Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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While a proposal to replace the upstream X.Org Server with the XLibre fork was ultimately withdrawn prior to voting by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), a Fedora Copr repository has now surfaced for those wanting to try out this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

The folks at iXsystems announced this afternoon that nightly builds of TrueNAS 25.10 are now available for testing of this Linux-based network attached storage (NAS) operating system. With TrueNAS 25.10 there are more performance improvements, improved installation process, initial support for 400GbE networking, and other enhancements to this ZFS-focused platform.

The open-source Valkey key-value database that is forked from Redis is preparing for the big Valkey 9.0 feature release. Valkey 9.0-rc1 was issued today and comes with some exciting performance optimizations and other enhancements for this in-memory KV database.

Canonical is pursuing a rather ambitious baseline of Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V too require the RVA23 profile that will leave most existing RISC-V developer boards to using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04. They continue to pursue this RISC-V baseline and with more of the necessary alterations for it being prepped for landing into the Ubuntu 25.10 archive.

Oracle today released VirtualBox 7.2 as the newest version of this cross-platform virtualization solution.

One of the latest departures from Intel amid their ongoing restructuring is the official maintainer of the "habanalabs" accelerator Linux kernel driver that provides support for their range of Gaudi AI accelerator products.

KDE Gear 25.08 is out this morning as the newest feature release to this collection of KDE applications.

Sent out today was the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening around early October. There are a number of smaller DRM graphics driver improvements ready as well as continued work around the accelerator "accel" drivers for the increasing number of NPUs in devices.

Next year's LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite is set to better handle documents with restricted embedded fonts. This is for dealing with situations where fonts may have restricted licensing rights and where up to now LibreOffice Writer simply hasn't dealt with them correctly.

Tbe BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has continued in advancing this open-source platform with more fixes and other enhancements. The project published its July recap to outline the interesting changes made.

A change queued in drm-misc-next for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel cycle later this year is promoting the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support to be using the GSP firmware by default. This reflects the reality that using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware with Turing and Ampere GPUs should provide a better experience than the older firmware alternative with Nouveau.

SR-IOV for virtualization with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver will only be supported on the Arc Pro products and -- unfortunately -- not the consumer Arc B-Series graphics cards.

While it looked like Linux 6.17 was going to be a good baseline for support with upcoming Intel Panther Lake powered laptops given that this next kernel release ships with the Xe3 graphics enabled by default and other bits coming together, it looks like there is at least one late item only being presented today in patch form: a new "SoC Power Slider" feature as part of the Intel thermal driver for this new feature of Panther Lake SoCs.

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window was an optimization geared for ARM64 that could have a "16x reduction" in the number of calls. Unfortunately that commit ended up causing a rather significant regression for some systems that has now been addressed.

Google engineers today introduced KFuzzTest as a new lightweight framework for in-kernel fuzz targets for internal kernel functions. KFuzzTest aims to make it easier to exercise Linux kernel code paths that are difficult to do from the system call boundary.

A new version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler "ISPC" was just published for supporting that C programming language variant optimized for single program. multiple data (SPMD) programming that is optimized for Intel's various hardware offerings. While catering to Intel hardware, ISPC 1.28 notably adds new AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processor targets.

The IDXD Linux kernel driver used for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) support on recent Xeon processors is being cleaned up for some "not so happy code paths" after an Intel engineer uncovered memory leaks and other troubles with the open-source driver code.

It was nearly one year ago in the Linux 6.13 kernel that the ReiserFS file-system was dropped from the mainline kernel after having been deprecated in 2022. That dropped 32.8k lines of code from the Linux kernel but some documentation remnants of ReiserFS were mistakenly left in but now in the process of dropping those remnants for the defunct file-system.

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library release continues to get more exciting almost by the day. The newest feature being squeezed into this next release is a Whisper audio filter for making use of OpenAI's Whisper model for providing automatic speech recognition / transcription capabilities.

Last week Microsoft released new versions of WSL2 for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability affecting their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 implementation. Those details around CVE-2025-53788 are now public for this vulnerability that could lead to elevation of privileges.

The xf86-input-mouse driver for mouse support when using the X.Orrg Server on operating systems like the BSDs, Illumos, GNU Hurd, and Solaris is out with a rare update.

Following the discussion over potentially obsoleting/deprecating the Itanium IA-64 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), developers are discussing similar treatment for some of the other poorly-maintained CPU ports.

Go 1.25 is out today as the newest half-year update to this popular programming language. What I find most exciting with Go 1.25 is the new experimental garbage collector yielding 10~40% reduction in overhead.

Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%.

This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities.

While most Linux gamers are content using Valve's Steam Play (Proton) these days for Linux gaming, a new release of CodeWeavers' CrossOver is now available for enjoying other Windows applications and games on Linux as well as macOS. CrossOver 25.1 enhances the stability of the Microsoft Office office suite on Linux among other changes.

This Patch Tuesday the only new security fix merged to the Linux kernel is addressing a vulnerability affecting AMD SEV-SNP secure virtual machines.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie", Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 has been released as the state of Trixie while running atop Hurd rather than Linux.

Following the NVIDIA 580 Linux beta driver from just one week ago, today NVIDIA issued a new R580 series Linux driver build.

ZLUDA as the open-source solution bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware has been seeing a nice uptick in activity the past several months for its latest take on life. The latest feature merged to ZLUDA is the all-important kernel cache to help with performance.

The GCC 14 compiler had marked the Itanium IA-64 code as being obsolete and slated for removal in GCC 15. But then last year the Itanium port was un-deprecated with plans to "support this for some years to come." Now one year later it's back to talking about deprecating/obsoleting the Itanium IA-64 compiler code in GCC.

Intel has introduced another new PCI device ID to their open-source Linux graphics driver stack for signifying another likely product on the way based on the Battlemage BMG-G21 GPU.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week approved a number of additional features for the upcoming Fedora Linux 43 release.

The beta release of Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" is now available for testing of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base.