Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

As the last planned article on Phoronix of Q2, here is a look back at what excited readers the most in the second quarter. There were 872 original news articles this quarter as well as 54 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is what excited readers the most over these past three months.

Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76.

GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow.

Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change.

Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today's feature overview.

While Linux 7.2 introduces the ability to boot on Apple M3 Macs, it's not yet remotely useful for end-users wanting to use an Apple Mac/MacBook as their daily system. As it stands now, the M3 Macs boot to a simple console and that's about it with the lack of proper GPU acceleration and functionality like the keyboard on MacBooks not working either. Posted to the kernel mailing list today was the new driver patches for enabling the internal keyboard on more recent Apple MacBooks.

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month.

12 Hours Ago - AMD - AMD Linux Highlights Q2-2026

With Q2'2026 drawing to a close, as part of the different quarterly recaps of popular areas on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the quarter.

13 Hours Ago - Ubuntu - Canonical + Trifecta Tech Foundation

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical continues making more inroads in the Rust infrastructure space. Canonical announced today they have become the first gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation that works on projects like sudo-rs for building more open infrastructure in the Rust programming language.

Intel has dropped AMX-TF32 before its debut in Xeon Diamond Rapids. The latest Intel programming reference manual has dropped AMX-TF32 and Intel engineers are already moving ahead to strip out the AMX-TF32 support that existed in the GNU Compiler Collection.

Released last week was the Servo 0.3 browser engine release along with their latest Servoshell demo browser. Today the project has published their monthly development recap to highlight all of the interesting changes made. Here's a look at what they accomplished over the past month while doing so on less than $8k in monthly donations.

The newest GCC 17 compiler code has landed support for -mcpu=spacemit-x100 and -mtune=spacemit-x100 targeting for the SpacemiT X100 RISC-V core.

Wine 11.12 fell off the bi-weekly release rhythm with not making it out last Friday, but it managed to ship today. Wine 11.12 brings fractional scaling support to its Wayland driver and various other enhancements.

The Bcachefs file-system already makes use of the Rust programming language in the user-space tools for this CoW file-system and they have been planning to make use of Rust within the kernel module too. Beginning in the next Bcachefs release, v1.38.7, they are looking at beginning to include Rust code now in their kernel driver.

Git 2.55 is out today as the latest stable update to this distributed version control system.

I have begun testing out Linux 7.2 on more hardware following the winding down of the merge window and culminating with yesterday's Linux 7.2-rc1 release. Today's tests are looking at how Linux 7.2 in its early development state is comparing to Linux 7.1 stable on AMD Ryzen Threadripper.

Microsoft today shipped the first public preview of WSL Containers "WSLC" as their latest extension of the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11.

29 June 10:36 AM EDT - Arm - AArch64 Linux Desktop Experiment

Red Hat senior software engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz of Red Hat's ARM Team had been dogfeeding with an AArch64 Linux desktop being used as his primary, personal system for nearly the past year. But now he shared he has gone back to using his AMD Ryzen desktop instead over AArch64 Linux issues encountered with his Ampere Altra desktop.

The Infinity Scheduler is another attempt at improving the CPU scheduling behavior under Linux and created by the developer behind the existing "scx_flow" sched_ext scheduler. But Infinity Scheduler isn't taking the approach of using sched_ext and is rather patched into the Linux kernel in modifying CFS and RT behavior.

29 June 06:32 AM EDT - AMD - Low-Power CPU Core

A new Linux kernel patch series posted to the kernel mailing list minutes ago is introducing a new "Low Power" CPU core type for AMD heterogeneous processors. The x86 topology code in the Linux kernel already supports the notion of Performance and Efficiency type cores while now a new "Low Power" core type is being introduced for AMD heterogeneous platforms.

ZLUDA as a reminder is the open-source project that began as drop-in CUDA support for Intel graphics hardware and then was quietly funded by AMD for years as a drop-in CUDA replacement on AMD GPUs that went open-source after losing funding. That was then taken down and since late 2024 ZLUDA then began focusing on multi-GPU CUDA focused on AI after beginning to receive funding from an unspecified party. Now, unfortunately, funding has once again been cut from that unnamed party but in turn ZLUDA is focusing on PhysX and better Windows support.

It's not clear that any games have yet to deploy this open-source anti-cheat system but TLAC is a new open-source project that aims to provide a privacy-respecting alternative to kernel-level anti-cheat systems like Denuvo, Easy Anti-Cheat, and BattlEye.

29 June 05:35 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default.

OpenAPV, the Academy Software Foundation project that provides a reference implementation of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec is out with a new feature update.

Mageia 10 ISOs are now available for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva Linux and in turn the legendary Mandrake Linux.

Ahead of the July 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, a new Archinstall 4.4 release has been tagged for this text-based and very convenient installer for Arch Linux.

As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it's off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10.

28 June 02:49 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Open-Source/Linux In Q2

With Q2'2026 working toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux and open-source news for the quarter.

CachyOS is out today with a new feature release for this Arch Linux powered distribution that delivers stellar out-of-the-box performance.

While the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window is only ending later today to cap off the feature work on this next version of the Linux kernel, already for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle later in the year there is one notable feature on the way: the DRM color format property is being introduced and being first supported by the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

With Q2'2026 quickly coming to an end, here's a recap of the most popular Linux kernel news over the past three months on Phoronix.

Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines.

For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches.

The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it's a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering "infinite" zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace.

Linux kernel developer and Bytedance engineer Qi Zheng sent out a request for comments (RFC) patch series on a new feature called Reserved THP to combine the best of HugeTLB and THP kernel functionality.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches.

In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

27 June 06:29 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma This Week

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

27 June 06:02 AM EDT - GNOME - COSMIC System Monitor

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too.

Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution.

One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver's high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn't work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport "DP MST" connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming.

Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA's GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera results.

The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it's mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.

26 June 09:25 AM EDT - GNOME - Per-Monitor Backgrounds For GNOME

One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop.

26 June 08:59 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Vulkan Descriptor Heaps

Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window.

26 June 06:19 AM EDT - Intel - Intel ISPC 1.31

Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware.

The input subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.2, which is seeing its merge window wrap up on Sunday. Most notable with the input updates is the introduction of the "wacom_w9000" for supporting newer, pen-enabled touchscreens.

Coreboot 26.06 is out today as the latest quarterly feature release for this software project providing open-source system firmware support for a growing number of platforms.

Daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" continue to be published, but for those preferring something a bit more regulated, out today is Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 as the second monthly ISO image.

The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors.

Philip Rebohle announced the release today of DXVK 3.0 as the latest major feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for use by Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

The Academy Software Foundation that advances open-source efforts for the VFX/cinema industry and more with the likes of OpenVDB, OpenMoonRay, Open Shading Language, and other projects, has announced the formation of a new working group to help with Wayland adoption for artists.

Servo 0.3 released today as the latest version of this modern browser engine developed in Rust. With Servo 0.3 the demo servoshell browser is becoming more useful and supporting additional modern web features while Servo also continues to possess much potential moving forward on the embedded front as an alternative to the likes of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF).

Linux 7.2 is continuing the trend of removing obsolete hardware drivers for which the code hasn't seen any maintenance in years and there are no believed users left of said drivers, especially those that would be running modern mainline versions of the Linux kernel. The char/misc changes merged dropped two more obsolete drivers from the Linux source tree.

Cache Aware Scheduling is one of the most exciting kernel innovations to land in Linux this year. While it was finally merged last week to Linux 7.2, a new patch series today is already working to extend Cache Aware Scheduling and is showing some exciting performance improvements.

An AMD engineer has contributed to the upstream FFmpeg library an ONNX Runtime back-end for its DNN filter. The FFmpeg Deep Neural Network (DNN) filters allow for running AI models natively inside the video processing pipeline for upscaling, object detection, background segmentation, and more. This ONNX Runntime back-end support is notable in that it expands the GPU and NPU capabilities with FFmpeg.

Way back in 2017 for the Linux 4.12 kernel the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver was added to the kernel's staging area. Nearly a decade later, it's still being cleaned-up to suit the more rigorous non-staging area of the kernel in the formal networking subsystem. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is once again dominated by clean-ups to this Realtek WiFi driver.

Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server. There hasn't been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support.