Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to this week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request introducing some new HDMI 2.0 helpers for the DRM drivers, the pull request also introduced improved GPU reset support for the Broadcom V3D GPU with the VC4 kernel driver.

GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published a blog post today to introduce the world to the Toolpak plans for GNOME OS.

Queued this week into the slab/for-next Git branch ahead of next month's Linux 7.4 merge window is a memory management change for refilling pre-filled sheaves from the barn. In some cases this yields wild improvements to specific synthetic benchmarks.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc5 release.

Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots.

The AMDXDNA open-source Linux kernel accelerator driver is seeing a fair amount of work for better supporting current-generation NPU3 neural processing units. The AMD NPU3 is what's found in current AMD Ryzen AI 300 / Ryzen AI 300 PRO series SoCs.

Even with this week's KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9.

Last call for the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" Premium sale: it runs through end of day Sunday, 27 September (any timezone - I'm not particularly strict). If you have been meaning to support the site, this is the window.

Going back to last year the Igalia open-source consulting firm has been working on enhancing the Linux kernel to help Steam Play gaming on ARM64 and ensuring the FEX emulator is operating efficiently for x86/x86_64 games running on the likes of the Steam Frame. After other kernel work in recent months, there's finally an updated round of the FUTEX get_robust_list2 and set_robust_list2 system call patches.

GDB 18.1 is out today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger that works across C/C++, Fortran, Rust, and other languages like Go, Ada, and more.

The Redox OS open-source, Rust-based operating system has seen a lot of activity in recent weeks with many notable improvements landing.

While Linux 7.2 brought initial Apple M3 support and Linux 7.3 brought M3 Pro / Max / Ultra support, the mainline Linux kernel support for the M3 series hardware remains very basic and not yet ready for daily driving. But more work continues to be upstreamed and today the patches were posted for getting NVMe storage up and running across all Apple M3 hardware.

Linux 7.4 is going to be the big kernel release where the AMD graphics driver will finally expose HDMI 2.1 by default and comes with features including HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM. Ahead of that milestone there have been various other last minute tweaks and improvements to its HDMI 2.1 support. Sent out on Thursday was the latest round of AMDGPU DC patches that includes a few more patches for improving the HDMI 2.1 reliability.

A new blog post published on Thursday covers the experimental support for SIMD with the Go programming language. This expanding Go SIMD support also includes a platform-independent API for making use of SIMD with modern processors.

Samba 4.25 is out as the newest stable release for this open-source software enabling file and print services sharing between Linux servers and Windows systems.

While the Linux kernel continues to be bombarded with patches from AI/LLM agents, to date the kernel hasn't carried an AGENTS.md Markdown file with instructions catering to AI/LLM agents. But a patch set out today would finally introduce one.

Yesterday Qualcomm posted open-source GPU driver patches for their Adreno 850 GPU one day after being announced with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Yesterday Qualcomm also announced their Snapdragon X2 Linux support plans. Today they have posted the GPU enablement patches for what's found in the Mahua SoC for lower-tier Snapdragon X2 SoCs.

The open-source ReactOS project striving to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows applications/games as well as drivers took a huge step forward today with landing a significant update to its DirectX stack from code leveraged from the Wine project.

COSMIC Epoch 1.9 was released last night as the newest version of the System76-sponsored, Rust-based desktop environment. COSMIC Epoch 1.9 release notes only became available today and it's a big one with new apps and improvements to existing offerings.

Following their recent AVX10_V2_AUX support for GCC as part of the bring-up for the AI Compute Extensions "ACE" in GCC 17, AMD compiler engineers this week posted the initial patches for enabling the AVX10V1AUX ISA support.

One of the livelist Fedora Discourse community discussions in recent days -- or even in quite a period of time for that matter -- comes down to a user having suggested that Fedora replace LibreOffice by default with the downstream Collabora Office.

Following the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing.

Two years ago RHEL-derived AlmaLinux announced a hardware certification program as part of their Certification Special Interest Group (SIG). They have now expanded their hardware certification program to include third-party software certification on AlmaLinux too plus a new app that users can install for self-certifying their system.

The Linux kernel is having to introduce a new taint flag "TAINT_FORCED_BIND" to deal with fuzzing bots like Syzbot abusing Linux's bind/unbind sysfs functionality and generating bug reports for impractical and not at all relevant hardware/driver combinations.

Canonical today released Mir 2.30 as the newest release of this Wayland compositor library for building out different shells and other functionality from smart mirrors to other consumer devices.

Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced Fwupd 2.1.8 today as the newest feature release for this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems. With Fwupd 2.1.8 comes support for a number of newer devices plus plenty of bug fixes.

In 2022 the SLOB allocator was deprecated and removed with Linux 6.4 a year later. SLOB was popular with embedded systems with minimal amounts of RAM, so as a result the CONFIG_SLUB_TINY Kconfig option was then added for configuring the slab allocator for a minimal memory footprint for systems with 16MB of RAM or less. The CONFIG_SLUB_TINY is now on the chopping block with a proposed rework to the allocator code for making the "tiny" memory handling a boot time option.

Sent out today was the latest weekly pull of drm-misc-next changes of feature material to queue in DRM-Next for Linux 7.4. Most notable in this week's pull request are a number of patches for enhancing the HDMI 2.0 handling in the DRM core infrastructure and display helpers.

With Debian voting to allow the responsible use of generative AI, there is now a new initiative funded by Scaleway to make it easier for Debian contributors to leverage AI: the Debian Inference Portal.

Qualcomm at their Snapdragon Summit taking place in Hawaii are talking up the forthcoming Linux support for Snapdragon X2 series laptops.

As a friendly reminder in case you missed it from over the weekend, the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" premium sale is taking place through the rest of this week for those wishing to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, and other benefits while helping for the site to survive and continue producing daily original content.

The AMD-aligned Lemonade open-source project for serving as a local AI server released 2026.39.1 today as well as issuing a release candidate of 2026.40 as their next release. Besides adapting to a new versioning scheme, the Lemonade SDK updates today bring a few notable changes.

Intel engineers have been quietly developing dxvk-igdext as their own component for DXVK Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 atop the Vulkan API for leveraging Intel Direct3D 11 Graphics Extensions.

NTFS-3G 2026.9.18 was released this morning as the newest update to this FUSE-based open-source driver for NTFS file-system support.

Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver.

In addition to AMD working on AVX10_V2_AUX support for the GCC compiler, this summer they also posted AVX10_V2_AUX support for the LLVM/Clang compiler. As of yesterday that enablement was merged for LLVM 24 for that important step toward AI Compute Extensions (ACE).

Merged at the start of the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle was adding Logitech Bolt USB receiver support for Logitech HID++ devices to the hid-logitech-dj driver code. That has resulted in too many bug reports of early Linux 7.3 users encountering varying issues with their Logitech mice that the functionality is now being reverted until it can be better developed.

The Nouveau Linux kernel graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA driver support has new patches posted for enabling HDMI Deep Color support.

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop.

In 2024 Canonical generated nearly $300M USD in revenue for this company behind Ubuntu Linux and other services and software solutions. For 2025, they not only broke $300M but well exceeded it with $345M in revenue.

A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop.

SPEC back in May 2025 introduced SPECViewPerf 15 as the newest major release of this industry-standard workstation graphics benchmark. Sadly, the Linux support once again fell behind with SPECViewPerf 15 only debuting on Microsoft Windows. Today though Linux has caught up with SPEC releasing a Linux-native build of SPECViewPerf 15.0.1.

Systemd 262 made it out today as the newest feature update to this Linux init system and service manager. As with most systemd releases, it's heavy on new features and functionality.

The open-source YSERVER project as a modern X11 sever written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code is out today with a new feature release. Most notable for this AI Rust X11 server is X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) support for multi-user shared desktops.

The Omarchy project announced today that Alibaba Cloud will be contributing a total of three million USD to their foundation for helping development of this Linux distribution and working to make it an "ideal agentic operating system".

Sent out today was a new HID subsystem pull request of fixes for the week to the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides some conventional bug fixes are also supporting some additional devices via quirks and new IDs.

Later this week it looks like the latest round of Cache Aware Scheduling fixes will be merged for enhancing this kernel scheduler functionality for grouping related tasks together on CPU cores that share the same last level cache (LLC). Cache Aware Scheduling can lead to better cache locality and lower latency by avoiding the costs of potential cache bouncing -- that is when bugs don't get in the way.

A convenient addition that surprisingly hasn't been added to the Linux kernel until now is /sys/devices/system/cpu/sev/sev_status as a new sysfs interface for reporting the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) status.

ZLUDA as the open-source project working on CUDA for non-NVIDIA GPUs like AMD Radeon graphics cards now has implemented support for some of NVIDIA's core cuFFT APIs.