Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News (original) (raw)

Linux 6.18-rc5 To Cut Down Performance Regression Observed On IBM POWER CPUs

Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc5 kernel due out on Sunday is a partial fix for a performance regression observed on IBM POWER hardware.

Ryzen AI Software 1.6.1 Advertises Linux Support

6 Hours Ago - AMD - Ryzen AI Software 1.6.1

Ryzen AI Software as AMD's collection of tools and libraries for AI inferencing on AMD Ryzen AI class PCs has Linux support with its newest point release. Though this "early access" Linux support is restricted to registered AMD customers.

AMD Sends Out Initial GNU Binutils Patch For AMD Zen 6 - Confirms New AVX-512 Features

8 Hours Ago - AMD - AMD Znver6

AMD has begun their open-source compiler enablement upstreaming effort for Zen 6 processors! The first "Znver6" patch was sent out on Friday in preparing for new instructions to be found with these next-generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

oneDNN 3.10 Continues Preparing For Future Intel CPUs With AVX 10.2

9 Hours Ago - Intel - oneDNN 3.10

Released one Friday was the newest version of oneDNN as this library started off by Intel and now officially under the UXL Foundation umbrella for serving as building blocks for deep learning software.

Qt Merges Wayland Color Management "color-management-v1"

9 Hours Ago - Qt - Qt color-management-v1

The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland's color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series.

Linux Kernel Patches & Device Tree Additions For PCIe M.2 Connectors

On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that "just work" without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files.

KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing

10 Hours Ago - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.6

KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components.

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 Released With Build Fixes For Google & Azure Clouds

10 Hours Ago - BSD - FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted.

7 November

GTK Adds "Reduced Motion" Accessibility Option To Follow macOS, Windows & Others

7 November 08:15 PM EST - GNOME - GTK Reduced Motion

In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a "reduced motion" accessibility option.

NILFS2 File-System Seeing Renewed Interest With Additional Maintainer

It's been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days.

Mesa 25.3-rc4 Brings Fix For Many Steam Play Games To Properly Run On Intel Linux Driver

7 November 01:02 PM EST - Mesa - Mesa 25.3-rc4

Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month.

Hyprland 0.52 Released With New Features For This Wayland Compositor

7 November 12:08 PM EST - Wayland - Hyprland 0.52

Hyprland 0.52 is available today as the latest feature update for this alternative Wayland compositor.

IncusOS Announced As Immutable Linux OS With ZFS For Running Containers

It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical's LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus.

Intel's Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD

Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development code.

D7VK Aims To Deliver Direct3D 7 Atop Vulkan

DXVK is an important piece of Steam Play (Proton) that over time expanded to supporting Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 and even D3D8 too. Meanwhile VKD3D-Proton delivers Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. Now there is a fork of the DXVK project working to bring Direct3D 7 support atop Vulkan.

Linux To Gain ML-DSA/Dilithium Post-Quantum Cryptography For Module Signing

7 November 09:06 AM EST - Linux Security - ML-DSA/Dilithium Module Signing

New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing.

Microsoft Contributing "RAMDAX" Driver For Upcoming Linux 6.19 Kernel

A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft.

Vulkan 1.4.332 Brings A New Qualcomm Extension For AI / ML

7 November 06:01 AM EST - Vulkan - Vulkan 1.4.332

Vulkan 1.4.332 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API specification. Besides a number of documentation clarifications/corrections, there is one new extension this week in the name of AI / machine learning.

Mesa Lands Fixes For HDR With Vulkan Drivers

7 November 05:47 AM EST - Mesa - Mesa Vulkan + HDR Fixes

Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code.

6 November

Ubuntu Server 25.10 Performance On AMD EPYC With "amd64v3" Optimized Packages

6 November 08:39 PM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Server 25.10 + amd64v3

Last week Canonical announced Ubuntu "architecture variants" with initially supporting "amd64v3" optimized packages built using the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. For this initial debut in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive an initial subset of packages are built using that higher feature level that can assume AVX/AVX2 and other more recent CPU ISA additions. More details on that and some initial desktop benchmarks can be found within the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks article. Complementing that are some Ubuntu Server 25.10 benchmarks carried out on an AMD EPYC "Turin" server of the base amd64 packages versus amd64v3.

Archinstall 3.0.13 Adds WiFi Connection Menu To Arch Linux Installer

6 November 02:26 PM EST - Arch Linux - Archinstall 3.0.13

Just days after the Archinstall 3.0.12 release for this text-based Arch Linux installer, Archinstall 3.0.13 is now available to deliver a new feature. That new feature is a text-based interface for being able to connect to a WiFi network within Archinstall.

CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43

With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Finally Exposes Pipeline Binary "VK_KHR_pipeline_binary"

6 November 11:58 AM EST - Intel - VK_KHR_pipeline_binary

Introduced back in August of 2024 with Vulkan 1.3.294 was VK_KHR_pipeline_binary as a pipeline binary extension to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves. Finally today for Mesa 26.0-devel the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has enabled this extension.

CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Preview For Linux ARM64

6 November 10:18 AM EST - WINE - CrossOver For Linux ARM64

CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra.

Cloudflare Makes Open-Source The Rust Code To Tokio-Quiche

Cloudflare announced today they have open-sourced the code to Tokio-Quiche as their async QUIC library that combines their previously-open-sourced Quiche QUIC implementation with Rust's Tokio async runtime.

RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics

6 November 09:12 AM EST - AMD - RadeonSI + ACO

Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has "slightly better" viewperf performance with NIR+ACO than using the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Curious about that SPECViewPerf impact, here are some benchmarks with the recently released AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card.

FreeDesktop.org Adopts The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

6 November 06:18 AM EST - Linux Storage - Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Adding to the array of software projects and specifications under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard "FHS" has been adopted by these desktop-focused open-source developers.

Linux 6.18 Lands Electronic Privacy Screen Hotkey Handling For Some Dell Laptops

6 November 06:07 AM EST - Hardware - Electronic Privacy Screen

Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops.

NVIDIA Preparing For Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support With Open-Source Nova Driver

6 November 05:52 AM EST - NVIDIA - Hopper + Blackwell Nova Prep

NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the open-source and upstream Nova driver for the Linux kernel. This modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA driver is still taking shape as an alternative to NVIDIA's official downstream open-source driver and the aging and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Out on the horizon for Nova is Hopper and Blackwell GPU support.

5 November

FEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64

FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple's Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64.

More Intel Crescent Island Enablement Prepped For Linux 6.19

5 November 04:38 PM EST - Intel - Intel Crescent Island

Following Intel's disclosure less than one month ago of Crescent Island as a upcoming Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM focused on enterprise-level AI inferencing, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been quick to begin plumbing the Xe kernel graphics driver for this next-generation graphics card.

Intel Xeon 6 Performance Feature Benchmarks: Latency Optimized Mode

A new feature of Intel Xeon 6 "Birch Stream" platforms is the "Latency Optimized Mode" performance setting. The Intel Latency Optimized Mode will keep the uncore clock frequencies higher for more consistent performance but at the cost of increased power use. For those wondering about the performance and power impact, here are some comparison benchmarks of engaging this Latency Optimized Mode with Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" server processors.

Linux Patches Updated For Snapdragon X Elite Powered TUXEDO Elite 14 Gen1 Laptop

5 November 11:33 AM EST - Hardware - TUXEDO Elite 14

In mid-2024, Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers began teasing a Snapdragon X Elite powered Linux laptop with hopes of having it available by Christmas 2024. As we approach Christmas 2025, there still are no immediate signs of this new ARM-based TUXEDO laptop soon shipping but there are signs of life still with new Linux kernel patches posted for enabling this Snapdragon X Elite laptop.

Fwupd 2.0.17 Released With More Hardware Support & Features

5 November 11:23 AM EST - LVFS - Fwupd 2.0.17

Days after the Linux Vendor Firmware Service celebrated 135 million firmware downloads, a new version of the Fwupd utility is now available for firmware updating systems and peripherals under Linux.

Linux 6.19 To Support Additional Arm Mali & Vivante Graphics Hardware

5 November 09:24 AM EST - Hardware - drm-misc-next

Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week's update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator "accel" drivers.

GNOME Mutter Now "Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend"

5 November 08:15 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME Mutter Removes X11

The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.

LXQt 2.3 Released With Improved Wayland Support

5 November 08:08 AM EST - Desktop - LXQt 2.3

LXQt 2.3 is out today as the newest release of this lightwight, Qt-based desktop environment.

3mdeb Achieves Good Progress Porting Coreboot+OpenSIL To AMD Turin Motherboard

5 November 06:04 AM EST - Coreboot - Gigabyte MZ33-AR1

Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD's new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL.

systemd-appd Is A New Component Being Planned By Flatpak Developers

Given this week's release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd.

4 November

AMD Contributes BFloat16 Support To LLVM's SPIR-V Target

4 November 08:32 PM EST - LLVM - AMD + BF16 + LLVM + SPIR-V

AMD software engineers continue making interesting contributions to the LLVM compiler stack around SPIR-V as the IR used by Vulkan and other Khronos APIs.

Benchmarking The AMD EPYC 9V64H: Azure HBv5's Custom AMD CPU With HBM3

4 November 02:00 PM EST - Cloud

Nearly one year ago Microsoft announced the HBv5 virtual machines powered by a custom-designed AMD 4th Gen EPYC processor with high bandwidth memory (HBM3). Finally today the Azure HBv5 series is reaching general availability for those with memory-intensive HPC applications and other workloads. Microsoft kindly provided Phoronix with HBv5 access in advance to begin testing these new VMs with the AMD EPYC 9V64H CPUs featuring HBM memory, so here are some of the first independent benchmarks of these exciting processors powering Azure's new HPC VM instances.

Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund Announced For Long-Term Support To Rust Developers

4 November 01:00 PM EST - Programming - Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund

The Rust Foundation announced today the creation of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund as a new means of providing consistent, transparent, and long-term support for developers that make the Rust programming language possible.

Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intel's Adaptive Sharpness Filter "CASF" With Lunar Lake

4 November 10:51 AM EST - Intel - Intel CASF

Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality for user-space that could be used by other kernel graphics drivers. Finally with the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel, this Intel Content Adaptive Sharpness Filter "CASF" feature is being introduced to the mainline kernel.

Open Container Initiative "OCI" Runtime Spec v1.3 Released With FreeBSD Support

4 November 10:00 AM EST - BSD - OCI v1.3

The Open Container Initiative unveiled today the OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 update for this standard around operating system process and application containers. This runtime specification continues to evolve for outlining the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of a container. Notable with the v1.3 revision is introducing official FreeBSD support.

MIPS64EL & ARMEL Architectures Dropped In Debian Unstable/Experimental

4 November 09:35 AM EST - Debian - End Of The Road

The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world.

AMD's Zen 5 RDSEED Issue Is Causing Headaches For Optimized CachyOS Builds

AMD's RDSEED issue with Zen 5 processors that is in the process of being addressed with microcode/BIOS updates is in the interim causing headaches for Arch Linux powered CachyOS that provides optimized binaries for these latest Ryzen processors.

Wild 0.7 Released For This Very Fast Linker Written In Rust

Wild 0.7 released on Monday as the newest feature release for this very fast linker for Linux systems competing with Mold on x86_64 / ARM64 / RISC-V devices.

Intel's LLM-Scaler Updated With OpenAI's GPT-OSS Model Support

4 November 06:06 AM EST - Intel - llm-scaler-vllm

Back in August was the announcement of LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. LLM-Scaler is a new Intel software project to provide optimized AI inference capabilities on Intel graphics hardware. A new beta release of LLM-Scaler "llm-scaler-vllm" is now available with expanded LLM model coverage.

SUSE Provides U-Boot Support For The Raspberry Pi 5

4 November 05:56 AM EST - Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi 5 + U-Boot

SUSE's hardware enablement team has worked through proper U-Boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

libinput 1.30-rc1 Released With Lua Plugin Support

4 November 05:34 AM EST - X.Org - libinput 1.30

The libinput input handling library for the Linux desktop on both Wayland and X.Org based systems is rolling out Lua plug-in support. Out today is libinput 1.30-rc1 with the initial infrastructure for supporting plug-ins written in the Lua scripting language.

3 November

Intel Preparing Linux Graphics Driver For Xe3P DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM Support

3 November 08:30 PM EST - Intel - Advanced Link Power Management

Last month Intel's open-source Linux software engineers began sending out Xe3P_LPD display support in preparation for display capabilities with Nova Lake. Now being built out atop that is further functionality with the most recent talking point being DisplayPort 2.1 Advanced Link Power Management (ALPM).

Rust-Based Redox OS Gets Servo Web Engine Running - Sort Of

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source operating system project is out with its October 2025 status report. Most notable is this Rust-based OS now having the Rust-based Servo web engine running... Albeit in extremely crude form at the moment.

Linux 6.19 To Optimize Exiting To User-Space For Restartable Sequences

3 November 05:45 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Lnux 6.19 RSEQ Optimization

Queued up in a TIP branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window opening in about one month's time is optimizing the Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" code for its exit to user-space code path.

Git 2.52-rc0 Starts Working On SHA1-SHA256 Interop, Hints For New Default Branch Name

The first test release of the Git 2.52 distributed revision control system is now available. As has been a common trend, Git 2.52 is making further preparations in anticipation of the big Git 3.0 milestone.

Flatpak 1.17 Adds Support For Sideloading From OCI Images, flatpak+HTTPS URIs

Flatpak 1.17 is out today as the newest feature release for this Linux app sandboxing/distribution tech. Flatpak 1.17 brings a number of exciting new features.

RadeonSI ACO vs. LLVM Backends For AMD Strix Halo

3 November 08:52 AM EST - Radeon - RadeonSI ACO vs. LLVM

With the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end for all Radeon GPUs rather than the conventional AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with Radeon 8060S Graphics for comparison.

Linux 6.19 To Support Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions

3 November 06:29 AM EST - Microsoft - Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions

A few weeks back I reported on Linux kernel patches surfacing for implementing Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions. This should help some HP devices and hardware from other OEMs for obtaining fan information reporting under Linux. The good news now is that the patches should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.

GCC 16 Lands Improved Memmove Behavior For x86/x86_64 CPUs

3 November 06:17 AM EST - GNU - inline memmove

H.J. Lu, a long-time compiler expert at Intel, merged today improved memmove() behavior for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 16 release.

Devuan 6.0 Released For Debian 13 Without systemd

3 November 06:10 AM EST - Debian - Devuan 6.0

Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur" is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for "init freedom" lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system.

Linux 6.19 Adding Support For The Line 6 POD HD Pro X Audio Effects Processor

3 November 06:05 AM EST - Multimedia - Line 6 POD HD Pro X