Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

The EROFS read-only file-system popular for embedded systems, containers, and other use-cases has resorted to temporarily disabling its LZ4 rolling decompression support due to data corruption concerns.

For those wanting the freshest Debian 13 "Trixie" install media, Debian 13.7 is out today in bundling up all the latest bug and security fixes.

A Void Linux maintainer has orphaned more than 100 packages he maintained over a dispute of the project's AI policy for LLM-generated text.

Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later.

GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It's quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week's GNOME 51 desktop release.

Releasing on Friday was the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.38 as the user-space open-source driver components for leveraging the Core Ultra Neural Processing Unit (NPU) under Linux in conjunction with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver.

A possible future enhancement being considered for Ubuntu Long Term Support "LTS" releases is the introduction of a linux-firmware-hwe package as part of their hardware enablement (HWE) stack.

Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out.

For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release.

Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations.

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he's posted some "crazy" patches delivering some significant gains.

The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems.

Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm.

The Linux Mint project today published their August 2026 development report, including some new applications added to their XApp collection.

Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed -- widely speculated to be with Valve's involvement -- that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the bulk of that work will now be in place and enabled by default.

While still ultimately working toward Git 3.0 with SHA-256 hashes by default and the "main" branch name by default, among other breaking changes (and potentially coming around the end of 2026), Git 2.56-rc0 is now available for testing.

Intel's Thermald released on Thursday as the newest update to this daemon for thermal monitoring on Intel hardware that was also recently extended for beginning to support Qualcomm/ARM hardware too. The main change with Thermald 2.5.13 is adding back Intel Wildcat Lake platform support after it was accidentally removed in the prior release.

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 13 compiler in production that debuted more than three years ago, GCC 13.5 released today with more than 265 bug fixes. GCC 13.5 also caps off the GCC 13 series as the last planned point release.