Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Among Intel's ongoing reduction in open-source projects they maintain, their BigDL open-source project focused on running large language models across Intel XPUs from Core Ultra laptops to discrete GPUs to cloud / data center hardware all in a low-latency manner, is being ended.

Among the changes being considered for the in-development Fedora 45 is a lightened version of the GRUB UEFI bootloader that would focus on being a minimal implementation suitable for confidential computing.

Released on Friday was the newest version of Intel Thermald, the thermal daemon developed by Intel for their processors on Linux for monitoring and helping control temperatures across modern Intel-powered laptops and desktops. Catching me immediately by surprise was Intel Thermald 2.5.12 introducing support for ARM.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel working on function multi-versioning support for APX and AVX10.2 with the GCC compiler. This allows developers to write optimized code paths specifically targeting Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) or Advanced Vector Extensions 10.2 capabilities of future processors while being able to otherwise fall-back to generic or other optimized code paths for other ISA target features. This work is now merged for GCC 17.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month.

Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.

The day started out with Arch Linux's AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages.

OpenZFS 2.4.3 is out today as the newest stable point release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation as well as point releases for the OpenZFS 2.3 and 2.2 series too.

Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.11 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for running Windows games and applications under Linux as well as other platforms.

AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux.

Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks.

Last year when releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, Red Hat announced a RHEL 10.0 developer preview for RISC-V. Since then that RISC-V developer preview hadn't been updated but now Red Hat has published a new developer preview snapshot based on RHEL 10.2.

On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1.

Among the many new features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 is switching the default D-Bus implementation over to using the high performance Dbus-Broker drop-in replacement.

One of the exciting additions to the Linux 7.1 kernel is the introduction of the new NTFS file-system kernel driver. While in good shape already and proving advantageous over other NTFS open-source driver options, one of the initial limitations on it is around Windows native symbolic link handling but that is now in the process of being resolved.

Linux cryptography subsystem expert Eric Biggers Eric Biggers of Google worked on some pretty nice Intel/AMD x86_64 optimizations over the years. Especially around AVX-512 optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto code has been one of his many nice improvements to the kernel in recent times. Today he's out with another enticing AVX-512 optimization and this time it's for the software RAID code.

The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised.

The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces.

The first beta release of the Qt 6.12 toolkit is now available for testing. Qt 6.12 is packing a number of refinements and new features compared to earlier Qt6 releases. For paying Qt commercial customers, Qt 6.12 is also going to be the latest Qt6 Long Term Support (LTS) release.

For those relying on last year's stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes.

Being submitted on the kernel side with the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is initial support for the GFX 11.5.6 graphics IP block along with several other newer IP blocks such as SDMA 6.4, NBIO 7.11.5, IH 6.4, HDP 6.4, MMHUB 3.4.2, SMU 15.0.5, ATHUB 3.4.2, and VPE 2.2. Now in user-space for the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers is the GFX1156 (GFX 11.5.6) support being prepared too.

Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default.

It's crazy realizing that glTF 2.0 is already nine years old for this API-neutral 3D runtime and asset delivery format. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group today extended that with the debut of glTF 2.1 as a backward-compatible revision to the specification.

Open-source developer Jos Dehaes wrote in to Phoronix today in announcing a new X11 server he has been working on from scratch that has been quietly developed to this point but now ready to announce to the world... The YSERVER.

OpenJPH as an open-source implementation of high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (or JPH or HTJ2K) is now significantly faster for both encode and decode operations thanks to new AVX2 optimizations for Intel and AMD processors.

Intel's Open Image Denoise is the open-source project providing a high performance denoising library for ray-tracing and used by the likes of Blender and other renderers/creative apps for powerful denoising capabilities. Released last week was Open Image Denoise 2.5 with some very nice performance improvements for Intel GPUs.

Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced.

One of the new network drivers destined for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window is for supporting the Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY.

ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform.

Framework Computer began informing those that pre-ordered the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro that it will begin shipping in July rather than their original June target. The setback is coming to address two issues that came up in their testing process that delayed the start of mass production.

Just a week after the release of Intel XPU Manager 1.3.7, Intel today released XPU Manager 2.0 as a major overhaul for this software for monitoring and management of their data center GPUs on Microsoft Windows and Linux.

An important one-liner is set to come for Linux 7.2 to enable ESWIN SoC support by default for RISC-V kernel builds. This change will allow default RISC-V kernel builds in turn to boot on the likes of SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 developer board.

Lemonade, the local AI server solution developed by AMD that is designed to work across their CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, is out with a new version today that also adds NVIDIA CUDA support.

The Linux Foundation continues working to get more involved in new AI initiatives. Today the Linux Foundation announced the OpenSharing Project with an effort to standardize AI asset and data exchange.

NVIDIA engineer Kyrylo Tkachov posted a patch for testing yesterday to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for conducting a native bootstrap. The time spent in the configure process for native GCC builds is reduced by around 43% while the overall bootstrap wall time is lowered by around 15%.

The cros_ec Linux kernel driver is used for supporting the ChromeOS Embedded Controller "EC" used by Chromebooks and various other laptops like Framework Laptops. With patches pending to cros_ec, support for custom fan curves is being introduced.

Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE's KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11.

The linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the de facto home of all the binary blobs used by the mainline Linux kernel open-source drivers has now introduced AGENTS.md documentation and other preparations for embracing AI coding agents.

While not as exciting as features like HDMI 2.1 FRL and Display Stream Compression itself, as part of AMD's efforts to provide a fully open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for AMDGPU, new code is being prepped for their kernel driver to support the HDMI compliance testing efforts.

Among the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window are preparations for supporting Advanced Performance Extensions within KVM virtual machines.

Initially introduced in RDNA3 (GFX11) GPUs is INST_PREF_SIZE to specify the number of instruction bytes to prefetch prior to a wavefront beginning execution. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now making use of this feature in RDNA3/RDNA4 GPUs for better instruction cache prefetching.

Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI.

Alpine Linux, the Linux distribution popular especially for containers / micro-services and embedded devices, is out with its newest feature release.

Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation.

In addition to Redox OS continuing to evolve quite nicely for that from-scratch, Rust-based open-source OS, Asterinas OS is also continuing to move forward for that Rust-based operating system striving for Linux compatibility.

Following the recent Hygon C86-4G CPU support added to the GCC 17 compiler, the open-source LLVM Clang compiler has similarly seen Hygon c86-4g-m4 / c86-4g-m6 / c86-4g-m7 CPU support merged.

Going back to the launch of 1st Gen Xeon Scalable processors in 2017 was Intel Key Protection Technology (KPT) promoted and there have been Key Protection Technology references in QuickAssist (QAT) documentation since 2016. Surprisingly we are only now seeing Key Protection Technology references for the upstream Linux QAT driver as Intel engineers prepare for their next-gen "Gen6" QuickAssist hardware support.

Pragtical, the lightweight open-source code editor that prides itself on using just ~50MB of RAM and ~10MB of disk space while being a full-featured code editor, is tacking on more features. Most notable with the new Pragtical release is adding an SDL-based GPU back-end for this MIT-licensed editor.

The open-source developers at Georgia Tech working on Vortex as an OpenCL-compatible RISC-V GPGPU implementation are out with their next major release for this open-source GPU design.

Back in March, Martin Wimpress stepped down as the longtime Ubuntu MATE leader and was looking for contributors to keep this Ubuntu derivative going with its GNOME2-derived desktop. That change in leadership paired with no Ubuntu MATE 26.04 release having occurred led to some concerns among users, but the plan is still for Ubuntu MATE to continue moving forward.

Following the official Fedora 44 images released one month ago, Fedora 44 RISC-V images were published today for those wanting to run this newest Fedora Linux on RISC-V hardware.

Linux's ufshcd-pci as the Universal Flash Storage host controller PCI driver has supported a variety of Intel devices to this point while for Linux 7.2 the first AMD device is set to be added.

Last week I ran benchmarks of CachyOS with the BORE scheduler using its "linux-cachyos-bore" kernel option. The results didn't end up being as enticing as anticipated but the developer behind the BORE scheduler commented in the forums that he recently received reports from users experiencing game stuttering while using BORE that was attributed to CachyOS' default use of Ananicy-Cpp. So over the weekend I did another CachyOS BORE run without that CachyOS default.

The belated "This Month in Redox" was posted today for covering improvements made to this open-source, Rust-based operating system during the month of May. Most notable in May is seeing the Xfce desktop ported over to Redox OS.

Canonical engineers are again evaluating the impact of building the Ubuntu Linux archive for the x86-64-v3 "amd64v3" micro-architecture feature level for its performance benefits on modern Intel and AMD systems. An amd64v3 archive is available of Ubuntu 26.10 for testing with the packages targeting this level that allows for AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU x86_64 ISA capabilities of the past decade.

Ahead of NVIDIA Vera ramping up, the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is adding the ACPI CPPC v4 support authored by a NVIDIA engineer.

Flatpak 1.18 is out today for providing the latest improvements to this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech.

An interesting quandary has arose on the Linux kernel mailing list over maintainership of old, unmaintained code within the Linux kernel. Someone has stepped up to maintain an old, very rare file-system driver but admittedly doesn't even use it and just submitted basic fixes. Or is it just better removing that old code?

As the discussions continue among developers over potentially branching off some of the older Mesa drivers, the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits on Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.

In addition to the SpacemiT K1 and K3 RISC-V SoC Device Tree updates sent out last week, the RISC-V T-HEAD Device Tree "DT" changes were also sent out last week ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel merge window.