Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Among the many VFS pull requests merged as the initial material for the in-development Linux 7.4, the VFS IOmap pull introduced lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads. This improvement is benefiting checksumming on XFS with improved performance and lower resource usage.

Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN.

The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop.

Added to the Linux kernel last year was Coredump support via Unix domain sockets as an alternative to the pipe-based Coredumps. With code now merged for Linux 7.4, the core dumps via sockets has the potential of being much smaller thanks to sparse support. In extreme cases they can be 1% of the size without sparse support.

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel -- as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel.

Following last week's release of Plasma 6.8, the Plasma 6.8.1 point release is out today with dozens of bug fixes.

The Omarchy Linux distribution to date has been centered on x86_64 support for this Arch Linux distribution. Released today was Omarchy 4.5-RC1 and with this new version there is initial AArch64 support centered around Snapdragon X and NVIDIA N1X laptop support.

Linux 7.4 is seeing a new emulation function added for cmpxchg() for compare and exchange. This is being done so that two-byte cmpxchg() can be used in common Linux kernel code that is already natively supported on newer CPU architectures. The pull request notes though that some old CPU architectures might no longer be supported by the Linux kernel moving ahead.

Miguel Ojeda sent out his pull request of the new Rust kernel code slated for introduction in Linux 7.4. It's a big one this round due to updating the Zerocopy vendored library plus updating other Rust crates for the kernel.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 8.0 today as the 61st release of this BSD operating system.

AMD GAIA 0.25 is out this week as the latest feature release for this open-source project that began as "Generative AI Is Awesome" and is now going on a tag line of "AMD's open-source agent factory" in building/using local AI agents on AMD Ryzen AI hardware.

In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers.

With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system.

An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve's Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK.

Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results.

The Motorola 68000 "m68k" CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models.

Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well.

GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday's Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals.

Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue.

Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor.

There is yet-another-Linux-file-system attempt... An initial request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out this morning for BeamFS. The proposed BeamFS is a Reed-Solomon protected file-system.

The ARM64 code for Linux 7.4 is stripping away its support for big-endian kernel builds for 64-bit ARM.

Going back to July 2025 the open-source Radeon RADV Vulkan driver has offered experimental host image copy support with the API's VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. This has been for RDNA1 and newer GPUs while now GFX10 RDNA 1 GPUs have this extension enabled by default while also enabling experimental support for prior GFX9 era GPUs too.

Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing "attack" by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations.

The Linux 7.3 kernel is out today for an on-time release of this next stable kernel version.

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential computing with VMs has assumed the need to perform cache flushing when transitioning memory between KeyIDs used by the total memory encryption (MKTME) for unique AES encryption keys. But it's turned out to be unneeded and the Linux kernel is working now to reduce the excessive cache flushing.

The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4.

Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements.

Servo's August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser.

VirtIO-FS as the shared file-system for transferring data between guest VMs to/from a host server is showing some promising performance results with pending code for allowing synchronous queues rather than always being asynchronous.

The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too.

MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which "no human wrote any of its own code". Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system.

Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow's presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago.

Coming about the past few months has been Moose as a GNOME-aligned AI chat application built around GTK4 and libadwaita. It began as a local AI chat app for the GNOME desktop and grew to support cloud AI services as well. This past week marked the latest feature release for Moose.

Ahead of the Linux 7.3 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow, last minute workarounds were merged for the Samsung 990 PRO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe solid state drives.

With KDE Plasma 6.8 released earlier this week, KDE developers have begun working on more feature activity toward Plasma 6.9.

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 was released on Friday as the latest update to this community-maintained tablet/smartphone Ubuntu Linux platform. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.5 was also released as a maintenance update for the prior series.

Wine 11.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux. We are quickly approaching the point where this development work will culminate into the Wine 12.0 stable release in early 2027.

Just shy of two weeks since a dozen vulnerabilities were published for the X.Org Server and XWayland, more than one dozen vulnerabilities were made public today affecting multiple X.Org client libraries.

The GNOME OS Linux distribution to date has just been in GNOME OS Nightly form for tracking the latest nightly packages of GNOME in their current development form. GNOME OS Preview was announced today as their trek toward a stable GNOME OS in using the latest GNOME stable releases rather than nightly form.

The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here's a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version.

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Darrick Wong who stepped down as the XFS file-system maintainer in 2023 is now taking a step back from his other Linux kernel development roles after working on the kernel the past 23 years.

Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite.

The RPM v4 packaging format has been used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and its derivatives for more than two decades. With next year's Fedora 46 release, Fedora Linux may finally transition to the modern RPM v6 packaging format.

With pending code for Mesa, the LLVMpipe software-based Gallium3D/OpenGL driver could soon become faster on modern systems that support AVX-512. That's assuming the AI/LLVM-generated code is all in order.

Linux 7.4 is enabling support for a new Intel CPU feature for providing safety against possible denial of service attacks using Trust Domain Extensions "TDX" VMs. The new feature is Intel Instruction Timeout and previously in-development known as Notify VM Exit.

With the Linux 7.3 kernel due out for release on Sunday, I've continued running more benchmarks recently of this forthcoming kernel version and it looks great. In my Linux 7.3 testing of the Git state it's been looking great in testing on a variety of hardware shown across multiple systems. Recently I decided to try out this new kernel code on the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX workstation.

Intel software engineers today released the latest version of LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5, their containerized Docker stack providing a convenient AI/LLM experience atop Intel Arc Graphics hardware and born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative.

Merged today to Mesa is initial video acceleration support for the generic Zink Gallium3D driver built atop the Vulkan APIs. What this implementation allows is exposing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implemented atop the Vulkan Video interfaces.

For those eager to run the pristine Fedora 45 media, you will need to wait at least one more week.

Valve just dropped a new Steam client beta and it's a big one for Linux gamers.

A patch has been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list by an Intel engineer confirming that Nova Lake S and Nova Lake P processors with integrated graphics will support SR-IOV in conjunction with the Xe kernel graphics driver.

The open-source Memtest86+ program that is popular for RAM testing has expanded beyond the x86/x86_64 (and LoongArch64) world to now support memory testing on ARM64/AArch64 hardware.

3mdeb firmware engineers have been quite busy this year working on porting Coreboot and openSIL to an AMD Ryzen AM5 MSI motherboard and similarly getting openSIL and Coreboot up and running on a Gigabyte server motherboard for AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs. They haven't forgotten about their past projects though and today released an updated version of their Dasharo downstream firmware for the ASRock Rack SPC741D8-2L2T motherboard supporting 4th and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors.

AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now officially available as the newest six-month non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux.

For those using the generic ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver such as on a number of ARM64 Linux server platforms, if the CPUs support a "boost" mode it's disabled by default. But a patch from Huawei is now looking to enable CPU boost mode by default on Linux.

As an early improvement to Mutter to look forward to with GNOME 52 (Update: It will first appear in GNOME 51.2), the compositor is now tracking damage for secondary GPU copy buffers. This should improve the experience for those with multi-GPU setups such as some hybrid laptops.

Microsoft's newest software release for Linux is... Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to "secure Linux desktops" with Microsoft acknowledging that "more developers begin to use Linux desktops" and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support.