Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Python 3.15 is out today as the newest annual feature release for the Python programming language.

From a performance and enthusiast perspective, what I personally find most disappointing and puzzling with the imminent release of Ubuntu 26.10 comes down to its default compiler version.

For those making increased use of Linux's Zswap as a compressed RAM cache for swap pages amid these times of sky high RAM prices, a new patch series was posted providing some incremental performance gains for Zswap by batching the writeback I/O.

When booting the Linux kernel using UEFI SecureBoot, the kernel is put in the lockdown mode to restrict the ability to modify the running kernel image or leaking data from kernel memory. Kernel lockdown mode can also be manually enabled by the user/administrator. Among the limitations imposed in Linux's lockdown mode is no hibernation support. But that soon may be relieved with new patches proposed.

Over the past few months NVIDIA has been developing Boro as a new AI-assisted kernel development CLI written in Rust and focused on local AI for enhancing efficiency for kernel development.

AMD on Thursday sent out a final pull request of their feature work aiming to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window. This round of "few last odds and ends" is mostly about landing some bug fixes but of which there are a few worth mentioning.

For those making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux, one of the features coming to the MSM DRM kernel driver is static HDR support for DisplayPort outputs and eDP panels.

The latest proposal for the upstream Linux kernel is introducing infrastructure for AI agent resources. Initially these agent resources would be for a skill so AI agents can automatically add a "Fixes: " tag on relevant patches for noting the first problematic Git commit automatically that a patch fixes.

There is yet another feature to get excited about for this quarter's Mesa 26.3 release. Months in the making, the Valve-contributed VK_AMD_anti_lag support for the Radeon RADV driver was merged today for benefiting AMD Linux gamers as a nice improvement over the former implementation.

The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the "data=journal" mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028.

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

The curiosity into secretive semiconductor startup Rosaic Labs builds. Earlier this year it was noted that Intel was providing Rosaic Labs with access to its Atom technology with RTL code. There have also been rather mysterious x86 additions not from Intel or AMD (or Zhaoxin / Hygon) that given the timing may pertain to Rosaic Labs. News today is that Rosaic recently hired a long-time, Linux x86 developer veteran.

NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat's Danilo Krummrich presented at this week's LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI.

Sashiko that was built by Google engineers for agentic review of the Linux kernel code changes and powered by Google's AI models continues proving very valuable to kernel developers. In less than one year since they launched Sashiko for agentic AI code review, their results are quite fascinating.

For those interested in the SpacemiT K3 as one of the few RVA23 RISC-V SoCs readily available so far and in the likes of the K3 Pico-ITX system, more improvements for its upstream kernel support are coming in Linux 7.4.

While Linus Torvalds previously shot down plans for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in the mainline Linux kernel, Google engineers are hoping still to get that out-of-tree functionality upstream. They also would like to see PGO supported for Linux kernel modules rather than just the main Linux kernel image. Additionally, they hope to see limitations overcome around AutoFDO and Propeller optimizations of kernel modules.

Valve released tonight a new Steam client beta that includes some notable improvements for Linux users.

Back in February we featured LiteBox as a new Microsoft open-source project building out a Rust-based sandboxing Library OS. LiteBox leverages Linux virtualization security features and Rust language inherent benefits to provide the ability for sandboxing Linux apps on Linux, Linux programs on Windows, and other security-oriented deployments. Out today is the first tagged release of LiteBox for this open-source library operating system.

As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language.

FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve's Steam Frame headset.

NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes.

Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device.

Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity.

Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage.

One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn't been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6's IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems.

With the assistance of AI, another dozen security vulnerabilities affecting both the conventional X.Org Server as well as XWayland were made public this evening.

Amid multiple ongoing innovations being pursued in the Linux memory management space amid sky high RAM prices, a new patch series posted on Monday aim to enhance the Zswap performance for this compressed RAM cache for swap pages.

Back in March Canonical announced switching to ntpd-rs was its next target as part of transitioning more Ubuntu Linux system components to Rust-based implementations. This time synchronization package is available for testing in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release while it aims to be the default for Ubuntu 27.04.

Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Meta. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 "Polaris" graphics cards.

IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries.

Intel's LPMD project as the Low Power Mode Daemon for modern Intel Core Ultra desktops and laptops is quite important for achieving peak performance and optimal power efficiency. Here are some of Intel's own findings on the importance of LPMD for Linux gaming

With Blender 5.0 having nice Vulkan API support that's now grown mature, Blender developers are contemplating on potentially removing OpenGL support in Blender 6.0.

With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM.

Microsoft yesterday released WSL 3.0.2 as their latest WSL update since last week's WSL3 release with "WSLC" for promoting Linux containers on Windows to general availability. Some notable changes in WSL 3.0.2 include automatic virtual NUMA support and experimental support for sparse VHD storage.

Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler.

YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements.

TrueNAS 27 RC.1 released today in working toward the next major release of this Linux-based storage/NAS operating system from iXsystems.

Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle.

The Linux 7.4 kernel is set to introduce support for a new AMD Zen 6 security feature.

The open-source Auto-CPUFreq tool for active system monitoring and power optimizations is out with a new release for continuing to enhance battery life on Linux laptops.

The Mesa 3D driver stack has functioned well over the years without a formal governance model and just relying on an informal consensus approach for big changes. But on some occasions this informal handling has been less than ideal so upstream Mesa developers are now looking at establishing a formal governance model.

With today's very high memory prices, the Linux ZRAM code for compressed block devices in RAM has seen a rework to provide greater memory savings.

Going back to last year have been patches for booting the mainline Linux kernel on Pixel 10 devices while finally those Google Pixel 10 Device Trees and Tensor G5 SoC support is set to be mainlined for Linux 7.4.

The Mold high speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD recently has been going through a rewrite from C++ to Rust as well as having high ambitions of eventually becoming the default linker on Linux systems. Today marks the release of Mold 3.0 for this Rust-based high performance linker.

Back in May we spotted a Linux patch adding "Panther Lake R" as a rugged version of Panther Lake intended for "use in harsh environments". Since Linux 7.2 we have seen some bits of Panther Lake R driver support added while for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle there is additional enablement happening for this Panther Lake derivative.

A new patch series sent out from Qualcomm that aims to help at least the Snapdragon X series laptops is hardware-binned trip point support. Some Qualcomm SoCs are available in different multiple thermal/package bins with different junction temperature limits but otherwise being the same silicon. The new Linux patches are working to properly convey that information around the thermal limits for a given piece of silicon.

With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel the necessary changes to the AMD P-State driver are set to land for properly supporting the upcoming AMD Ryzen client processors based on the Zen 6 cores.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.3-rc7 as we work toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release in two weeks.

This week was the surprising and unfortunate decision of Siemens shutting down the OpenRadioss project as the four year old open-source project started by Altair Engineering with their prominent Radioss finite element solver. Siemens didn't just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it. Fortunately, there's a new community fork of OpenRadioss as OpenCourant.

Linux's Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" has already achieved nice performance gains for Linux in recent years by optimizing page reclaims and improves performance under memory pressure. The new MGLRU-FG patches aim to take things further.

In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer's conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency.

Last month Fujitsu formally announced their MONAKA CPU as a 144 core Arm-based server processor geared for AI infrastructure. This comes after two years of seeing various Monaka patches to the GCC compiler and other open-source components. Now that MONAKA is announced, we are seeing more patches surface for the Linux kernel with this week seeing several workarounds for MONAKA CPU bugs.

We are nearing the cut-off of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem material for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. AMD this week sent in another feature pull to DRM-Next that is moving over to mostly bug fixing but does contain the enablement of some new GPU intellectual property blocks for upcoming graphics hardware.

OpenSUSE developers have announced they are making ZUPT available on their Linux distribution as a solution for providing post-quantum backups. ZUPT combines backup creation, compression, integrity verification, and encryption all via this single open-source utility.