Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

A change proposal has been raised to compress the initrd by default using Zstd compression rather than XZ. This change would help provide some disk savings as well as speeding up the boot process on modern systems with Fedora Linux.

Sent out this morning as part of this week's "locking/urgent" pull request is a performance regression fix ahead of today's Linux 6.16-rc5 release. This latest performance regression in the Linux kernel is around the new Futex code merged this cycle with a big performance hit being observed in scheduler benchmarks.

Nearly one year after the merge request was first opened, back-ported now to the X.Org Server 21.1 stable branch are a number of GLAMOR 2D acceleration fixes around OpenGL ES 2.x as well as supporting OpenGL ES 3.x shaders for this generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL for the xorg-server and XWayland.

Intel software engineers continue ironing out their Linux support for Bartlett Lake.

Sent out today by longtime Freedreno/MSM open-source Qualcomm GPU driver developer Robin Clark are the main set of MSM kernel graphics/display driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. There are several exciting feature additions coming to this next kernel version for those relying on Qualcomm graphics capabilities.

DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux.

SUSE developers working on their new operating system installer "Agama" have been making steady progress and on Friday debuted Agama 16. With Agama 16 they have moved from X.Org to Wayland for powering their installer UI along with a number of other changes.

It shouldn't be particularly surprising as Fedora Linux has always been known for shipping with a leading-edge compiler toolchain, but the formalities have now been submitted for Fedora 43 to ship with the latest GNU and LLVM toolchain components.

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 kernel expected to be released tomorrow, a round of x86 platform driver updates were merged this week with several fixes as well as some new device additions.

It was another exciting week in the GNOME space to kick off July.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly summary to highlight all of the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the past week.

Building off Coreboot 25.03 is now the availability of Coreboot 25.06 for further enhancing this open-source system firmware project that continues to see new hardware improvements -- predominantly for Google Chromebook devices but also more Intel platforms and other hardware -- as well as new capabilities to further rival proprietary BIOS solutions.

The Vulkan working group is celebrating the US Independence Day with graphics API independence in today publishing Vulkan 1.4.321 that comes with several new extensions.

A handful of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted yesterday to Linus Torvalds for merging ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 release due out on Sunday. Today they were merged.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project just published their June 2025 status report to outline recent progress on this innovative platform.

Sent in today for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle as part of the input subsystem fixes is enabling support for the Acer Nitro Gaming Controller (NGR200).

Intel today sent out a batch of new kernel graphics/display driver code for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening in a few weeks. There is now DRM Panic support for the Intel i915 and Xe kernel drivers, Wildcat Lake "WCL" display enablement, and experimental flip queue support for Lunar Lake and Panther Lake hardware, among other changes coming for the Intel drivers in Linux 6.17.

The Debian project is hoping to address challenges of mentoring newcomers to contribute to the Debian Linux distribution as well as making it more known that open-source contributors can do more than just work on Debian packaging but that help is needed for documentation writing, web page creation, sorting out licensing issues, finding project sponsors, and more. Debian is also looking to attain OpenAI sponsorship or open-source funds from other large language model (LLM) / AI providers to help Debian developers for those wanting to use AI to help accelerate their Debian workflows.

The first release candidate of Redis 8.2 is now available for testing of this popular in-memory key-value database. Redis 8.2 is building off the recent Redis 8.0 release that ended up going tri-licensing with the AGPLv3 stemming from developer/community feedback.

Three years since the Bash 5.2 release and one year since the first alpha release, GNU Bash 5.3 was released overnight as the newest step forward for this popular shell used on Linux and other operating systems.

Perl 5.42 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular programming language that comes one year after the prior Perl 5.40 release.

A proposal raised for Fedora 43 would end support for allowing UEFI installations on MBR-partitioned disks for x86_64 systems in the Anaconda installer. This would enforce a requirement on using GPT partition tables for all UEFI-based Fedora installations in the x86 world.

A nice improvement was merged today to the X.Org Server for benefiting the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code when using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Linux 6.17 is expected to clear out some final remnants of the OpenMoko Neo 1973 and Neo FreeRunner smartphone support from that Linux smartphone effort from two decades ago.

The Linux support for the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld continues to be improved upon thanks to the option of having Steam OS on this alternative to the Steam Deck.

Sent out today was the newest drm-misc-next pull request of changes built up over the past week for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. The drm-misc-next material is the usual random assortment of DRM display/graphics driver changes and core improvements, which this week includes some TTM eviction work.

Libreboot 25.06 released this week as the newest version of this Coreboot downstream focused on shipping only with free and open-source components. But due to the strict open-source nature of Libreboot, it continues to primarily see support for long outdated platforms.

Steam Survey issues prevented the survey results from being posted on the evening of the 1st as is traditionally done, but the results were just uploaded now to the Steam website. Steam on Linux usage dipped slightly but overall remains healthy with much excitement still around the Steam Deck and SteamOS efforts.

Following last month's release of Debian Installer Trixie RC1 as the installer for the upcoming Debian 13.0 release, a second release candidate was issued today for testing.

The ZLUDA open-source effort that started off a half-decade ago as a drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs and then for several years was funded by AMD as a CUDA implementation for Radeon GPUs atop ROCm and then open-sourced but then reverted has been continuing to push along a new path since last year. The current take on ZLUDA is a multi-vendor CUDA implementation for non-NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads and more. More progress was made during Q2 on this effort.

Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs, AMD software engineers today posted patches for review on the "amd-ai-engine" accelerator driver. This new AMD AI Engine driver is for supporting the IP found on their Versal adaptive SoCs.

A few days ago Wayback was announced as an X11 compatibility layer for X11 desktops environments leveraging a rootful XWayland server. While currently experimental, the hope is that it will be production-ready next year and Alpine Linux is looking at using it by default for its X11 environment.

Prior to the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel there was the DG1 graphics processor that served primarily as the initial developer vehicle for facilitating Intel's modern discrete GPU push. DG1 ended up being in the Intel Xe MAX GPU for a small number of laptops and then there's also been a select number of DG1 graphics cards surfacing on eBay in the years since. Only now in 2025 is the upstream Linux kernel driver set to enable Intel DG1 graphics out-of-the-box for modern Linux distributions.

GNOME Papers has been in development as a modern GTK4-based document viewer. There have been many improvements made to Papers and now ahead of the GNOME 49 release in September, it's been approved to replace Evince as the official document viewer of the GNOME desktop.

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API. A new merge request is further enhancing OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability by supporting the GL_NV_timeline_semaphore extension.

The newest Arm SoC seeing Linux kernel patches working their way toward the mainline kernel is the Axiado AX3000 as a security processor designed for cloud data center, network gear, and more.

AMD today submitted their initial batch of "new stuff" for queuing into DRM-Next of their kernel graphics/compute driver changes they have prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle opening in a few weeks.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has decided to "double down" their investment in OpenJDK Java for Ubuntu Linux.

The Gentoo Linux project ended the month of June by releasing new install media.

The Mesa 25.2 release that will likely be out as stable in August should have nice initial support for the newest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, namely used by the GeForce RTX 50 series, with the NVK open-source driver for Vulkan usage.

NVIDIA previously warned CUDA users that CUDA 12.x is the last for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs. NVIDIA overnight now officially confirmed that the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPU support is going to end in their Linux driver with the upcoming NVIDIA R580 Linux driver series.

Over the course of last month on Phoronix were 240 original news articles written by your's truly as well as another 24 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. On top of that last month also marked the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com.

The digiKam 8.7 professional photo management software has been released for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source solution for digital photography.