Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Systemd 258 is nearing release with many big changes to this init system / service manager. Systemd 258-rc3 was released today with some last minute fixes while also now adding that the next release, systemd 259, will face increased Linux system requirements.

AMD's GPUOpen team just released the FidelityFX SDK 2.0 development kit and with it is now the inclusion of the FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling tech to complement the existing FSR 2 / FSR 3 support.

Following the release of Mesa 25.2 from two weeks ago, Mesa 25.2.1 is out now as the first point release. Mesa 25.2.1 is quite heavy on bug fixes and some other notable back-ports from Mesa 25.3-devel.

MoltenVK 1.4 is available today for this Vulkan portability implementation that layers the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers for allowing Vulkan games/apps to run across macOS, iOS, and tvOS devices.

With the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are aiming to have a better ARM64 experience with their generic desktop ISO thanks to a new improvement they have been working on called Stubble.

LibreOffice 25.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source office suite that is one of the most comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux and other platforms.

Given the promising AMD Strix Halo benchmark results on Linux 6.17 following the recent merge window and early regression fixes landing in the kernel, I was curious to see how Linux 6.17 was fairing on more powerful AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a brief look at some of the performance improvements found running EPYC 9005 "Turin" with the latest Linux 6.17 development kernel compared to Linux 6.16 stable.

One of the new hardware drivers expected to appear in the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year is the "us144mkii" USB sound driver for supporting the TASCAM US-144MKII USB audio interface.

AMD's GPUOpen HIPRT 3.0.9ba63f3 released today as the first update since HIPRT 2.5 shipped near the beginning of the year. HIPRT is AMD's ray-tracing library built around their HIP Interface for making it easier to enable ray-tracing workloads for HIP-based software like Blender.

Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser.

While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

Tinygrad 0.11 is out as the newest version of this deep learning framework maintained by Tiny Corp.

As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage.

Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs.

While the Linux v6.17 merge window only wrapped up earlier this month, Apple Silicon DeviceTree "DT" updates have already begun queuing for the Linux 6.18 merge window that will happen in October.

Intel's newest contribution to the upstream LLVM compiler stack is XeVM as their Multi-Level Intermediate Representation "MLIR" dialect catering to modern Intel graphics processors.

Patches were posted on Monday for Kernel Stack Watch, a new lightweight debugging tool for detecting kernel stack corruption in real-time on Linux.

Google engineer Roman Gushchin has proposed the ability for the Linux kernel to customize the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs.

We still don't have much confirmed information on AMD's GFX1250 that has come to light in recent months due to being developed for their AMDGPU shader compiler back-end within LLVM. AMD GFX1250 surfaced in LLVM activity and the past few months has been seeing more additions made. A notable change committed today for LLVM is that the number of user Scalar General-Purpose Registers (SGPRs) has doubled.

Following the AMD ZenDNN 5.0 release from last year's EPYC Turin launch that brought big performance improvements for CPU-based inferencing with this open-source library compatible with Intel's oneDNN, today marks the availability of ZenDNN 5.1 as the next update.

Kdenlive 25.08 is out today as the newest feature release for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source video editor. In addition to a number of new features, there are also many bug fixes including more than 15 crash fixes.

Git 2.51 is out this Monday as the newest milestone for this widely-used, distributed version control system.

One of the areas worked on by AMD Linux engineers recently to better optimize the Linux kernel on AMD Ryzen platforms is for lowering the power consumption in S5 state due to some devices not being put into a low power state when the system is powered off. Sent out today was the sixth iteration of these patches.

The Firefox 142.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement due out on Tuesday. Firefox 142 isn't bringing many notable changes but one is likely to cause some contention around Firefox Extensions.

Merged today to Mutter ahead of next month's GNOME 49 release is an important improvement for those making use of Variable Rate Refresh (VRR).

It's been 15 years already since the Illumos project was formed as based on the OpenSolaris codebase after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and closing down OpenSolaris. Illumos Cafe is a new effort akin to BSD Cafe aiming to be a resource and helping to reinvigorate interest in Illumos-based platforms.

The SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed new code for revising how it selects the high performance GPU in multi-GPU systems.

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime oneAPI/OpenCL release, a new version of the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" has been released for Windows and Linux.

The newest hardware offering announced by Raspberry Pi today is a 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2.

Linux 6.17-rc2 is now available to facilitate the latest weekly testing of the Linux 6.17 kernel.

Last week I ran some early Linux 6.17 benchmarks showing some improvements and regressions when testing with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo". Since then there have been some performance regression fixes along with addressing other early fallout from this fresh kernel code. Repeating the tests now on the latest Linux 6.17 Git state ahead of today's Linux 6.17-rc2 tagging is showing some nice improvements and fixes from the code churn this week.

One of the new exciting security features with Linux 6.17 is Attack Vector Controls as a means of easier managing CPU security mitigations depending upon the system/server use-case. It drastically simplifies CPU security mitigation management for only activating the mitigations relevant to intended use. With the Linux 6.17-rc2 kernel due out later today, Attack Vector Controls refines its logic around the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigation.

Merged this week as part of the sound fixes for the Linux 6.17 cycle and now to be back-ported to the stable kernel versions is a headset detection fix/workaround for the Framework 13 Laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series.

Released last month was Shotcut 25.07 with many improvements to this popular open-source and cross platform video editor. Released today was Shotcut 25.08 to provide more fixes atop that latest video editor release.

While a proposal to replace the upstream X.Org Server with the XLibre fork was ultimately withdrawn prior to voting by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), a Fedora Copr repository has now surfaced for those wanting to try out this alternative X Server implementation on Fedora Linux.

Released on Friday were the Linux 6.16.1 and Linux 6.15.10 stable kernel point releases. Notable there is an Intel i915 kernel graphics driver performance regression fix with some users having reported as much as a 30% performance hit on prior Linux kernel versions.

In addition to yesterday's GNOME 49 beta release marking the 28th birthday of GNOME, a lot of other exciting GNOME developments materialized this week.

Building off yesterday's Wine 10.13 release following the month-long summer release hiatus, Wine-Staging 10.13 is out today with some 300 patches atop the upstream codebase.

KDE Plasma developers this week focused a lot on improving performance, fixing bugs, and enhancing the user interface. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly report to highlight all of these interesting Plasma changes for the week.

The GNOME 49 beta release is out this Friday evening as the next stepping stone on the path to GNOME 49 in September. Making the GNOME 49 Beta release even more notable is that it's the 28th birthday of GNOME.

One month has passed since the Wine 10.12 release. While typically new Wine development releases are on a bi-weekly release cycle, summer holidays typically interfere for one release per year with the Wine project. Thankfully Wine 10.13 is out today to start the cycle anew.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is a great and popular Arm single board computer, some elements of getting the hardware support upstream have lagged behind just as was also the case with prior generations of the Raspberry Pi SBC. One of the enablement bits now inching its way toward the mainline kernel is Ethernet support on the Raspberry Pi 5.

The Ubuntu Release Management Team is pursuing a new concept called "Dangerous" Desktop Images that will ship leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu daily development images.

Intel FRED has been seeing Linux software enablement going on for the past three years. FRED is the Flexible Return Event Delivery that overhauls CPU transitions between privilege levels with a goal of lower ring transition latency and more robust software support. Unfortunately it has a late breaking incompatible change to the architecture and the Linux kernel is now being patched for it.

Barring any issues from coming up in the near future, it looks like DM-PCACHE will be submitted for the Linux 6.18 cycle later in the year as a high throughput, low latency cache for DAX-capable persistent memory devices.

Some old and unmaintained drivers for Linux's Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) support are being marked as deprecated for eventual removal, including the generic VFIO platform driver.

One of the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) patch series that has long been in the works is on a standardized Color Pipeline API. This is for improving advanced color management handling on Linux and aligns with what Valve and Igalia engineers have been doing with AMD-specific color management implementation on the Steam Deck and their Gamescope compositor. Sent out today by AMD was the 11th iteration of these Color Pipeline API patches.

As of today the Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now under a feature freeze ahead of the stable release due out in October.