Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 8 min ago
EROFS With Linux 7.2 Better Handles Large Sparse AI Datasets, More Efficient I/O
The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the
Fwupd 2.0.21 Brings Fixes For More Than 250 Potential Security Issues Found Via AI
While the Fwupd 2.1 series is the latest stable channel for this open-source firmware updating solution, Fwupd 2.0.21 was released today to backport fixes for more than 250 potential security issues recently uncovered in the codebase...
Linux 8250/16550 UART Serial Driver Seeing Some Modernization Work In 2026
The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel...
New Hygon Model 8 "Suzhou" x86 CPU Support Appears In The GCC Compiler
A seemingly new generation of Hygon x86 processors are on the way with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing support today for the Hygon Model 8 "Suzhou" c86-4g-m8 processors...
Linux 7.2 RISC-V Reduces Kernel Startup Overhead, Eswin SoC Support By Default
Along with the many x86/x86_64 improvements and some ARM64 architecture improvements (albeit slowed down by the AI/LLM noise affecting the development pace), the RISC-V architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel development...
KDE Plasma 6.7.1 Released With Initial Batch Of Bug Fixes
Following last week's major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes...
USB4STREAM Merged For Linux 7.2 To Quickly Send Data Between USB4 Connected Systems
As part of today's USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers...
Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 Lays Out Tuning Recommendations For More Workloads
Back in March Intel announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative for helping server administrators and developers better maximize the performance of different workloads running on Intel hardware. Out today is the Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 release with more workloads now covered for squeezing out the most performance on Intel CPUs...
Steam Machine Launches, Priced $1049 To $1428 USD
Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end...
Benchmarking Bcachefs 1.38.6: The First Release No Longer "Experimental"
Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.
Xfce Wayland Compositor Sees First Preview/Alpha Release
Over the past half-year, Xfwl4 has been developed as a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. Released this weekend was the first preview release of Xfwl4 in alpha form...
Linux Finally Lands Battery/Charger Driver For 14 Year Old Microsoft Surface RT Tablet
It's been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status...
AMD Updates ROCDXG To Deliver Better ROCm Experience On WSL
Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support...
Miracle-WM Mir-Based Wayland Compositor Aiming For v1.0 Later This Year
Miracle-WM 0.10 released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor. With this new release is also acknowledgement they are hoping to cross the "1.0" milestone later in the year...
Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" as a new GUI created by developers on Valve's open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming...
OneXPlayer Configuration Driver Merged For Linux 7.2 Along With Other New Hardware
The HID subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 7.2 kernel with some treats that will excite Linux gamers and other desktop users...
Linux 7.2 sched_ext Continues Working Toward Sub-Scheduler Support
Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext's sub-scheduler support...
Early AMD GCN GPUs Seeing Improved GPU Recovery - Another Valve-Led Linux Improvement
Early AMD Radeon Graphics Core Next "GCN" GPUs are seeing work to improve the GPU recovery process in the event of hangs. This work is yet another improvement for older AMD GPUs being led by Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team...
zlib-rs 0.6.4 Released With Fix For Intel Raptor Lake Crash, SIMD Optimizations
As a follow-up to last week's article around Firefox leveraging zlib-rs and some nice upstream improvements to this Rust-based Zlib implementation, the zlib-rs 0.6.4 release is now available to ship all of these latest enhancements...
Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite Laptop
Last month Qualcomm engineers posted patches bringing up the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 laptop on Linux. Sent out this weekend were a new set of patches from Qualcomm for bringing up the HP EliteBook X G2q laptop model powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC...
