Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel's merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes -- including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are "completely overwhelmed" due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models.

Rust 1.98 released today and is headlined the debut of new algebraic floating-point methods.

KMSCON 10.0.2 debuted today as the latest update to this leading user-space terminal emulator for Linux systems. KMSCON is built around Linux's KMS/DRM interfaces and the most viable alternative to date for in-kernel VTs.

With today's release of KIO-Snapshot, KDE software now has stable integration of Btrfs file-system snapshots.

FSCRYPT is the Linux file-system encryption framework for supporting per-directory, transparent encryption. FSCRYPT so far is used by the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and CephFS. For Linux 7.3 there is an important clean-up to the FSCRYPT code to simplify it while also opening the door for new features moving forward into future kernel versions.

The PreSonus Quantum 2626 is a high-end, Thunderbolt 3 based audio interface. PreSonus just maintains Windows and macOS drivers for this high-end audio interface while now an open-source Linux driver has been posted after being independently developed via reverse engineering.

RPM 6.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this package management system. With RPM 6.1 comes a number of features and improvements as well as a new release model.

For those preferring the tradition of waiting for the first point release of a new Mesa feature release before upgrading, Mesa 26.2.1 is available today with a healthy round of bug fixing.

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out some 32-bit time code persisted but that is now being fixed with Linux 7.3.

KDE Gear 26.08 was released today to deliver the latest collection of KDE application updates.

Following today's release of XWayland 26.1 RC1, X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 was tagged. This xorg-server 26.1 release is aiming to become the first major feature release in five years, succeeding the xorg-server 21.1 series.

In addition to the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4.

Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance front with Linux 7.3.

Go 1.27 was released today as the newest version of this programming language from Google's Go team.

David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system feature updates today that target the Linux 7.3 merge window. Among other changes are more performance improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of XWayland 26.1. This is the first new tagged feature release since XWayland 24.1 back in 2024! As such there are many new features in tow.

All of the SoC updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that include adding some new SoCs as well as deprecating several older 32-bit ARM platforms. In turn with those platforms deprecated, "hundreds" of drivers are now orphaned in the process.

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently relayed a request to see some fresh PHP performance benchmarks. So here are some fresh numbers of PHP 7.4 through the latest PHP 8.5 code plus the current Git state of PHP 8.6 ahead of the official PHP 8.6.0 release later in the year. With PHP 8.6 is also a fresh look at the JIT performance enabled too.

The exciting set of scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 merge window.

Covered first on Phoronix back in June was an AMD Linux patch for introducing a new "low power" CPU core type to complement their typical "performance" cores and their "efficiency" cores like with Zen 4C/5C. That low power core is presumed for some Zen 6 clients and that integration is now merged for Linux 7.3 as well as unifying the Intel/AMD CPU core type handling.

The newest Raspberry Pi product to launch is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Programming Jig.

Modular, the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame, has open-sourced their Mojo systems programming language! This comes following the recent acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm.

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_read_xattr() kernel function.

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system.

Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as an upgrade-friendly and Linux-compatible 2-in-1 laptop. The Framework Laptop 12 was originally powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" low-end processor while now Framework is adding Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" as an upgrade or for new Laptop 12 orders.

In addition to the POWER/PowerPC code adding Rust kernel support, the main set of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have now been submitted. Most notable are early fixes toward eventually allowing the experimental Rust GCC back-end to be used as an alternative to the official rustc compiler with LLVM code generation.

It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames.

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 46.

When it comes to the watchdog driver changes for Linux 7.3, standing out is the new Lenovo driver for their upcoming ThinkEdge AI edge computing systems.

Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK.

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES.

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system.

Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory management behavior.

The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed.

A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP.

AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU.

Among the pull requests sent out today now that the Linux 7.3 merge window is open are the SMP improvements for this next kernel version. Standing out among the SMP code are some enhancements for helping reduce latency and ultimately enhancing real-time Linux performance.

Firefox 154 is now available as the newest monthly update bringing a few new features, enhancements, and other alterations to this open-source web browser.

In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3.

KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release.

Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work, out of the blue he announced a new -ck patch series today with updated MuQSS code.

The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures.

AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features.

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.

The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases.

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option.

Today marks thirty three years since the Debian Linux distribution was started by the late Ian Murdock.

Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available.

The Linux kernel's binfmt_misc functionality allows non-native/custom files to be run directly such as for Windows EXE files to be handled by Wine or JAR files to be handled by the Java runtime. For the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window, the miscellaneous binary formats support is being extended so a binary type can be matched programmatically and the interpreter determined on a per-exec basis. BPF programs can also then be attached to dynamically choosing an execution environment on a per-binary basis.

For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards.

Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler.

The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set.

Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.

RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita.

Ahead of the presumed Linux 7.2 stable kernel release tomorrow, some last minute sound fixes/quirks have been merged for this next kernel version.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements.

Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not.