Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As quite a Valentine's Day treat, the long-in-development dynamic triple buffering support for GNOME's Mutter compositor was just merged ahead of next month's GNOME 48 desktop release!

A change queued up by an Amazon engineer ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will ensure that PlayStation 5 controllers on Linux load with the correctly desired driver.

Fwupd 2.0.6 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source solution for system and peripheral device firmware updating under Linux.

As a follow-up to the news from last October of Ubuntu considering Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation, that work remains ongoing with some improvements since having been prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release but it remains overall an active affair.

Stemming from the ongoing discussion around the issues raised with Fedora's Flatpak package of OBS Studio and how Flatpaks should be prioritized within the GNOME Software app center/store, the future of RPM support within GNOME Software raised.

If you wish to show your appreciation for all of the Linux hardware reviews, Linux benchmarking, and open-source news provided on Phoronix each and every day, you can join Phoronix Premium this Valentine's Day weekend at a discounted rate.

Vulkan 1.4.308 was quietly released last week and besides a few fixes what makes it interesting is the provisional VK_NV_present_metering extension.

Valkey as the open-source in-memory store forked from Redis is preparing for its next feature release.

TrueNAS 25.04 beta was released on Thursday as another step toward unifying the TrueNAS CORE OS derived from FreeBSD and the Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE.

The OBS Studio open-source screencasting and streaming app has called out Fedora's poor Flatpak packaging of the application and is threatening as going as far as legal action if it isn't addressed.

The Zed code editor for macOS and Linux systems has proven to be quite popular for this Rust-based editor started by the creators of the Atom editor. Their latest feature being introduced is Zeta as an open-source edit prediction model to further enhance this code editor with AI capabilities.

The latest round of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted today for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel. Besides fixes for the current kernel, it was announced today that the on-disk format for the file-system is now considered frozen in its latest development "master" branch.

Last week Hector Martin resigned from upstream maintainership of the Apple Silicon code for the Linux kernel. At the time he was still going to contribute to the Asahi Linux project's downstream kernel but in a surprise move today, he has decided to resign as project leader of Asahi Linux.

Submitted today via the x86 platform driver updates ahead of Linux 6.14-rc3 on Sunday are some Lenovo ThinkPad patches that may interest some users.

For those preferring the AOM-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder over SVT-AV1, Rav1e, or other AV1 encoders, Google this week unveiled AOM-AV1 3.12.

As a quick follow-up to the article earlier today... The Wayland Color Management and HDR protocol support is now merged to upstream Wayland Protocols!

While there has been the recent drama over upstream maintainership over Apple Silicon / Asahi Linux code, Sven Peter is continuing to move things forward for the upstream kernel and this week sent out a set of Apple SoC DeviceTree updates intended for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.

Similar to the Autonomous Performance Level Selection and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) support already found within the Intel P-State and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers for their modern processors, NVIDIA engineers are working on similar support for the CPPC CPUFreq driver that can benefit their Grace processor.

Today could finally be the day. In the works for 5+ years, the Wayland color management and HDR protocol additions look like they will finally be merged in the coming hours.

SUSE/openSUSE has a long history with the AppArmor Linux security module going back to the Novell days and when AppArmor was originally known as SubDomain. OpenSUSE/SUSE and Ubuntu Linux have been big proponents of AppArmor for Linux security but now moving forward on new installations of openSUSE Tumbleweed it will be defaulting to Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS along with new point releases for its derivatives had been scheduled for release on Thursday. But a last minute issue has delayed this release.

Mesa 25.0-rc3 is out today as a rather large weekly release candidate to Mesa 25.0 that will be debuting as stable later this month.

Given the recent patch proposal to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the 250Hz vs. 1000Hz comparison on some modern desktop hardware.

In addition to the recent release of SysVinit 3.14 and systemd continuing to tack on new features, the GNU Shepherd system/user service manager written in Guile Scheme is out today with a new release.

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers.

A patch has been proposed for the Linux kernel to add a C1 demotion knob via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/c1_demotion for more control over lower power state handling for recent Xeon Scalable processors. This C1 demotion knob can help with the performance of some workloads for Intel Xeon servers but at the cost of increased power consumption.

The open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver within Mesa known as "TURNIP" has now matured enough that it's going to be built by default when compiling Mesa for ARM64/AArch64 hardware.

Intel on Tuesday released Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 as their newest feature release of this open-source daemon to help monitor and control the CPU/SoC temperature within laptops and other modern Intel hardware.

Python 3.14 Alpha 5 is out today as the latest of many development releases in stepping toward the Python 3.14 stable release in October.

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved.

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis.

Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack.

FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec.

Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop.

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process.

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win.

Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard.

For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.

GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.

Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).

KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project.

You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature.

A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz.

Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options.

Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.14 is now available for testing as a rather light update for the week.

A set of patches sent out on Saturday by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello seek to adjust the Linux behavior for laptops/handhelds during AC plug/unplug events during s2idle to better match that of Microsoft Windows 11.

This week besides the drama over Apple Silicon maintainership for the upstream Linux kernel, in recent days there has also been a number of rather subtle changes to the maintainership of several Intel Linux kernel drivers.

Intel's ISPC project as the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as this C language variant for Single Program, Multiple Data programming on CPUs and GPUs is out with a new release.

This week was the dramatic decision by Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin to step down as upstream kernel maintainer for the Apple Silicon (ARM) code following friction with other kernel developers over Rust affairs within the kernel. He still intends to contribute code to Asahi Linux's downstream kernel and Linus Torvalds has already merged the patch dropping him as an upstream maintainer. Now a new co-maintainer has volunteered to help oversee the Apple Silicon code for the mainline kernel.

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has updated his set of patches implementing FineIBT-BHI mitigations for toughening up the FineIBT kernel protections previously introduced. This FineIBT-BHI code depends upon newly-merged code for the LLVM Clang compiler as part of the compiler defenses.

Following the release of Wine 10.1 on Friday for kicking off the new bi-weekly development releases after last month's Wine 10.0 stable release, Wine-Staging 10.1 is out today to get things moving once again for this experimental flavor of Wine.