Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

With Ubuntu 26.10 that shipped in October there is a little talked about feature with upki revocation support beginning to roll out. Due to the late change, upki for certificate revocation was only enabled for Ubuntu 26.10's curl package but with more plans ahead.

This summer AMD acquired the company MEXT for their AI-powered predictive memory technology to make flash memory such as NVMe SSDs behave more like DRAM. AMD MEXT with EPYC servers allows for flash memory as DRAM tiering and uses a predictive AI engine for handling the tiering in an effective way. There is a Linux driver but this is one of the few offerings in the AMD space that isn't open-source as part of their typical open ecosystem approach.

During the AMD briefings for 6th Gen EPYC SP7 availability, they did already tease next-gen EPYC processors.

In addition to today's announcement of AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 availability, complete with reviews of the AMD EPYC 9996 256-core flagship and EPYC 9686F 96-core 5.3GHz part, AMD also announced the EPYC Embedded 9006 Series SP7 processors.

Blender 5.3 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

Backed by Samsung, Square Enix, and others, KORA Systems announced KORA OS today as a Linux distribution built for the age of "intelligent PCs".

With the assistance of AI/LLMs, eight more security vulnerabilities were made public today for the X.Org Server. These issues also end up affecting the XWayland code too.

Linux memory management expert Lorenzo Stoakes at Arm who has been contributing to the kernel since 2014 is stepping away from some reviewership roles within the Linux kernel due to all of the noise from the flood of kernel patches resulting fro AI/LLMs.

While there aren't any processors released yet with AI Compute Extensions (ACE) or AVX10.2 quite yet, the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by AMD and Intel have now posted their ACE v2 and AVX10.3 specifications.

With openSUSE Leap making use of the modern Agama installer developed by SUSE engineers, the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed is now preparing to make the same transitioning in replacing the YaST Installer.

With Fedora 45 having shipped last week, developers are turning more of their attention to Fedora 46 that will debut by the end of next April.

KDE Plasma 6.8.3 is out today as the newest bug-fix release for last month's major Plasma 6.8 debut.

The exfatprogs 1.4.4 release was issued today for these user-space open-source programs for managing exFAT file-systems on Linux.

Mesa 26.3 is out today as the fourth quarter Mesa3D feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The Firefox 160.0 release builds are now available as the latest bi-weekly stable update to Mozilla's web browser.

Since the beginning of the year there have been AMDGPU LLVM back-end patches for GFX13 as AMD's next-generation graphics IP. This is most likely for RDNA 5 graphics. Now out today are the GFX13 patches finally surfacing for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver.

Darling is the software project more than a decade in development that is designed to run macOS binaries on Linux. This macOS compatibility layer for Linux is now gaining more brisk developments as it turns to AI/LLMs to assist in this creation.

The Linux kernel's ChaCha symmetric stream cipher code has long had an AVX-512 optimized code path but it was catering to the early generations of Intel CPUs with AVX-512 (Skylake) that suffered from down-clocking under use. But now slated for arrival with Linux 7.5 is tuning the code to perform better on today's AVX-512 Intel and AMD processors that don't suffer from this limitation. In turn the ChaCha performance is as much as 99% faster with current-generation AMD Zen 5 processors.

MSI's latest Ryzen motherboards with AMD 800 series chipsets feature a new capability marked as Mystic Light for RGB lighting controls of the motherboard as well as compatible graphics cards and cases. MSI Mystic Light control software is only offered for Microsoft Windows but thanks to an open-source developer with the help of Claude Code, a Mystic Light open-source driver is being worked on for the Linux kernel.

Merged for Linux 6.13 back in 2024 was multigrain timestamp support for being able to switch between coarse and fine-grained change/modification time reporting on a per-file basis. This is useful if caring about accuracy more than the once-per-jiffy timestamps on files and was originally devised as a way of addressing NFS caching issues. A limitation of multigrain timestamps though has been the lack of user-space to know whether a file's timestamps are multi-grain or not.

Samsung's Galaxy XR headset runs on Android XR by default with its own downstream kernel patches. A user leveraging AI with multiple LLMs has now drafted an initial set of patches getting the Galaxy XR headset working on the mainline kernel along with bringing up the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 "Halliday" SoC that powers this VR/XR headset.

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on enhancing the Vulkan Video support in the Mesa ANV driver for better open-source video acceleration support.

Linus Torvalds just released the second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.4 with some notable bug fixes and other changes routed in past the merge window. It's another big one in the AI era.

Even before the Linux v7.4 merge window was over, there were already two pull requests of drm-misc-next material targeting for what will be Linux 7.5. This week already saw the third drm-misc-next pull request of more feature patches targeting this next kernel version.

Of the many exciting changes in Linux 7.4, one of the exciting out-of-the-box performance improvements is the new "PerfOpt" functionality for AMD SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics. AMD PerfOpt can deliver some nice iGPU performance improvements especially for AI/LLM workloads. With today's Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel release there are a few tweaks to the PerfOpt code in the IOMMU area.

Yunsilicon is a Chinese semiconductor startup founded in 2021 that is working on producing high performance networking adapters and DPUs. Over the past month has been their first foray into posting patches to the Linux kernel mailing list and working to get their networking hardware supported by the mainline Linux kernel.

How time flies with the GCC 17 feature development set to end next week and transitioning over to a bug fixing focus.

This week's batch of x86 fixes have been sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel releasing later today.

OpenIndiana Hipster 2026.10 is out today as the newest six-month update to this operating system based on Illumos and with the lineage tracing back to the fruitful Sun OpenSolaris days.

Out today is GNU Automake 1.20 with the new --enable-jobserver option and opting for GPLv3+ licensing.

While FreeBSD has been working to improve its desktop and laptop experience, that work isn't yet shipping in released form for the OS installer and other ongoing efforts. Now there's a new desktop FreeBSD distribution on the scene with HyprBSD providing a Wayland-based desktop experience and with the Linux binary compatibility layer even an easy route to gaming with Steam.

Kmorph aims to provide reboot-less kernel crash recovery for Linux systems and can yield as little as ~2 second downtime for recovering the Nginx web server or other important services in the case of a kernel crash.

With Plasma 6.8 stable approaching one month old, KDE developers continue ramping up work toward Plasma 6.9. Here is some of the interesting work they've been up to so far in November.

Vulkan 1.4.368 is out as the newest weekly spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API.

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.2022 on Friday night as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution. Given the rampant AI/LLM-fueled bug reporting and security research, Azure Linux 3.0.2022 ends up incorporating more than 470 security fixes for different CVEs across the many open-source projects making up Azure Linux.

Given the recent Linux 7.3 upstream kernel release, the Asahi Linux project published a new status report to outline recent code they have upstreamed to the mainline kernel as well as other efforts taking shape in their downstream codebase.

FreeBSD 15.2 Beta 1 is out today as the release dance kicks off in working toward the next installment of FreeBSD 15.

After years of work, ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for Windows program and driver compatibility now has an initial USB 3.0 driver stack in place.

An interesting technical detail I noticed today from the latest AMD Linux activity is that Zen 6 processors apparently are featuring a RISC-V based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) where in the past it was an ARM-based core.

In addition to a FAT32 optimization yielding as much as a 265x improvement that was merged for the Linux 7.4 cycle and separately another big FAT32 improvement expected for Linux 7.5, merged this week as part of the non-MM fixes for Linux 7.4-rc2 was another big FAT32 performance optimization.

With the Linux kernel having phased out i486 CPU support and dropping old AMD Elan SoC code along with removing other obsolete and stagnate 32-bit x86 hardware support, some x86 32-bit clean-ups are proceeding along with being able to make the kernel depend unconditionally now on some features.

FEX 2611 is out for running Linux (and Wine) x86/x86_64 games/applications on AArch64 Linux. FEX 2611 brings JIT improvements while also waiting for the Linux kernel to align with the AArch64 specification and Windows on ARM and macOS Apple Silicon behavior around a particular register's usage.

A few months back were discussions of a Linux firmware HWE package for Ubuntu to carry updated firmware blobs under the hardware enablement (HWE) umbrella. Plus also splitting up the monolithic linux-firmware package for easing of firmware updates. Those plans didn't materialize in time for the official Ubuntu 26.10 release but are now being pursued for Ubuntu 27.04 and may then be SRU'ed into Ubuntu 26.10 and potentially Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

Linux kernel developers are looking at dropping the RT_GROUP_SCHED feature that is used for group scheduling of real-time tasks using cgroups.

The sound subsystem is seeing a "unsurprisingly high amount" fixes and device workarounds/quirks for this weekend's Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel release.

OpenCV 5.0 debuted back in June with a rewritten DNN engine and many other exciting improvements for this widely-used computer vision (CV) library. Out today is OpenCV 5.1 with tons of fixes and other incremental improvements to this important code.