Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 31 min ago
NVIDIA's Nova Driver Continues Being Built Up In Linux 7.2 Along With Other DRM Rust Code
Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape...
Linux 7.2 Continues Improving AMDGPU Support On POWER, ARM
In addition to AMDGPU finally seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL support in Linux 7.2, another change worth noting in this week's AMDGPU pull request is the continued work on enhancing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver support for non-4K page size kernel builds. In particular this helps out with AMD graphics and ROCm for the likes of ARM and POWER...
GNOME 51 Retires Legacy NVIDIA Driver Support With Removing EGLStreams
EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter...
Today Marks 22 Years Of Phoronix For Linux Hardware Testing & Benchmarking
Today marks 22 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. It's been quite a journey from the early state of Linux hardware support.....
Benchmarking The BORE Scheduler Performance With CachyOS Linux
Earlier this week I ran benchmarks of different CachyOS Linux kernel flavors that proved interesting from the performance overhead of their hardened kernel build to various other interesting performancr takeaways. One kernel flavor I hadn't tested though was their build with the BORE scheduler. Given the interest and feedback from Phoronix readers, here is an article focused on looking at the performance of the BORE scheduler for the Linux kernel on CachyOS.
Linux 7.1 + Mesa 26.1 Performance With The Radeon RX 9070 GRE, RX 9070 XT
With this week's launch day review of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Ubuntu 26.04 with its Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0 default driver stack was used for testing. That choice was made since the Ubuntu 26.04 release is still fresh, the RDNA4-based RX 9070 GRE was working without issue there, and from other RDNA4 testing knowing there isn't much uplift from the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel or the current stable Mesa 26.1 OpenGL RadeonSI / Vulkan RADV drivers. But for those interested, here are those tests...
Linux 7.2 Will Be Able To Boot On Apple M3 Macs - But Far From Useful For End-Users
The upcoming Linux 7.2 mainline kernel is expected to be able to boot on Apple M3 devices including the M3-powered iMac and MacBook products. But before getting too excited it's still a long ways to go before it will actually be useful for any Apple M3 daily usage under Linux with the overall support at this stage still being very limited for these 2~3 year old Apple Macs...
Qualcomm Gets The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 Laptop Working On Linux
For those interested in the prospects of running Snapdragon X2 laptops on Linux rather than Windows 11 on ARM, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 has emerged as one of the initial X2 laptops with tentative Device Tree handling to allow Linux to boot on this latest-generation Qualcomm-powered laptop,..
Blender 5.2 LTS Enters Beta With New Features
Blender 5.2 is now available in beta form for this leading open-source 3D modeling software...
AMD's GAIA Finally Has A Nice Multi-Device Experience For AI
AMD's GAIA open-source project geared for building AI agents that run locally on your PC is out with a significant new feature release for Windows and Linux systems...
GCC Git Enables Additional Tuning For AMD Zen 6
In addition to Intel adjusting their Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids targets in GCC this week to deal with APX realities, AMD this week also adjusted some tuning bits for their Zen 6 "znver6" target...
systemd 261-rc3 Released With Individual Binaries Now Embedding dlopen ELF Metadata Note
The stable release of systemd 261 is quickly approaching for being found in H2'2026 Linux distributions...
AMD Submits Its Long-Awaited HDMI 2.1 FRL Support For Linux 7.2 AMDGPU
It's happening! The long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for handling higher resolutions and higher refresh rates on modern AMD Radeon graphics cards with the upstream AMDGPU open-source driver has been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of this month's Linux 7.2 merge window!..
Crown Engine 0.63 Restores Its OpenGL Renderer For Legacy Hardware Support
While not as well known as the likes of the Godot or O3DE open-source game engines, Crown Engine continues advancing as an open-source, C++-based game engine...
LLVM To Begin Offering Zstd-Compressed Binaries For "Significantly Reduced" Downloads
The LLVM project will begin offering Zstd-compressed archives of their binaries in addition to the existing XZ-compressed releases. LLVM developers are finding Zstd working out great with "significantly reduced" download sizes...
Steam Survey For May 2026 After Delay: Linux Just Under 4%
Back in March Steam on Linux skyrocketed to 5.33% with more than double the Steam gaming marketshare of macOS. Then for April Steam on Linux pulled back to a still-great 4.52%, well above the times when Steam on Linux was at 2% or less for many years. Now the May 2026 figures have been published overnight by Valve...
Widely-Used libinput Updated Due To Arbitrary Root Code Execution
The libinput input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland environments on modern Linux desktops is out with a new security fix release. A new vulnerability is now public allowing for arbitrary root code execution...
3mdeb Keeps Making Progress On Their AMD Coreboot + OpenSIL Port To Ryzen MSI Board
Following thr 3mdeb consulting firm's recent release of their Dasharo build of Coreboot and AMD openSIL for the Gigabyte MZ33-ARI1 EPYC 9005 series motherboard, the same engineers continue working on their port of Coreboot and the openSIL CPU silicon initialization library to a Ryzen 9000 series consumer motherboard...
COSMIC Now Implements Wayland Pointer Constraints For Better Gaming Experience
COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 was released today and while it doesn't yet contain the new "Frosted Glass" option for the desktop UI, COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 does contain some other notable enhancements...
AMD EPYC 8635P "Sorano" Benchmarks: Significant Upgrade Opportunity For EPYC 8004 Servers
After announcing the AMD EPYC 8005 "Sorano" series back in February, AMD recently began shipping these Zen 5 successors to the EPYC 8004 "Siena" line-up. With the EPYC 8005 product stack ranging from 8 to 84 cores and being drop-in upgrades for EPYC 8004 servers after a BIOS update, these are quite some interesting processors for those after a single socket, performant server. Up today are benchmarks of the EPYC 8635P as the flagship 84 core Sorano CPU.
