Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Wine 11.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and apps on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API.

Google's Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first "real" drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is set to be retired.

The latest Apple Silicon enablement code working its way from the Asahi Linux project toward the upstream Linux kernel is the AVD driver used for accelerated video playback across Apple M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs.

If you missed out on the Phoronix Premium special back during the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com in June, there is another promotion now active for helping to support the site and allow for continued daily original content and relentless Linux performance benchmarking and other open-sourced focused hardware testing.

Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery "FRED" that debuted with the Core Ultra Series 3 processors.

The Ubuntu 26.10 desktop is adjusting its default out-of-memory (OOM) daemon behavior when dealing with memory pressure on the system.

The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration of these patches were posted by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes.

Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October.

Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed.

The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes.

Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward.

The Rust security response working group and Crates.io team have issued a warning that a targeted attack is underway against key Rust programming language developers.

Last month Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm. Modular was the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame. Released today was Mojo 1.1 and also marks the project recently now beginning code contributions from the community to its compiler.

The fourth monthly-ish snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now available for testing and comes ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta milestone.

The idea has been talked about before but in 2026 still hasn't made it to the mainline Linux kernel.... Standardized reporting of video memory statistics that would work across different vendors / kernel graphics drivers. A new proposal was raised today in an effort to get a standardized interface established.

For two years now we have been curious about the Fujitsu MONAKA CPU since some slides about this Arm-based server processor first appeared and they upstreamed compiler support in GCC 15. This week Fujitsu formally announced the MONAKA CPU and with availability beginning in November.

Released today was the Intel Compute Runtime 26.35.39758.10 update for Windows and Linux systems. With this updated OpenCL and Level Zero GPU compute driver stack comes some exciting updates for this monthly feature update.

For those hopeful of running Linux well on the ASUS Zenbook A14 or A16 laptops powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 SoC, a new ASUS EC driver has been developed for enhancing the support.

Sent out today was the latest weekly drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) material ready for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window.

Days after the recent release of GNU Coreutils 9.12, Rust Coreutils 0.12 was released overnight for advancing this alternative Rust-based implementation of these core utilities.

Released on Wednesday was a new version of the Dragonfly database that continues to promote itself as "the world's most efficient in-memory data store" and a modern replacement to the likes of Redis and Memcached while being fully compatible with their APIs.

Leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput 1.32 for improving input handling on Wayland and X.Org based environments.

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek rolled out Miracle-WM 0.11 today as an end-of-summer update to this Wayland compositor built atop the Mir library.

Mesa 26.2.3 is out today as the newest stable point release in this quarter's Mesa 26.2 series.

Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the GNOME 51 desktop is officially released.

Ori Bernstein announced an early preview of his Good Enough File-System "GEFS" for OpenBSD. GEFS is a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write file-system that he wrote initially for 9front and now porting to OpenBSD.

Arm engineer Christian Loehle sent out a patch series today proposing that the Linux scheduler code randomize its picking of equally shallow idle CPU cores. This randomization is showing to deliver a win at least for high CPU core counts for better distributing workloads.

The newest Linux kernel patches out of AMD for enhancing the upstream support with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors is for enabling SEV-TIO TDISP that is supported with PCI Express 6.0 and beyond.

While Ubuntu Linux has been making use of the Rust Coreutils project over the past year since Ubuntu 25.10 as an alternative to GNU Coreutils and part of their effort to get more system components implemented in the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language, Ubuntu 26.10 finally completes the transition with the cp, mv, and rm commands now coming from Rust Coreutils.

Introduced back in Linux 7.1 was the Yogafan HWMON driver for supporting fan speed monitoring across various Lenovo Yoga, Legion, Flex, Slim, and IdeaPad laptops. An initial set of Lenovo laptops was initially supported by this driver while succeeding kernel versions have continued building out the support.

AMD's GAIA software for building AI agents on your PC and leveraging generative AI locally with the power of AMD Ryzen and Radeon hardware continues becoming more featureful. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.24/0.24.1 and with it comes the ability to transcribe and summarize meeting recordings locally along with other functionality.

OpenVDB is the sparse volume data structure and tooling library maintained by the Academy Software Foundation. OpenVDB in turn is used by various CGI software for dealing with sparse volumetric data such as Houdini, RenderMan, and Cinema 4D to the open-source Blender. It's even won an Academy Award for technical achievement while now in 2026 it's finally establishing a SIMD framework for better leveraging modern x86 ISA capabilities.

Over the past few months there have been patches floating around for an AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() for the Linux kernel for that functuon used by the Linux software RAID code. It's been shhowing very nice performance gains with this function being used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5 and RAID6. The upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle is slated to merge this nice enhancement for benefiting AMD Zen 4 and newer or current Intel server CPUs with AVX-512.

Linux 7.4 looks like it will be a very exciting kernel update for AMD customers. On the AMD Radeon graphics side HDMI 2.1 is being enabled by default with the AMDGPU driver with the HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM features in tow. On the AMD Ryzen client CPU side, there will be Zen 6 tuning with the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

The SDL3 library commonly used for games and applications for cross-platform hardware and software abstractions now has upstream support for Huawei's HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony.

The beta release of Fedora 45 is out today and right on schedule for this wonderful Linux distribution.

Oracle christened Java 27 today with the OpenJDK 27 release reaching general availability (GA) status.

Sound Open Firmware as the open-source, vendor-independent audio DSP firmware stack and driver framework is out today with a new feature update.

The Firefox release train keeps on rolling. With Firefox 156 released, Firefox 157 is now in beta ahead of the planned release coming up at the end of September.

A new patch series being worked on is enhancing the Linux kernel's hibernation allocator to allow for faster performance when hibernating the system.

The Raspberry Pi Desktop on Raspberry Pi OS has seen a major overhaul to better modernize the desktop computing experience on the ARM64 single board computers.

A minor reporting issue on Linux that has gone unaddressed until now is for properly conveying the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) sizes on AMD Zen 5 processors.

OpenAPV as the open-source reference implementation of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec today saw its v1.1.1 release, succeeding v0.3.0 as the prior release.

AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP.

GNU Coreutils 9.12 released today with a mix of fixes, some new options, and various performance improvements to these widely-used set of core system utilities.

Valve just announced their long-awaited Steam Frame headset is now available.

While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we've seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaffected.

Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement.

The Linux kernel is going to see the removal of a number of recently deprecated ARM 32-bit platforms. Following the deprecation in Linux 7.3, removing the old ARM platforms will lighten the kernel by around 55k lines of code. But removing now unused drivers only relevant to those platforms will mean roughly a quarter million lines of code can be removed from the kernel source tree.

Earlier this month I wrote about a patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that addressed a lot of "hideous code" to make Linux kernel builds faster. A number of single-threaded bottlenecks were tracked down and fixed within the Linux kernel thanks to the assistance of AI. A second revision of those patches hit the mailing list this morning and there is hope they could be upstreamed for Linux 7.4.

Being merged after yesterday's Linux 7.3-rc3 release was an important fix for addressing a silent, user-space data loss bug that has existed in the kernel the past three years.

Out today is the third weekly release candidate of Linux 7.3 as this next kernel version works its way toward a stable release in the second half of October.

In addition to Usama Arif's recent Linux patches for addressing a major inefficiency within the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code, he also has a separate patch series destined for Linux 7.4 to further enhance the Zstd compression/decompression performance by avoiding redundant initialization.

The latest upstream file-system to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel is... BFS.

Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it's left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the ARCTIC Fan Controller is the best desktop fan controller for Linux and less than $10 USD. That open-source driver is now being dual-licensed to help with in bringing it to more operating systems.

It's been quite some time since hearing any news out of the Shotwell photo manager project for GNOME, but out today is Shotwell 33 with the long-awaited GTK4 port.