Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.14-rc6 a few minutes ago as we work toward the stable Linux 6.14 kernel release later in March.

On Friday AMD sent out another batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature patches destined for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. One notable feature in this late pull request is introducing a new "high precision" mode to be found with the GFX950 target, which is believed to be the upcoming Instinct MI350X series.

Intel's new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) feature is a hardware-based solution to manage skin and/or board temperatures of a device. Platform Temperature Control will adjust the SoC power/performance if the temperature thresholds are exceeded, which are programmed by the device manufacturer. But new Linux patches posted allow controlling the Intel Platform Temperature Control feature found with new Core Ultra Lunar Lake laptops and upcoming Panther Lake hardware.

Already queued ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening later this month are DeviceTree support for Apple's T2 SoCs as well as other DeviceTree additions set to be mainlined. A third round of DeviceTree patches were sent out on Sunday morning to the Linux kernel mailing list for the upcoming v6.15 cycle.

ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that's more than a half-century old and went on to inspire and influence other programming languages. It has its place in programming language history but a recently published compiler front-end for ALGOL 68 has been decided for now at least not to be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that's part of the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.

Last year Microsoft donated the Mono Project to Wine for its stewardship under the WineHQ umbrella. Today marks the Framework Mono 6.14 release as the first major Mono release in five years and the first under the WineHQ organization.

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.30 as the newest version of this GNU Coreutils rewrite within the Rust programming language. Uutils developers will also be targeting more common Unix tools to port over to Rust too.

In addition to Friday's very exciting GNOME 48 release candidate with some last minute features, there have also been some other GNOME-related changes this week to call out.

Mesa's Venus driver that allows for 3D graphics acceleration within virtual machines is now able to make use of the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions when using Mesa 25.1-devel along with updated Venus Protocol and Virglrenderer code.

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 10.3 is now Wine-Staging 10.3 for this more experimental version of Wine that is presently shipping 347 experimental/testing patches atop the upstream state.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting KDE Plasma improvements merged for the week.

Wine 10.3 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms.

The GNOME 48 release candidate "48.rc" is out this evening as we approach the stable release of the GNOME 48 desktop in two weeks.

At the Vulkanised 2025 conference a few weeks back in Cambridge (UK) there were a few presentations concerning Vulkan Video for this cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode/decode interface.

Canonical engineer Matthieu Clemenceau has posted a status update on the behalf of the Ubuntu Foundations engineers now half-way through the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle. A number of notable package updates have landed as well as continued work on better ARM64 support and coming to a decision over "-O3" optimized packages.

Back in January at CES was the Ryzen 9 9000X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D announcement while today AMD officially confirmed the release date and pricing on these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

The GCC "-fschedule-insns" option allows for reordering of instructions to eliminate execution stalls when required data is unavailable. This early scheduling option can be beneficial for systems with slow floating point performance or costly memory load instructions. With the upcoming GCC 15 release, AArch64 will be enabling this early scheduling optimization at the -O3 optimization level and higher.

The community-based ROCm SDK Builder is an unofficial project leveraging the open-source AMD ROCm code and making it easy to build machine learning and GPU compute software across a range of environments and helping ensure proper integration with other machine learning tools and models. The ROCm SDK Builder takes special focus on the consumer Radeon iGPUs and dGPUs that typically aren't as much of a focus for the upstream AMD ROCm stack.

Intel engineers today sent out their final drm-xe-next feature pull request to DRM-Next of the remaining features they are ready to land for the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle. It's a big one.

Well known AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has been at it again working on some further performance optimizations to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code.

The latest bit of increased driver code unification and decreasing code duplication among Mesa's OpenGL and Vulkan drivers is finally introducing a common shader statistic framework.

Sent out today was a batch of platform-drivers-x86 fixes for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Notable among these fixes is introducing Intel Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support to the Intel VSEC driver.

A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is expected to merge two new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display drivers for supporting the Apple Touch Bar displays on older Intel x86 Macs and a newer "ADP" driver for handling the Apple Touch Bar displays on the newer Apple M1/M2-powered MacBooks.

For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default.

Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta’s top services.

Wim Taymans of Red Hat today released PipeWire 1.4 as the newest major update for this leading open-source software to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other solutions on the modern Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams in a very excellent way.

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.

The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts.

FEX 2503 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that enables the ability to run Linux x86_64 binaries on Linux ARM64 (AArch64) hosts.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.

The Xen Project announced the availability today of the Xen 4.20 virtualization hypervisor.

In addition to Vulkan-powered AI / machine learning talks at last month's Vulkanised 2025 conference, another interesting topic at this annual Vulkan developer conference was around improving the Vulkan API and making it easier for new developers and maximizing the potential with new GPU hardware.

The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration.

Linux already supports a number of XP-Pen drawing tablets while the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to include support for another one: the XP-Pen Artist Pro 19. This XP-Pen Artist Pro 19 is a big, 4K resolution display drawing tablet that retails for nearly $800 USD and features dual stylus, 16K pressure levels, and a nice display for this 19-inch drawing surface.

Sven Peter continues work on upstreaming more of the Apple SoC support to the mainline Linux kernel. On the DeviceTree side following the DT support for Apple T2 SoCs sent out last month, another set of updates were submitted this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

Released last year shortly after the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 for Zen 5 optimized CPU inferencing with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. ZenDNN 5.0 delivers up to a 400% performance uplift according to AMD engineers. Out today is ZenDNN 5.0.1 with further optimizations, particularly around recommendation engines and large language models (LLMs).

LLVM 20.1 was just tagged in Git as the first stable version of the LLVM 20 compiler stack including sub-projects like the Clang 20 C/C++ Compiler.

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.

Intel has been running an annual open-source developer survey and they recently wrapped up their survey for 2024 and today published the results to provide various insight into the health of open-source development.

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package.

Open-sourced back in January was the Yandex Perforator as a new software project for uncovering code inefficiencies and potentially "save billions of dollars" in expenses. Perforator has continued evolving since its open-source announcement and out today is Perforator 0.0.5 as the latest milestone.

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API.

While AMD hasn't released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU.

Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That's culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted.