Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU.

Among the pull requests sent out today now that the Linux 7.3 merge window is open are the SMP improvements for this next kernel version. Standing out among the SMP code are some enhancements for helping reduce latency and ultimately enhancing real-time Linux performance.

Firefox 154 is now available as the newest monthly update bringing a few new features, enhancements, and other alterations to this open-source web browser.

In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3.

KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release.

Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work, out of the blue he announced a new -ck patch series today with updated MuQSS code.

The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures.

AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features.

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.

The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases.

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option.

Today marks thirty three years since the Debian Linux distribution was started by the late Ian Murdock.

Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available.

The Linux kernel's binfmt_misc functionality allows non-native/custom files to be run directly such as for Windows EXE files to be handled by Wine or JAR files to be handled by the Java runtime. For the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window, the miscellaneous binary formats support is being extended so a binary type can be matched programmatically and the interpreter determined on a per-exec basis. BPF programs can also then be attached to dynamically choosing an execution environment on a per-binary basis.

For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards.

Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler.

The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set.

Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.

RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita.

Ahead of the presumed Linux 7.2 stable kernel release tomorrow, some last minute sound fixes/quirks have been merged for this next kernel version.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements.

Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not.

AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target.

D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK's focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton's Direct3D 12.

For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs.

Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro's biggest release to date.

With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday.

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there will be the fair scheduler becoming the default.

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight.

It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler.

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements.

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software.

With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.

In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards.

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA.

The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel.

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4.

While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era.

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components.

Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update.

George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware.

While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core.

Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release.

Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base.

Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed.

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware.

One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2.

It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker.

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements.

LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet more features in tow.