Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 5 min ago
Intel XPU Manager Deprecates Data Center GPU Max Series & GPU Flex Series
Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series...
Intel Simplifying P-State Driver's Energy Model For Newer Core Ultra CPUs
Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake...
Ubuntu 25.10 Fix Pending For Broken Flatpak Support
Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support...
Phosh 0.50 Released, GNOME App Aims To Help You Learn Assembly
For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices...
KDE Plasma 6.5 Fixing Some Of The Most Common Crashes, Other Bugs Fixed Too
KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code...
Coreboot 25.09 Released With 19 More Motherboards Supported, Better amdfwtool For Turin
Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware...
Vulkan 1.4.329 Released With New Fused-Multiply Add Extension
Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow...
Linux Now Disabling TPM Bus Encryption By Default For Performance Reasons
Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel...
AMD ROCm 7.0.2 Released With Radeon RX 9060 Officially Supported
AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack...
Python 3.14 Performance Looking Good In Benchmarks
With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.
NVIDIA Posts Latest Linux Driver Patches For Open-Source vGPU Support
Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization "vGPU" support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag...
Microsoft Hyper-V Support Further Improved With Linux 6.18
Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18...
GCC Patches Posted For C++26 SIMD Support
One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512...
New Input Drivers Merged For Linux 6.18
In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers...
Shotcut 25.10 Video Editor Rolling Out More AI-Powered Functionality
Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality...
Intel's Lead Engineer For Linux Performance Monitoring Is Leaving The Company
This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire...
Linux Driver Support Ready For Intel Panther Lake's NPU 5
In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away...
Linux Seeing First LED Driver Written In Rust
The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language...
Intel's Open-Source Strategy Is Changing At Odds With The Ethos Of Open-Source
For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel's open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel's difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel's open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel's open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.
Intel Announces Xeon 6+ For Clearwater Forest CPUs
Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light... Especially as for what's known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.
