Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

It was another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space that has culminated with the release of Linux 7.1-rc4.

Similar to Canonical engineers having published "Ubuntu Concept" ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops to provide the very latest hardware-specific support that hasn't yet worked its way to the mainline Linux kernel and other packages, Canonical has begun providing Ubuntu Concept ISOs for the CIX P1 as an "AI" focused platform.

A new open-source project called low_latency_layer is an implicit Vulkan layer that enables AMD Anti-Lag 2 and NVIDIA Reflex 2 to reportedly work in a hardware-agnostic manner so that AMD and Intel graphics cards can both enjoy Reflex or Anti-Lag 2 working on non-AMD graphics cards as well.

An open-source developer with the assistance of Claude Code has managed to get the Adobe Lightroom CC software working on Linux under Wine.

Last year the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg multimedia library introduced Apple ProRes video acceleration using shaders with the Vulkan API. Now FFmpeg has taken it a step further and can support Apple ProRes RAW Vulkan-based video decoding.

Ahead of the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro laptops beginning to ship in June, an audio microphone fix was merged this weekend to the mainline Linux kernel for these new Intel Panther Lake powered devices.

Released this week was FluidX3D 3.7, the latest feature update to this computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is CPU/GPU accelerated by way of OpenCL.

In working toward the stable FreeBSD 15.1 release in early June, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 3 is out this weekend as the latest weekly test candidate.

The current GNOME System Monitor is on track to be replaced by the GNOME Resources app for as soon as the GNOME 51 desktop release.

Memtest86+ 8.10 is out today as a significant update to this legendary open-source RAM testing software.

Debian 13.5 is out today as the newest point release to Debian Trixie for incorporating all of the latest security fixes affecting the Linux kernel and dozens of user-space packages.

It seems that Valve isn't done expanding their open-source Linux graphics driver team and securing top talent for enhancing the Linux GPU drivers for a better gaming experience. One of the foremost leading Mesa developers has left AMD to join Valve.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 kernel test release due out on Sunday, a new round of x86 platform driver fixes were submitted for the week.

This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma's built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week.

A few days ago the widely-used SDL library added support for the new Steam Controller without depending upon the Steam client. Now another improvement for the new Steam Controller has been merged to this widely-used library for cross-platform games/apps with software/hardware abstractions.

ROCm 7.13 was released today as the newest ROCm Core SDK Preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0 later in the year.

Wine 11.9 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release and nearing the half-way point of the development cycle toward Wine 12.0.

Merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel is some new documentation surrounding what qualifies as a security bug as well as around responsible use of AI for finding kernel bugs.

A new patch for the Linux kernel posted today by Intel has outed "Panther Lake R" as a ruggedized variant of Panther Lake intended for harsh environments.

Following yesterday's disclosure of the ssh-keysign-pwn vulnerability that allows unprivileged users to read root-owned files, a slew of new stable kernel releases are out today to address this latest Linux security issue.

In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner.

3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!

For what originally began as an open-source Intel software project, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing robust development outside the confines of Intel Corp these days with ongoing improvements driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Ant, and other organizations for this Rust-based VMM for cloud workloads.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 release due out on Sunday, a variety of HID subsystem patches were merged overnight to Linux Git.

Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support.

Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn.

Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam.

Dynamic EPP is one of the new AMD P-State features in Linux 7.1, but, unfortunately is causing some fallout in early usage of this power-savings related functionality.

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release.

One of the latest Linux gaming handheld drivers being worked on is the MSI Claw Configuration Driver for controller configuration.

Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver.

I have been writing about the Cache Aware Scheduling work led by Intel engineers on the Linux kernel for more than a year. I've also tested out Cache Aware Scheduling on both Intel and AMD CPUs with the patched Linux kernel to great success. And thus very happy to see the Cache Aware Scheduling patches inching closer to the mainline Linux kernel.

In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7.

Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge.

Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers.

The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported.

Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI).

Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability.

Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client.

In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate.

KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack.

A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later.

Wine's Wayland native driver has taken another step forward with now supporting the pointer warp "wp_pointer_warp_v1" protocol.

For those making use of OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD, OpenZFS 2.4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation.

FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn't end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2.

Today's Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don't appear to be too widespread or impactful.

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support.

An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture.

A new driver expected to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is the ARCTIC Fan Controller driver to allow fan speed monitoring and PWM controls for this upcoming ARCTIC product. Making this new driver all the more exciting is that it was worked on by ARCTIC directly compared to the typical workflow for such desktop/consumer hardware peripherals often being left up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community.

Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a "potato" -- an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too.

Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems.

For years Intel has been developing the Low Power Mode Daemon "LPMD" to help their hybrid laptop and desktop CPUs deliver optimal power efficiency under Linux. Intel LPMD leverages hardware hints and other features for optimizing active idle power of the processor and putting the system into lower power modes where possible. This tool could soon call the Linux kernel source tree its new home.

The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April.