https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Device-Mapper https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Device-Mapper 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... Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:22:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DP-2.1-ALPM-v5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-DP-2.1-ALPM-v5 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... Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:25:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-68-Better-Remote-Desktop https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-68-Better-Remote-Desktop 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... Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:00:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Sound https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Sound 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... Tue, 25 Aug 2026 05:51:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-HID https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-HID 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:33:34 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/ath11k-7x-Lower-Latency https://www.phoronix.com/news/ath11k-7x-Lower-Latency 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:29:27 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-AF-ALG-Restrictions https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-AF-ALG-Restrictions 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:17:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-JPEG-XL-2026-Plans https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-JPEG-XL-2026-Plans 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:43:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-73-early-benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-73-early-benchmarks Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions. Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:38:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Emacs-31.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Emacs-31.1-Released GNU Emacs 31.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular text editor... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:55:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/VKD3D-2.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/VKD3D-2.1-Released VKD3D 2.1 was released today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet as the upstream Wine project for getting Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:34:10 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DRM-Fabric-Proposal https://www.phoronix.com/news/DRM-Fabric-Proposal Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:26:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-RISC-V https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-RISC-V 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:12:56 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-HWMON https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-HWMON 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... Mon, 24 Aug 2026 05:56:08 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-XOR-RAID6-Benchmark https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-XOR-RAID6-Benchmark Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:38:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-EFI https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-EFI The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:05:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-DRM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-DRM The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:10:13 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-Job-Objects https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-Job-Objects Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:41:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Preps-Toward-FAMFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Preps-Toward-FAMFS The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:20:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-5-Mispredict-Cost https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-5-Mispredict-Cost An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:56:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-New-Crypto-AES-APIs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-New-Crypto-AES-APIs Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:42:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Input https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Input The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:30:27 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/SMB3-CIFS-Maintainer-Change https://www.phoronix.com/news/SMB3-CIFS-Maintainer-Change There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:31:41 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-eCryptfs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-eCryptfs The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:24:17 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-Goes-EEVDF https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-Goes-EEVDF The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:42:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-HFS-Linux-7.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-HFS-Linux-7.3 In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:01:47 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS3-Vulnerability-For-Root https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS3-Vulnerability-For-Root A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:42:26 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RDNA-4m-Firmware-Published https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RDNA-4m-Firmware-Published In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:08:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-Video-Mesa-26.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-Video-Mesa-26.3 The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!.. Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:55:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-sched-ext https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-sched-ext The extensible scheduler framework "sched_ext" that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:43:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Tuned-2.28 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Tuned-2.28 Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat's tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems... Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:18:39 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-laptop-16-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-laptop-16-2026 While the past few weeks have been quite busy with the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro testing with that all-new laptop model and paired with Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", at the same time Framework Computer has begun shipping some updated components for the Framework Laptop 16 laptop. If looking for a bit more GPU compute power hor larger form factor than the 13-inch model, the Framework Laptop 16 can now be equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU as well as a haptic touchpad and one-piece keyboard for improving the input experience. Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:54:05 -0400 Michael Larabel