Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

With the wonderful KDE Plasma 6.8 having shipped just more than one week ago, KDE developers are beginning to go heavy on new features for Plasma 6.9.

OBS Studio 33.0 is out tonight as the latest major update to this popular open-source and cross-platform video recording and live streaming application.

The slab pull request was just merged for Linux 7.4. For end users nothing too incredibly exciting but there is one change that does yield a 24% throughput improvement in a benchmark exercising the kernel's memory management subsystem.

HPFS is the latest file-system driver for the Linux kernel facing possible removal. The High Performance File-System (HPFS) was developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2.

Seeing a Vulkan API driver pull request this morning for introducing a new "Borealis" driver ID caught me by surprise as it was the first time I was hearing of such a driver. It turns out to be a fork of the Asahi Linux project's HoneyKrisp driver in Mesa for Apple Silicon hardware.

The UXL Foundation announced today the release of oneDNN 3.14 as the latest feature update to this library providing optimized deep learning operations for software like PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. While oneDNN began as an Intel software project, making this version notable is beginning to see AMD Zen CPU optimizations land in oneDNN proper.

The power management subsystem updates were merged this week for Linux 7.4 along with the related ACPI and thermal control updates too.

OpenSSL 4.1 stable is out today with new AVX-512 optimizations, other performance improvements, and finally retiring Windows on Itanium and Windows CE support.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.366 is out and representing the past two weeks of specification fixes, clarifications, and one new Vulkan API extension.

The release dance is underway for FFmpeg 9.1 as the newest feature release for this widely-used open-source multimedia library.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel that included a few new drivers.

LibreSSL 4.4 released on Thursday as the newest release of this decade-old OpenSSL fork maintained by OpenBSD developers.

As a follow-up to the article in September about a Linux patch for fixing under-reported AMD Zen 5 TLB sizes, that work is now merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel.

Adding to all the exciting performance optimizations and other improvements for Linux 7.4 is an exciting workqueue improvement. It's not too often getting to talk about "10 to 100 times faster" software improvements.

Fedora 45 wasn't released this week as its ideal early release target due to not having a release candidate build in time for last week's Go/No-Go meeting. At today's Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 45 was delayed by at least one more week due to open blocker bugs.

A request for comments (RFC) was sent out last night on the Linux kernel mailing list in seeking to clean-up the AMD Zen microarchitecture detection within the kernel. This is for enhancing the kernel where there are code paths specific to a certain generation of AMD Zen processors or select generations such as Zen 3 through Zen 5 CPUs. AI was leveraged in helping to clean-up this AMD Zen code in the Linux kernel.

Back in August Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner's company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available.

The scheduler updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel to deliver several nice scheduling enhancements.

Linux user-space for several years had shadow stack support for hardware-enforced control-flow enforcement in defending against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks. Intel Tigerlake and newer CPUs or AMD Zen 3 and newer have the necessary hardware shadow stacks support. Shadow stacks have been effective for helping user-space software fend ROP attacks while now there is new work toward bringing shadow stack support for kernel space on Linux.

The Mesa 3D graphics driver project has loosened its rules laid out in their AGENTS.md for AI agents to permit AI/LLM assistance in generating code comments and commit/patch messages, as long as a human is ultimately reviewing/editing it in the end.

Myrlyn, the package manager GUI that began as YQPkg during a SUSE Hack Week and has evolved quite well, is out with version 1.1 as the first new feature update since the beginning of the year.

Valve landed a patch in Mesa 27.0 and to be back-ported to current Mesa stable series to satisfy more games running under Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton for working on AMD GFX8 GPUs like Polaris.

Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched on mainline but at least in some cases there are patches undergoing testing or queued in "-next" branches. The CVSS scores are as high as 9.0.

The x86/bugs pull request was merged this week for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable here is adjusting the CPU security mitigations for AMD Zen 6 processors.

There are notable patches by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes that have begun landing in Linux 7.4 for speeding up the Linux kernel build process. This work can provide some significant reductions in the Linux kernel build time.

Linus Torvalds continues with his recent uptick in kernel patches himself, assisted in part by AI with Claude Code. Merged today was removing the historical and unsafe __get_user() and __put_user() kernel functions.

The latest Linux kernel cryptographic subsystem performance work carried out by Google engineer Eric Biggers is migrating x86/x86_64 and RISC-V optimized implementations of different AES modes into the lib/crypto kernel crypto library to enjoy faster performance there.

PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 were just released to fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow for unauthenticated remote code execution. Server administrators are advised to update immediately.

AMD recently published patches for the Linux kernel to implement AOD, an AMD Overclocking driver for Ryzen processors. Linux enthusiasts have long sought an official AMD Ryzen CPU overclocking driver for Linux akin to Ryzen Master on Windows and it's finally coming, at least from the kernel driver perspective.

Of the many VFS changes to be merged for Linux 7.4 is now closing files synchrously for close_range, exec, and exit calls. In turn when needing to close many file descriptors this provides for much lower latency than the status quo.

Google Chromebooks already have a mandate for nice Fwupd support with the Linux Vendor Firmware (LVFS) while now there is work on improving the Android integration for Fwupd/LVFS.

Kernfs as the functions/frameworks used for creating pseudo file-systems on Linux like sysfs and configfs have seen some nice scalability work carried out by Meta. After Meta engineers discovered some system daemons getting stuck for minutes on their massive fleet of servers, they uncovered some scalability bottlenecks within Kernfs that now look to be resolved for Linux 7.4.

AMD HIPRT 3.2 released today as the first update to this HIP ray-tracing library since the beginning of 2026.

The XFS file-system updates have landed for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel.

Dynamic PAMT has made it for Linux 7.4! Dynamic PAMT is a new feature for reducing memory overhead on Intel TDX servers where there may not be many concurrent virtual machines occupying a majority of the system. In today's world with high memory prices and tight availability, Dynamic PAMT provides nice memory overhead reduction for modern Intel Xeon servers.

System76 developers just released COSMIC Epoch 1.11 as the newest point release to their Rust-written open-source desktop environment catering to their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Among the many VFS pull requests merged as the initial material for the in-development Linux 7.4, the VFS IOmap pull introduced lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads. This improvement is benefiting checksumming on XFS with improved performance and lower resource usage.

Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN.

The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop.

Added to the Linux kernel last year was Coredump support via Unix domain sockets as an alternative to the pipe-based Coredumps. With code now merged for Linux 7.4, the core dumps via sockets has the potential of being much smaller thanks to sparse support. In extreme cases they can be 1% of the size without sparse support.

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel -- as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel.

Following last week's release of Plasma 6.8, the Plasma 6.8.1 point release is out today with dozens of bug fixes.

The Omarchy Linux distribution to date has been centered on x86_64 support for this Arch Linux distribution. Released today was Omarchy 4.5-RC1 and with this new version there is initial AArch64 support centered around Snapdragon X and NVIDIA N1X laptop support.

Linux 7.4 is seeing a new emulation function added for cmpxchg() for compare and exchange. This is being done so that two-byte cmpxchg() can be used in common Linux kernel code that is already natively supported on newer CPU architectures. The pull request notes though that some old systems might no longer be supported by the Linux kernel moving ahead.

Miguel Ojeda sent out his pull request of the new Rust kernel code slated for introduction in Linux 7.4. It's a big one this round due to updating the Zerocopy vendored library plus updating other Rust crates for the kernel.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 8.0 today as the 61st release of this BSD operating system.

AMD GAIA 0.25 is out this week as the latest feature release for this open-source project that began as "Generative AI Is Awesome" and is now going on a tag line of "AMD's open-source agent factory" in building/using local AI agents on AMD Ryzen AI hardware.

In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers.

With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system.

An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve's Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK.

Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results.

The Motorola 68000 "m68k" CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models.

Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well.

GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday's Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals.

Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue.

Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor.

There is yet-another-Linux-file-system attempt... An initial request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out this morning for BeamFS. The proposed BeamFS is a Reed-Solomon protected file-system.

The ARM64 code for Linux 7.4 is stripping away its support for big-endian kernel builds for 64-bit ARM.

Going back to July 2025 the open-source Radeon RADV Vulkan driver has offered experimental host image copy support with the API's VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. This has been for RDNA1 and newer GPUs while now GFX10 RDNA 1 GPUs have this extension enabled by default while also enabling experimental support for prior GFX9 era GPUs too.

Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing "attack" by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations.