Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to the recent influx of Linux security vulnerabilities affecting Linux, FreeBSD has also begun receiving security reports via AI/LLM-driven discovery tools. FreeBSD 15.1-RC1 is out today ahead of the planned official release in June and it brings a handful of security fixes out of this new AI-driven security research space.

GNOME Commander, the orthodox file manager for the GNOME desktop that was inspired by Norton Commander, has been rewritten in the Rust programming language and also now using the GTK4 toolkit.

Merged today for Linux 7.1 was this week's power management fixes with a few notable fixes for both AMD and Intel platforms.

Released earlier this month was the OpenCL 3.1 specification with a focus on enhancing AI and HPC workloads for this long-time Khronos specification. Out today is OpenCL 3.1.1 as a point release with an emphasis on addressing a possible performance regression of OpenCL 3.1.

The first release candidate of systemd 261 is out today and it includes yet more features for this Linux init system and service manager.

For those with a new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop from HP or considering one of these new systems, the Intel ISH firmware has now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for enhancing the out-of-the-box support.

The AMD SoC Power Management Controller Driver is the latest seeing patch activity now in preparing for next-gen Zen 6 processors.

A new proposal volleyed today among LLVM developers is for Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" for the ThinLTO link-time optimization code. This is great news for today's high core count CPUs when looking to compile very large LLVM modules.

A set of 42 patches were posted on Thursday for the AMDGPU kernel driver and associated AMDKFD compute driver code for enabling pipe reset capabilities for compute workloads.

It's not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing -- including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues -- leading to "craziness" from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many "assisted-by" patches coming about in recent weeks.

Driven by AI/LLM bots like Shashiko uncovering new issues within the Linux kernel source tree, including various security vulnerabilities like Dirty Frag, the mailing list has been wild with bug reports and fixes. Today's networking fixes pull request for Linux 7.1 continues to highlight the ongoing craziness and fears that the worst may be yet to come.

CHUWI this week announced their UniBook laptop as a ~$449 USD laptop that aims to compete with Apple's MacBook Neo. While shipping with Microsoft Windows 11, it should be Linux-friendly and we'll soon be putting it to the test at Phoronix.

Open-source Intel software engineers today sent out their latest round of Xe kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.2 merge window.

SUSE engineers continue working on their modern "Agama" operating system installer used by the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Linux distributions. Out today is Agama 21 to incorporate their latest OS installer enhancements.

KMSCON 10.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this terminal emulator for Linux that can serve as an alternative to the in-kernel VT.

AMD engineers continue enhancing the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux.

Wine developers have announced the release of VKD3D 2.0, the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API. VKD3D is what's used by upstream Wine for D3D12 compared to Valve's downstream VKD3D-Proton within Steam Play (Proton).

AlmaLinux shared with us that they will be introducing a new version of their RHEL-derived Linux operating system that is built specifically for media and entertainment use-cases.

AMD is ready with more AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window.

A new release of chipStar is now available as the open-source tool for compiling and running HIP/CUDA code in a vendor-neutral manner with the SPIR-V intermediate representation on OpenCL or even Intel Level Zero as the run-time alternative. This is part of the ambitious effort to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP code to ultimately run on alternative vendors with increasing levels of success.

Back in 2024 there were Linux patches to enable a partially-working Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Now in 2026, there are new patches for making that ARM-powered Microsoft Surface laptop actually working more respectably under Linux... Like a working display and more.

One of the most exciting developments in recent times for the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is HDMI 2.1 FRL support for the AMDGPU driver along with Display Stream Compression support as they work toward providing full HDMI 2.1 support for this open-source AMD Radeon driver. The details how AMD managed to pull this feat off given prior resistance from the HDMI Forum remains to be confirmed, but it's moving ahead and out today is the latest iteration of the HDMI 2.1 FRL+DSC patches.

As a very exciting development ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window opening in about one month's time, it looks like the long-awaited Cache Aware Scheduling support will finally be merged! CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE has made it into a TIP branch with all the Cache Aware Scheduling code for helping with Linux performance on modern CPUs sporting multiple last level caches.

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser's settings area.

While it has been nearly seven years since Apple acquired the Intel Mobile Communications' smartphone modem business and fifteen years since Intel acquired the wireless solutions division of Infineon, in 2026 we might see mainline Linux kernel support for the out-of-date XMM6260 modem.

Red Hat today announced the releases of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 as well as RHEL 9.8.

Greg Kroah-Hartman took time away from his duties as Linux's second-in-command as stable maintainer, various subsystem maintainer, and recent hobby of using AI/LLMs for uncovering Linux kernel bugs to present at the Rust Week conference.

That didn't take long. Mere days after Dell and Lenovo began sponsoring the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as premiere sponsors in contributing $100k+ annually to this open-source firmware updating initiative, HP is also now a premiere sponsor.

FFmpeg already supports CPU-based decoding for Samsung's APV as the Advanced Professional Video Codec. FFmpeg also has APV encode support too while now an interesting addition was merged this week: Vulkan-based acceleration for APV.

Intel software engineers today rolled out the llm-scaler-vllm PV v1.4 as the Docker build of their latest software stack for those wishing to run vLLM in a pre-configured, performant setup on their Arc (Pro) Graphics hardware.

Valkey 9.1 released on Tuesday as the latest version of this popular fork of the Redis in-memory, key-value database.

The GTK-based GUI version of the Vim text editor, gVim, now has support in place for the modern GTK4 toolkit as an alternative to its long present GTK2/GTK3 support.

A year after SUSE decided to remove its Deepin desktop packages over ongoing security concerns, Fedora Linux is now also removing their Deepin packages over similar concerns and lack of activity in maintaining the packages.

Back in late February AMD announced the EPYC 8005 "Sorano" series to succeed EPYC 8004 Siena. At the time details were light while today AMD published the SKU table and more details on the EPYC 8005 series.

Theo de Raadt announced the release today of OpenBSD 7.9 as the latest feature update to this unique BSD platform.

Following the ISOs dropping a few days ago, today the Mageia 10 release candidate was officially announced for those fond of this Linux distribution with its roots tracing back to Mageia and Mandrake Linux.

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical today released Ubuntu Core 26.

The fix is set to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel so the P-core-only Bartlett Lake processors will not report bogus maximum frequency values.

One of the newest interfaces being worked on for the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel is an Untrusted Data API for data received into the kernel from user-space.

The latest Linux gaming handheld driver work by Derek Clark of Valve's Linux efforts is the OneXPlayer Configuration Driver that is now set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle.

Yet more open-source Intel software projects have been formally archived. Over the past year Intel has formally discontinued a number of open-source projects it formally maintained. Many of them were already dormant and not too noteworthy but there were also some more notable ones discontinued like their legendary Clear Linux, Software Defined Silicon, Optane Memory software projects, and then other efforts like open ecosystem community/evangelism. This past week yet more Intel software projects were formally disbanded.

The latest Intel Xe kernel graphics driver patches for Linux now indicate multiple PCI IDs for the upcoming Crescent Island "CRI" accelerators rather than just a lone model.

Among the VFS patches queued into "-next" branches ahead of next month's Linux 7.2 merge window is the code for introducing the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call.

Firefox 151 release binaries are now available as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's open-source web browser.

Given all the recent Linux kernel security concerns and new bugs being discovered, the Linux cryptographic subsystem is proactively dropping zero-copy functionality from AF_ALG due to growing security concerns.

With yesterday's Linux 7.1-rc4 release are some additional comments by Linux creator Linus Torvalds around AI tooling and the surge in security bug reporting to the Linux kernel due to said LLM-powered tooling.

The Lemonade SDK for "refreshingly fast local AI" that is largely developed by AMD engineers as an open-source project continues advancing quite rapidly for serving optimized LLMs on GPUs and NPUs.

As first reported on Phoronix in early April, Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has been leveraging new AI fuzzing tools for uncovering Linux kernel bugs. Prominent due to his position within the Linux kernel community and also being the primary Linux stable maintainer. His AI-assistance for fixing Linux kernel bugs is based on a Framework Desktop powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max. The "gkh_clanker_t1000" continues assisting in Linux kernel development along with the less frequent "gkh_clanker_2000" references

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.