Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

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.