Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Following the Vulkanised 2025 presentation how NVIDIA is finding great success with Vulkan for AI / machine learning and already competitive to CUDA in some areas, Red Hat engineer and DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie began exploring the potential of Mesa Vulkan drivers for AI inferencing. He was successful in using the Intel ANV, NVIDIA NVK, and Radeon RADV drivers for Vulkan-based AI inferencing while for the Radeon hardware tested is where it's showing the most potential (performance) at the moment and for even competing with the ROCm compute stack.

A new Linux driver patch series posted by AMD today introduces a new kernel driver "SFS" for Seamless Firmware Servicing. I hadn't heard AMD talk about Seamless Firmware Servicing at any previous events but it appears to be supported for current-generation AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors.

With the Linux 6.16 kernel that will be debuting as stable as soon as this coming Sunday there are some minor performance benefits for the Radeon integrated graphics with the incredible Strix Halo SoC. Here are some comparison benchmarks of Linux 6.15 vs. Linux 6.16 Git for the AMD Radeon graphics of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop.

The Ubuntu Concept ISO images that contain experimental patches -- or "hacks" to make things work -- to enable Ubuntu Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops is out with a fresh spin. The new Ubuntu Concept ISOs move to using the Linux 6.16 kernel while also enabling some additional Snapdragon X laptop models.

An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD's Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag.

Well known open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has landed his latest set of 16 patches into Mesa 25.3-devel for enhancing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Notable here is getting OpenGL sparse textures working on the latest Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4/GFX12 graphics cards.

One of the CPU architectures continuing to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel but rarely ever seeing any code activity is the SPARC64 architecture port for the once-interesting processors from Sun Microsystems.

Timur Kristóf as a contractor on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he's been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he's been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it's a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default.

Born out of his work on developing the GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) over the past decade, one of the recent initiatives by GNOME developer Christian Hergert has been on Foundry, a new "IDE in a box" of sorts and with CLI tooling complementary to the GNOME Builder IDE graphical environment.

Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components. In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella. Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer.

Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions.

The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well, and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features.

In addition to Blender 5.0 supporting HDR on Linux when using the Vulkan API and with Wayland, another important high dynamic range (HDR) milestone landed this week into Blender: the ability to both import and export HDR videos.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series.

With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17.

For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed.

Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives.

Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor.

The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs.

The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment.

The first release candidate of Python 3.14 is now available for testing as what will be this year's big feature update to this popular scripting language.

The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Intel-based Macs as release-blocking.

Sven Peter today sent out all of the Apple SoC driver and DeviceTree (DT) updates aiming for the soon-to-happen Linux 6.17 merge window.

While downstream Ubuntu is the most popular Linux option for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered "Windows on Arm" laptops, that's because of their concept images containing a number of "hacked packages" to lead to a decent user experience. But for upstream Debian Linux the prospects of running it on Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptops is less than ideal with a number of problems persisting -- similar to other Linux distributions focused on running the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream software.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week voted to approve a number of new features/changes for the upcoming Fedora 43 release.

A late change to the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end that may help efforts particularly for the ROCm compute support on RDNA3 hardware is finally merging support for using true 16-bit instructions and registers on all RDNA3 GPUs.

Arm engineer Karunika Choo has been leading the effort to enable support for the latest Mali GPUs within the open-source and upstream "Panthor" DRM kernel graphics driver for Linux. This work includes being able to enable the latest Mali 5th Gen GPUs on this open-source graphics driver.

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today announced the availability of Fwupd 2.0.13 for handling firmware updates on modern Linux systems.

A nearly five year old merge request was merged today to Mesa Git for Q4's Mesa 25.3 release. This merge transitions the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) from using the DRM "legacy" kernel mode-setting APIs over to the modern atomic mode-setting interfaces.

Intel Linux software engineers have recently been busy working on Wildcat Lake support primarily for the kernel drivers while now that work has been extended to Mesa for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers.

While we await AMD to officially release ROCm 7.0 as the next major release of their open-source GPU compute stack, out this afternoon is ROCm 6.4.2 as the newest stable point release. ROCm 6.4.2 expands the officially supported Radeon consumer GPUs as well as bringing various fixes and enhancements to the various libraries and components making up this AMD GPU compute ecosystem stack.

Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement.

The EROFS read-only file-system ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window has been working on metadata compression support to allow for even smaller container image sizes but at the cost of higher I/O latency.

Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clear Linux testing over its decade in existence as a high performance Intel Linux OS.

The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations.

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large.

HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others.

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser.

The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now available for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week.

Among the fixes merged today ahead of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 6.16-rc7 test kernel release is a lone patch on the "sched/urgent" side to fix possible bogus load average values. Reported system load averages within the kernel's scheduler code could potentially be off going back to May of 2021.

NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors.

Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC32 checksum performance.

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.

SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream.

In addition to Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" making some nice performance improvements for modern AMD GPUs with hardware ray-tracing, the emulated ray-tracing code path in RADV for primarily older GPUs has seen some improvements merged this weekend. In fact, so significant that from one merge request is around 40% faster performance for the Quake II RTX game with the emulated RT handling.

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.

For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version.

The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end.

The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser.

KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows.