Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting.

ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this "open-source Windows" project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility.

Coming in as a late pull request ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window closing this weekend were the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates that have now made it into Linux Git.

This week was extremely eventful in the GNOME space with GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter now largely wrapped up and the merge request opened to facilitate the code review. There was also the announcement of the half million Euro Sovereign Tech Agency investment into Flatpak. Plus on the application side were a few more interesting advancements this week.'

As an update to the May story about California's age verification law may end up exempting most Linux distributions, that AB-1856 bill has finally passed!

In time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve last night released the first preview of SteamOS 3.9 for the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and other devices. This early preview comes with some exciting software updates.

The Unsorted Block Images "UBI" layer in the Linux kernel for NAND flash memory tracking and wear leveling finally has the notion of per-device wear-leveling thresholds.

The voting is over and there is a winner now known in the much-debated Debian General Resolution voting over an AI policy for the Linux distribution.

Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE's fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) subsystem changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are centered around code clean-ups and improvements being made as a precursor toward TrenchBoot support.

DXVK 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop the Vulkan API as a key component to Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3.

Google Summer of Code 2026 featured a project working on GPU reset recovery for GNOME's Mutter compositor. GSoC has now wrapped up and the project overall was largely successful although some outstanding work remains. In this last week the merge request has been opened to conduct code review on this GPU reset recovery implementation for GNOME.

The Khronos Group is closing out the month of August with the Vulkan 1.4.361 specification update.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Chris Mason is departing Meta. In the process of doing so, he is also stepping down from his co-maintainership role of the Btrfs file-system.

The USB and Thunderbolt changes have been merged for Linux 7.3. Two changes stand out for me in the USB subsystem code with Linux 7.3. First, the kernel arguably being long overdue for checking USB-C cables capabilities whether they support alt-modes. Second, a new low-latency USB4STREAM option for lower latency data transfers between USB4-connected systems.

The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches these days causing additional maintenance burden for these obsolete drivers.

The latest beneficiary of Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency is Flatpak where more than half a million Euros will be invested over the next two years to help with app sandboxing and other functionality.

Canonical today published Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS as their first point release in the long-term support series for the "Resolute Raccoon".

Over the past year and a half a number of open-source drivers in the Linux kernel have been orphaned as a result of departures from the company. The impact has ranged from the Intel CPU "coretemp" temperature driver being orphaned without a maintainer to other lesser known Intel drivers. Another lesser known Intel driver is now being orphaned with no longer having a maintainer at the company: the Intel Specific Absorption Rate Driver.

It was back in May that the surprising event happened of AMD posting HDMI 2.1 FRL patches for their open-source AMDGPU Linux driver as part of their broader HDMI 2.1 bring-up. For years the open-source HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU was blocked by the HDMI Forum but whether it was due to Valve or some other event, the code was finally unblocked. While it's been part of the kernel since Linux 7.2, it's been disabled by default -- except that is now changing.

Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes.

Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump... to ROCm 10.0.

With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space.

For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems.

Werner Koch announced today the release of Libgcrypt 1.12.3 with various bug fixes and more exciting are the performance improvements.

Merged back in 2023 was Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for H.265 decoding. But it's been slightly out of compliant with the Vulkan spec, which is now fixed with the newest code for Mesa 26.3 by engaging the HuC firmware.

The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies.

The LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain merged overnight better support for the nearly decade-old AMD Zen 1 processors and also helps with Zen+ and Zen 2 processors too. This latest work thanks to the open-source community is for providing more informed instruction scheduling around PDEP and PEXT that end up being quite costly for these original Zen processors.

The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window.

The Asahi Linux crew working to bring Linux support to Apple Silicon hardware is out today with a new status update on their initiatives, largely around Apple M3 bring-up as well as some M4/M5 achievements.

Patches sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today can provide much more efficient Zstd compression and decompression by addressing a very unfortunate oversight in the existing code.

KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2024 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary.

AMD's compiler team is proposing a new LLVM Clang compiler option, -fenable-readonly-thp for implementing instruction Transparent Huge Pages "iTHP" at compile and link-time. With -fenable-readonly-thp, they are finding more performance out of SPEC CPU, Geekbench, and other workloads from the arranging of 2MB segment alignment at link time and allowing the executable text range can be promoted to huge pages.

Earlier this month when benchmarking six Linux distributions on the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", the performance was strangely slow on Fedora Workstation 44. When digging further into it, the performance loss was with Fedora 44 using Tuned-PPD by default where as other Linux distributions default to Power Profiles Daemon. Ultimately, after Red Hat engineers got involved, was found to be a bug within the Intel P-State kernel driver exhibited by Tuned-PPD. The latest Linux kernel already has a fix in place and will be back-ported to Fedora 44.

Intel is preparing to introduce a new Linux driver named "BFF" for dealing with aging processor silicon where bits may become stuck over time.

Armbian as the Debian/Ubuntu-derived distribution that provides an optimized platform for ARM and RISC-V single board computers is out today with a major update.

The Linux kernel's FUSE code for enabling file-systems in user-space is enjoying some nice speed boosts with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

LibreOffice 26.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature update to this leading open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

The AMD GFX1250 IP is what's used by the new Instinct MI450 series accelerators. That's been around within the Linux kernel, AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, and related codebases the past year. Interestingly merged yesterday is a new "gfx1250-strict" target.

A SiFive engineer posted patches today for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adding -mtune=native -mcpu=native support for the compiler on RISC-V.

All of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel were merged this week.

Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren't yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option.

Last year a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel with "multikernel" Linux can run on dedicated CPU cores whole sharing the underlying hardware resources. Linux 7.0-mk2 released today with the kernel patched for this multi-kernel behavior.

COSMIC Epoch 1.7 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based open-source desktop environment with development led by System76.

LLVM 23.1 was released today on-schedule as the first stable release of the LLVM 23 series as the H2'2026 update to this open-source compiler stack.

The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce's xfwm4 window manager into "xfwm4-gl" for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating.

The latest criticism of the increased burden placed on open-source software project maintainers caused by AI / LLM agents is around too many bug reports effectively causing a "denial of service" attack on project maintainers.

Apple today unveiled the M6 as their first 2nm SoC design while also introducing the M5 Ultra as their first quad-die product.

The pull requests for the existing Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver as well as the new modern "NTFS" drivers have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel cycle. Besides bug fixes, most notable among these NTFS file-system drivers are Windows System Compression "WOF" read support for the modern NTFS driver.

The Linux Device Mapper "DKM" framework for mapping block devices to higher-level virtual block devices doesn't see any major new features for Linux 7.3 but there are many bug fixes, including code clean-ups carried out by AI.

The in-development Linux 7.3 kernel is marking Nova Lake Xe3P graphics as stable in being enabled by default and no longer hidden behind the "force probe" flag. While on-by-default, there still are some features that have yet to land like the DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM functionality.

KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted all of the sound feature updates last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides the continued AI/LLM-generated patch churn, the sound code for Linux 7.3 sees a lot of new hardware support.

The HID subsystem updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel merge window. Among other hardware additions, the 2026 Valve Steam Controller is seeing initial kernel driver support.

A patch series being worked on for the ath11k mainline wireless networking driver for Qualcomm WiFi 6 / 802.11ax chipsets is yielding 7x lower latency or 2.2x throughput at identical latency.

The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel's internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it's being further restricted.

While Firefox 152+ already offers experimental JPEG-XL support, Mozilla formally announced today their plans for officially shipping JPEG-XL image format support in the Firefox web browser.

GNU Emacs 31.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular text editor.

VKD3D 2.1 was released today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet as the upstream Wine project for getting Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API.

Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric.

With the in-development Linux 7.3 is support for discovering and enumerating support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions. Plus there are improvements to its control flow integrity Shadow Stack handling, CPU context switch support for QoS tagging, using UEFI runtime services for restart and powering off, and other improvements.

Merged last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel were all the hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver updates for Linux 7.3, which included supporting several more ASUS desktop motherboards, a few AIO liquid cooling products, more Lenovo system support, and per-CCD temperature monitoring on AMD EPYC 9005 server processors.