (VFS) code around it and associated code. As a result of the continuing rise of new file-systems being proposed for the Linux kernel, documentation is being introduced to establish clear guidelines for getting new file-systems accepted into the mainline kernel.

Since last November we've begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too.