Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In the road to releasing Linux 7.1 in June, out today is Linux 7.1-rc5 that continues coming on heavy with fixes.

For those curious about the growing use of AI and coding agents within the Linux kernel, this week there was another large batch of new patches fixed that were generated or co-authored by agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.

With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops.

Following the process of phasing out Intel 486 CPU support and other old hardware drivers that were dropped in the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle for reducing the kernel maintenance burden, the upcoming Linux 7.2 cycle is continuing the trend of phasing out some of the old hardware support that is very obsolete, likely having no users on the latest upstream kernels, and no one formally maintaining the obsolete drivers.

Multikernel Technologies Inc has been working on a multi-kernel architecture for the Linux kernel while in addition to that they have been developing KernelScript as a domain-specific language for carrying out Linux kernel customizations and app-specific optimizations.

While in the past decade or so Linux desktop/laptop users likely have little to complain about boot times and there hasn't been much emphasis around trying to make boot times even faster on the Linux desktop especially in an era where many systems are always-on and suspend/resume working more reliably these days, boot times are still an important factor in the embedded Linux world. Boot-Time Wizard is one of the new efforts aiming to help embedded Linux makers cut-down on their boot times.

Wild Linker 0.9 was released today as the latest version of this very fast linker for Linux systems that is written in the Rust programming language.

The Linux Mint project today published their May 2026 status report to outline recent work done to this Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux platform and much of their focus in recent weeks on enhancements to their Cinnamon desktop environment.

With Intel having been one of the most dominant open-source contributors for years across the software ecosystem, months after they began sunsetting various software projects no longer aligned with today's Intel, they continue formally sunsetting/archiving different open-source projects.

For years already AV2 has been in development as the successor to AV1 for this wonderful open-source, royalty-free video codec. While there was talk about releasing AV2 by the end of 2025, that didn't happen but now latest indicators are pointing toward its formal debut next week.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for next month's Plasma 6.7 stable desktop release due out in mid-June while also beginning more feature work toward Plasma 6.8.

This week's x86 platform driver fixes include not only a handful of bug fixes but also enabling some additional laptops within existing drivers for HP and ASUS devices.

Back in 2022 it was announced DreamWorks Animation was open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer that has been used in production feature films. It ended up being published as open-source in March 2023 as OpenMoonRay and since then has continued advancing with new feature releases and improvements. Now it's being contributed to the Academy Software Foundation as the newest project.

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.