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

More Intel TDX Code Merged For KVM In Linux 6.16

Merged minutes ago ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release due out shortly was this week's batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates. Beyond the usual KVM fixes merged for the week, a bit of feature code was pulled in by Linus Torvalds for this post-merge-window phase.

Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20%

7 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel Graphics Security

While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance.

3mdeb Carries Out Experimental Port Of AMD OpenSIL To Zen 1 Platform

10 Hours Ago - AMD - AMD OpenSIL

The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors.

21 June

KDE Plasma Remains Committed To A Wayland Future: 70%+ Already On Wayland

21 June 03:24 PM EDT - KDE - KDE Wayland

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.

Ubuntu 25.10 Planning To Raise RISC-V Support Baseline To RVA23 Profile

21 June 06:55 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Higher RISC-V Requirement

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.

GNOME Fixes Years-Old Bug Of Trash Not Always Being Properly Emptied

21 June 06:31 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Trash

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop.

XLibre 25.0 Released As Inaugural Version Of X.Org Server Fork

21 June 06:18 AM EDT - X.Org - Xlibre 25.0

XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork.

KDE Plasma 6.4 Is Looking To Be In Good Shape, Fewer Bugs

21 June 06:04 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.4

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape.

20 June

AMD Instinct MI350X Series Microcode Upstreamed - Other AMD GPUs See Updates Too

20 June 04:00 PM EDT - AMD - Linux-Firmware.Git

A number of AMD firmware/microcode updates were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository, including introducing the AMD Instinct MI350 series files that are necessary for the open-source Linux compute driver stack to function for those newly-announced Instinct accelerators.

Intel Continues Working On Linear Address Space Separation "LASS" For Linux

20 June 01:59 PM EDT - Intel - Linear Address Space Separation

Going back to January of 2023 there were the initial Intel patches for the Linux kernel introducing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). Two and a half years later, these Intel LASS patches remain in-development with today the sixth iteration of these patches having been posted.

Apple x86 Touch Bar Input & Apple Magic Keyboard USB-C Support In Linux 6.17

20 June 01:10 PM EDT - Apple - Linux 6.17 Apple

Over the past week a number of Apple device support additions have been queued up into the HID subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle.

Vulkan 1.4.319 Published With New Data Graph Extension

20 June 10:00 AM EDT - Vulkan - Vulkan 1.4.319

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.318 was introduced with a new Valve extension, Vulkan 1.4.319 released this morning with another new extension.

Linux Delivering Driver Fix For 30 Year Old Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA Sound Card

20 June 08:52 AM EDT - Multimedia - SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA

Thirty-one years after Creative Technology introduced the Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA-based sound card, the open-source driver support within the Linux kernel continues to be worked on... Submitted today for Linux 6.16 is fixing support for this once mighty ISA sound card from the mid 90's.

Intel's OpenVINO 2025.2 Brings Support For New Models, GenAI Improvements

20 June 08:35 AM EDT - Intel - OpenVINO 2025.2

Intel open-source software developers this week released OpenVINO 2025.2 as the latest update to this prominent free software AI toolkit.

Latest Bcachefs Code Draws Torvalds' Ire Over Late Feature Code

20 June 06:38 AM EDT - Linux Storage - No Features Post Merge Window

There is some tension on the Linux kernel mailing list with some late Bcachefs feature work sent in as part of "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Established rules aim for only new feature code to be introduced during the kernel merge windows, which ended nearly two weeks ago for Linux 6.16, but Bcachefs wanting to be exempt to continue to allow new feature code to still land for the cycle in the name of data safety.

Microsoft Releases WSL 2.6 As The First Open-Source Release

20 June 06:22 AM EDT - Microsoft - Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6

Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project.

AMD Releases Updated ROCm 7.0 Preview For HIP Testing

20 June 06:10 AM EDT - AMD - ROCm 7.0

AMD originally released a ROCm 7.0 preview build back in May as it works to align their HIP API more closely with NVIDIA's CUDA. Last month was the big ROCm 7.0 preview announcement form AMD's Advancing AI Day in San Jose while this week is another new 7.0 preview build focused on further testing of the ROCm 7.0 HIP changes.

19 June

Intel Cleans Up LLVM/Clang For Misreporting CLDEMOTE On Arrow Lake & Future Hybrid CPUs

19 June 09:37 PM EDT - Intel - CLDEMOTE

Code compilers like the prominent GCC and LLVM/Clang have been advertising support for the Cache Line Demote "CLDEMOTE" instruction on Arrow Lake processors as well as Lunar Lake and upcoming Panther Lake hybrid processors. Intel engineers added that compiler plumbing but was inaccurate and inadvertently missed until now with this prominent instruction not being supported there.

OpenZFS 2.3.3 Released With Linux 6.15 Support

Following last week's release of OpenZFS 2.2.8, OpenZFS 2.3.3 is now available as the newest point release of this current stable series for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On The AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 "Strix Halo"

While the results shouldn't be too surprising given the recent AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Windows 11 vs. Linux testing, when the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by the step-down AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 arrived with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, I also took the opportunity to run some Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks on that AMD Strix Halo SoC.

Fwupd 2.0.12 Released With More Intel Battlemage GPUs & HP USB-C Hub Supported

19 June 09:06 AM EDT - LVFS - Fwupd 2.0.12

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 2.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a nice Linux system/device firmware updating experience.

Intel NPU Accelerator Driver Readies "Turbo Mode" For Better Performance

19 June 08:30 AM EDT - Intel - Intel NPU Turbo

Sent out today was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes for consisting of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) core updates as well as changes to the smaller display/graphics kernel drivers plus the growing work around accelerator "accel" drivers within the kernel. Intel NPU accelerator driver changes stand out for this week's pull request ahead of Linux 6.17.

OpenBLAS 0.3.30 Released With Performance Improvements & Fixes

OpenBLAS 0.3.30 released this morning as the newest version of this optimized BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library for multiple CPU architectures.

Debian's tag2upload Reaches Open Beta For Enhancing Packaging Workflow

19 June 06:41 AM EDT - Debian - Debian tag2upload

Debian tag2upload reached an open beta state for allowing Debian developers and maintainers to upload by simply using the git-debpush script for pushing a signed Git tag.

Intel Begins Sending In Kernel Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.17

19 June 06:10 AM EDT - Intel - Linux 6.17

Intel open-source software driver engineers have begun sending in their new kernel graphics driver feature pulls to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window coming up by early August. There is some new feature work included as part of Intel's pull requests for the weeks along with more PCI device IDs being introduced, bug fixes, and other code refactoring.

Mesa 25.1.4 Delivers Latest Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Fixes

19 June 05:48 AM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 25.1.4

Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.4 on Wednesday as the latest bi-weekly point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems.

18 June

Godot 4.5 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support

The first beta release of the Godot 4.5 open-source game engine is now available for testing. Notable for Linux users is the continued quest toward Wayland support at parity to X11.

Cache-Aware Scheduling For Linux Refined - Better AMD & Intel CPU Performance

18 June 03:18 PM EDT - Hardware - Cache Aware Scheduling

Going on for several months now has been an effort to wire up cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for the Linux kernel for helping out task placement for processors with multiple cache domains such as modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC and Intel Xeon platforms. This cache-aware scheduling has shown much potential for Linux with further enhancing performance on today's interesting CPUs. Out today is the third iteration of cache-aware scheduling with an important rework.

Zed Editor Introduces Built-In Debugger

The Zed Editor remains a popular code editor written in the Rust programming language and providing modern features for this project started by former Atom developers. One of the long sought features for Zed has been having built-in debugger capabilities and that work has finally been merged to the project's codebase.

XWayland 24.1.8 & X.Org Server 21.1.18 Further Address Yesterday's Security Disclosures

18 June 01:03 PM EDT - X.Org - X.Org Server

Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday.

Framework Laptop 12: An Upgrade-Friendly, Convertible 2-in-1 Linux Laptop

Back in February the Framework Laptop 12 was announced as the company's first 2-in-1 convertible laptop while still being well-built and upgrade-friendly/modular as we have come to enjoy out of their various Linux-friendly laptops. Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework Laptop 12 and thus can share our initial impressions on this Intel-powered 12-inch laptop.

Servo Browser Engine Finally Supporting Animated GIFs

The Servo browser engine project born out of Mozilla as an early Rust project and now advanced by open-source developers from various firms continues moving forward. Servo has finally scratched animated GIF support off its TODO list among other features.

Updated AMD ISP4 Driver For Linux Benefits The HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Future Ryzen Laptops

18 June 08:29 AM EDT - AMD - AMD ISP4 v2

AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future.

Broadcom BNGE Linux Network Driver Published For BCM5770X

Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family.

Arch Linux Moving To WoW64 Wine & Wine-Staging

18 June 06:41 AM EDT - WINE - WoW64 Wine

The Arch Linux project announced this week they are working to transition their Wine and Wine-Staging packages over to pure WoW64 builds. This "Windows on Windows 64-bit" allows for 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux platforms without needing 32-bit software libraries/prefixes present and overall a big architectural win.

Alienware "G-Mode" Reverted For Linux: It Actually Hurt Performance

18 June 06:32 AM EDT - Hardware - Alienware G-Mode

Alienware G-Mode / Game Shift is a feature designed to "enhance gaming performance" on select Dell/Alienware laptops with the press of a key. But at least under Linux with select laptop models it can actually regress performance compared to just running the laptop in the "performance" platform profile.

Qt Creator 17 Released With New Default Themes

18 June 06:07 AM EDT - Qt - Qt Creator 17

The Qt Creator 17 integrated development environment released today with a variety of improvements for this primarily C++/Qt focused developer IDE.

Mesa's Rusticl Driver Now Supports sRGB Images

18 June 06:03 AM EDT - Mesa - Rusticl + sRGB Images

Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver has supported various elements of 2D image handling while the latest addition in enhancing this open-source driver's support is for sRGB images.

17 June

Linux 6.16 Adds Support For Intel PMC SSRAM Telemetry For Lunar Lake + Panther Lake

17 June 08:31 PM EDT - Intel - Platform Monitoring Technology

For those interested in Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) for power and performance telemetry data among other metrics on Intel hardware, the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel has squeezed in support for existing Lunar Lake and next-gen Panther Lake SoCs into the PMC SSRAM telemetry driver.

Open 3D Engine 25.05 Brings Vulkan Improvements, Simulation Enhancements

Version 25.05 of the Open 3D Engine "O3DE" was released today for this open-source project born out of Amazon's Lumberyard engine nearly four years ago. With O3DE 25.05, this open-source game/simulation engine continues to be advanced by Amazon/AWS, Meta, Huawei, and other organizations.

X.Org Server 21.1.17 & XWayland 24.1.7 Fix The Latest Batch Of Security Issues

17 June 12:30 PM EDT - X.Org - X.Org Server 21.1.17

The X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 point releases were issued today to fix the latest batch of security issues.

NVIDIA 575.64 Linux Driver Released With A Few Fixes

17 June 10:46 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 575.64

NVIDIA today released a new version of their R575 series stable Linux driver to provide a few additional fixes for customers.

AMD & System76 Teaming Up For ROCm "Radeon Test Drive"

17 June 09:01 AM EDT - Radeon - Radeon Test Drive

AMD's Advancing AI 2025 event last week was very busy with announcing the Instinct MI350X and MI355X, the ROCm 7.0 preview, and debuting the AMD Developer Cloud. In addition, they held pre-briefs around the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and buried in as part of that was another new disclosure: Radeon Test Drive. Radeon Test Drive was brought up as something that's coming later this summer from AMD partnering with different hardware vendors to make it easier for developers/customers to try out ROCm on Radeon GPUs.

Qt 6.10 Beta Released With Native PipeWire Audio Backend For Qt Multimedia

17 June 08:49 AM EDT - Qt - Qt 6.10 Beta 1

Qt 6.10 Beta 1 released today as the next stepping stone for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit. Qt 6.10 isn't bringing any new modules but is deprecating the Qt Charts and Qt Data Visualization code.

KDE Plasma 6.4 Desktop Released With Many Fantastic Improvements

17 June 07:05 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.4

KDE Plasma 6.4 is out today with many fantastic improvements for this open-source desktop.

Intel's Next-Gen QAT Hardware Can Be Optimized For Just Decompression Use

17 June 06:46 AM EDT - Intel - Intel QAT6 + Decompression

Merged recently for the Linux 6.16 kernel was initial support for Intel QAT Gen6 hardware. A new qat_6xxx driver was added for supporting the next-gen QuickAssist Technology accelerator IP being found with upcoming Intel Xeon processors. Patches being prepared now for the Linux 6.17 kernel are building out a new decompression service for that next-generation hardware.

Intel THC Linux Driver Ready To Support Wake-on-Touch "WoT"

17 June 06:22 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Wake-on-Touch

Merged for Linux 6.14 at the beginning of the year were the Intel THC drivers for supporting the Touch Host Controller IP found in modern Intel Core Ultra laptops for dealing with the touchpad, touchscreen, and related touch-control functionality. This open-source driver is still being built-out ahead of next-generation Core Ultra laptops hitting the market.

Dbus-Broker 37 Released For High Performance & Reliable D-Bus