https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/F2FS-Linux-7.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/F2FS-Linux-7.1 The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window that will wrap up on Sunday. This follows earlier merges for the XFS and EXT4 drivers too... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:48:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Old-Network-AI https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Old-Network-AI Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:45:52 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Framework-Laptop-13-Pro https://www.phoronix.com/news/Framework-Laptop-13-Pro At Framework Computer's next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:15:01 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FW-OCuLink-Dev-Kit-Preview https://www.phoronix.com/news/FW-OCuLink-Dev-Kit-Preview In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:15:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-Age-Verification-Laws https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-Age-Verification-Laws The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:40:18 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS-3G-Driver-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS-3G-Driver-2026 Coming today as a big surprise -- one week after the new NTFS file-system driver was merged for Linux 7.1 and separately the existing NTFS3 kernel driver seeing some fixes -- is a new release of the NTFS-3G driver providing a FUSE-based user-space driver for NTFS on Linux and other platforms... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:41:57 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x3d2-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x3d2-linux Today we can finally share performance benchmarks of the long-rumored AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor. This new halo product for the Ryzen 9000 series desktop line-up offers captivating performance for developers frequently compiling code, creators, technical computing workloads for students or hobbyists or those not able to afford a Threadripper / EPYC type workstation, or similar heavy computing use. With the 16 cores / 32 threads and both CCDs having 3D V-Cache, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 offers leading performance among current generation desktop processors. Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IRDMA-Gen4-Linux-7.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IRDMA-Gen4-Linux-7.1 The IRDMA driver as Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:55:28 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Default-Host-Image-Copy https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Default-Host-Image-Copy Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:24:59 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Arm-C1-Pro-Fix https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Arm-C1-Pro-Fix Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:35:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Initial-Linux-SDXI-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Initial-Linux-SDXI-Driver Recently sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list was the initial patches for implementing the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) as a vendor-neutral architecture for memory-to-memory data movement offload... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:22:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Staging https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Staging Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:00:45 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-Import-Export-Agent https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GAIA-Import-Export-Agent AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today's GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:36:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.2-Released Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:23:56 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-KVM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-KVM The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes were recently merged for the Linux 7.1 merge window for further enhancing KVM as this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:59:34 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS3-Linux-7.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS3-Linux-7.1 Last week saw the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:41:37 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Box64-0.4.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Box64-0.4.2-Released While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:16:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Git-2.54-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Git-2.54-Released Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:03:58 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Coreutils-9.11 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Coreutils-9.11 It's not only the uutil's Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today's release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:48:20 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-150 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-150 Mozilla today published their Firefox 150 release binaries as the latest milestone for this open-source web browser with growing AI ambitions... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:34:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Compute-26.14.37833.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Compute-26.14.37833.4 Out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4 that now includes production support for the newly-launched Wildcat Lake cut-down Panther Lake SoCs that debuted last week as the Core Series 3... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:51:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-MM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-MM Andrew Morton recently sent out his various "MM" related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:35:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redb-4.1-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redb-4.1-Released Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI)... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:27:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Graphics-Drivers https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Graphics-Drivers The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it's the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:12:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-JFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-JFS It's pretty rare nowadays seeing any real changes to the JFS file-system on Linux when there are multiple far superior solutions available. But in any event, the JFS file-system driver has seen a few fixes in Linux 7.1... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:58:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/LXQt-2.4-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/LXQt-2.4-Released The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others... Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:36:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HID https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HID The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:42:18 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GIMP-3.2.4-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/GIMP-3.2.4-Released Following last month's GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:45:44 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-DPL-Sruthi-Chandran https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-DPL-Sruthi-Chandran Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader "DPL" after running unopposed in this year's elections... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:58:26 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Fixes-VA-API-H264-Rate https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Fixes-VA-API-H264-Rate A fix today for GNOME Shell's screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:14:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-PCI https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-PCI The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a wide assortment of PCI(e) changes from new to old hardware... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:40:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2604-xe2-lunar-lake https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2604-xe2-lunar-lake Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it's been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:52:00 -0400 Michael Larabel