Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job.

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director.

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17.

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices.

Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs.

Version 25.08 of the Genode OS Framework has been released for this open-source operating system framework designed for software safety and security.

Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices.

Released overnight in beta form is OBS Studio 32.0, the next feature release for this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform application for desktop streaming/recording.

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.15 LTS through Linux 6.17 Git kernel performance using the latest stable and development kernels compared to the Long Term Support (LTS) kernels over the past four years. For having hardware support back to Linux 5.15 I was using an AMD EPYC Milan-X server. In those benchmarks there were some nice gains and even from Linux 6.16 to 6.17 Git was around a 3% geo mean improvement. So I was curious to run some benchmarks on the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors to see if there was similar uplift there.

The engineers over at iXsystems announced today the beta release of TrueNAS 25.10 "Goldeneye" as the latest iteration of this formerly BSD-based OS that has transitioned to making use of the Linux kernel while unifying both the TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offerings.

While the Asahi Linux project has faced some setbacks, such as most recently with Alyssa Rosenzweig leaving the project and still working to bring-up M3/M4 support, the upstreaming effort by Asahi Linux developers to get their changes to the upstream Linux kernel continues.

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list was the patch series for introducing the AMD ISP4 driver to the mainline kernel. This supports the image signal processor IP that to date is found with HP's Strix Halo powered ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. With time, future AMD Ryzen laptops will also likely be leveraging this ISP technology for offloading more webcamera work from the CPU, but for now the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is the main beneficiary of this open-source driver.

The newest monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 25.10 is now available for testing and is the final planned monthly snapshot prior to the October release of the Questing Quokka.

The newest feature addition for Mesa 25.3 is enabling support 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) within the LLVMpipe software rasterizer.

While Linus Torvalds doesn't too often like new kernel options being enabled by default, one area where it has proven beneficial and otherwise an oversight by those configuring their own kernel builds is the architecture-optimized crypto algorithm implementations. Some will enable support for different kernel crypto algorithms only to forget or be unaware that there are CPU architecture specific implementations that can also typically be enabled for much better performance over the common code. Google engineer Eric Biggers has been cleaning this up and BLAKE2s is the latest receiving treatment.

Ahead of the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 release, SUSE engineers are busy finishing up work on their new "Agama" operating system installer. Agama 17 is now available as what will be the installer powering SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 installations or a version very similar to this latest milestone.

This week's drm-misc-next pull of feature updates to the small Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver bring a few updates worth pointing out ahead of the Linux 6.18 cycle.

LF Networking, the networking group within the Linux Foundation, announced from the Open-Source Summit Europe today the release of Essedum 1.0. Essedum 1.0 is for integrating AI into networking environments.

Last year Intel and AMD formed an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group "EAG" in collaboration with key partners. The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group is to collaborate and innovate further around the x86_64 ISA. With AMD and Intel in agreement, FRED (Flexible Return Event Delivery), AVX10, and Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) are some of the early areas where they are finding common ground and interest.

With Mesa 25.2.1 recently having been released, the prior quarter's Mesa 25.1 series is now drawing to a close. Excellent Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.9 as one last point release for Mesa 25.1 before ending this branch.

An initial set of Linux kernel patches were posted this week for allowing USB Rust kernel drivers to be developed for Linux.

Introduced earlier this month with the Vulkan API 1.4.325 spec update was the introduction of the untyped pointers extension with VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers and SPIR-V's underlying SPV_KHR_untyped_pointers for providing an alternative option to strongly-typed pointers. As of yesterday the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now supporting this untyped pointers extension.

Generative AI "GenAI" is now being used in part to help determine the Linux kernel patches that should be back-ported to prior current stable Linux kernel releases such as the all-important Linux Long Term Support (LTS) branches.

There's a follow-up to yesterday's surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She's now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers.

The NOVA open-source kernel graphics driver continues getting slowly built-up for the NVIDIA RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs that sport the GPU System Processor (GSP) for easing the hardware initialization and management of modern NVIDIA GPUs within the mainline kernel. This Rust-written kernel driver now has patches pending for booting up the NVIDIA GSP to its RISC-V active state.

QEMU 10.1 was released overnight as the latest iteration of this open-source machine emulator that plays an important role in the Linux virtualization stack.

As another very unfortunate setback for the Asahi Linux project moving forward after Hector Martin left the project as did Asahi Lina pausing work on open-source Apple driver development, Alyssa Rosenzweig announced today that she is stepping away from the project following the successes in bringing up Apple M1 and M2 graphics drivers for Linux.

A number of yet-to-be-completed changes/features have been delayed from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44 while permission is granted for a few features to still land late in the Fedora 43 cycle.

While the Framework 13 was upgraded earlier this year with a motherboard upgrade for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point", the larger Framework 16 has been stuck in the Zen 4 era. But today Framework announced a new upgrade path for this 16-inch modular laptop for the Ryzen AI 300 series as well as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 discrete graphics.

LLVM 21.1 is out today as the first stable version of the LLVM 21 compiler stack. This half-year stable release to the open-source LLVM compiler software brings new hardware support, new language features, and a lot of other enhancements throughout this massive and widely-used codebase.

While the ATI Radeon 9000 / X300 / X500 / X600 series "R300" GPU support has long been unmaintained on the Microsoft Windows driver side, thanks to the open-source community the Linux driver support keeps going for the old ATI R300 GPUs with that driver also supporting the X700 / X800 "R400" and X1000 "R500" series graphics cards too. Two more OpenGL extensions are now wired up for the old R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa.

Mir 2.22 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical project providing libraries for building Wayland-based shells/compositors. Mir 2.22 brings some notable improvements around NVIDIA GPU/driver support as well as initial preparations for Rust programming language support.

AMD and IBM announced a joint collaboration today around quantum-centric supercomputing. IBM's quantum computing expertise is to be paired with AMD's AI and HPC technology like their Instinct accelerators to help accelerate quantum-centric supercomputing.

Linux's classic initial RAM disk "initrd" support might finally be on its way out of the Linux kernel depending upon feedback from stakeholders. Long live initramfs.

Red Hat engineers have been rewriting Greenboot in the Rust programming language to replace the Bash-written version of this generic health check framework for systemd, bootc, and RPM-OSTree based Linux environments. That Rust rewrite of Greenboot is now cleared for appearing in the Fedora Linux 43 release.

GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 was announced this evening as the newest incremental update to this FreeBSD 14 based operating system focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box desktop experience. Notable with this new GhostBSD release is now shipping a Gershwin community preview for this desktop environment focused on providing a Mac OS X like user experience, complete with GNUstep usage.

OpenZFS 2.4-rc1 was released a few days ago with faster encryption performance using AVX2 and other enhancements. For those just looking for bug fixes and expanded Linux kernel compatibility, OpenZFS 2.3.4 is out today as the newest stable point release.

On this 34th birthday since the Linux kernel was announced, coincidentally there's a new patch series out there for one of the oldest drivers: the floppy disk driver.

Red Hat's performance team is now shipping TuneD 2.26 as the latest feature release for this tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux systems to monitor and adaptively adjust the power/performance characteristics of different system components and more.

Meson 1.9 released this weekend as the newest feature update to this build system / build automation tool that works well across different software platforms. With Meson 1.9 there is enhanced Rust support, introducing Swift and C++ code interoperability, and other enhancements to this increasingly used alternative to the likes of CMake and Autotools.

The Open Platform for Enterprise AI "OPEA" that is a sub-project of the Linux Foundation and backed by a wide variety of different organizations to provide open solutions for Generative AI announced today their newest GenAI code examples.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel will begin upstreaming hardware enablement for the ASPEED AST2700 as the next-gen baseboard management controller "BMC" that will likely appear in the majority of future generation servers.

The Linux Foundation used Open-Source Summit Europe 2025 happening in Amsterdam to announce the formation of the Developer Relations Foundation "DRF". Separately, they also announced from Amsterdam that DocumentDB has joined the Linux Foundation.