https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Working-Group-AI-Policy https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Working-Group-AI-Policy The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:17:55 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fwupd-2.1.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fwupd-2.1.2-Released Fwupd 2.1.2 is out today as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that allows for updating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:12:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-71-early-benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-71-early-benchmarks With the Linux 7.1 merge window winding down ahead of the planned Linux 7.1-rc1 release on Sunday, I have begun testing out the Linux 7.1 Git state on various systems in my lab. So far Linux 7.1 appears to be looking good in the performance department with seeing a number of performance improvements in different areas but also a few possible regressions. Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:43:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-x86-Platform-Drivers https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-x86-Platform-Drivers As usual in recent years, there were many x86 platform driver changes merged this cycle for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops. A variety of new features and laptop hardware support additions were merged for Linux 7.1... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-SBI-EPYC-Venice https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-SBI-EPYC-Venice The Linux kernel continues getting ready for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:43:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Input https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Input Beyond Linux looking to remove old drivers due to the surge of AI/LLM bug reports, the Linux 7.1 kernel is also removing some old hardware drivers simply on the basis of long obsolete hardware. The input subsystem saw several drivers removed this week for decades old hardware... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:22:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-C1-Ultra-Sched-LLVM-Clang https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-C1-Ultra-Sched-LLVM-Clang Merged recently to the latest LLVM/Clang compiler development tree is the Arm C1-Ultra scheduling model for helping with delivering optimal binaries for that flagship next-gen Arm mobile CPU... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:23:53 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-PR-Remove-Old-Net https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-PR-Remove-Old-Net It was just days ago we reported on a proposal to drop old network drivers due to AI-driven bug reports becoming a burden on upstream kernel developers. Last night that culminated with an initial pull request to clear out some old, unused networking drivers plus also clearing out the entire ISDN subsystem and more... Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:08:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-FRL-On-Nouveau-Linux https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-FRL-On-Nouveau-Linux While the AMDGPU open-source driver has struggled with HDMI 2.1 support due to the HDMI Forum blocking open-source implementations, HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) as a feature of the HDMI 2.1 specification is enjoying success now with the open-source Nouveau graphics driver on Linux for NVIDIA GPUs... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:16:44 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Opera-GX-Flatpak-Snaps https://www.phoronix.com/news/Opera-GX-Flatpak-Snaps Last month Opera released the Opera GX gaming-focused web browser for Linux. It rolled out in RPM and Debian package format support while now for those interested is also available via Flatpak and Snap sandboxed app formats... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:22:05 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Drops-Old-PCMCIA-Code https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Drops-Old-PCMCIA-Code In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia's Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:18:17 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Solaris-11.4-Less-Updates https://www.phoronix.com/news/Solaris-11.4-Less-Updates Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:03:59 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04-LTS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04-LTS The official release ISOs of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, and the various other Ubuntu flavors are now available for download... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:32:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Godot-4.7-With-HDR https://www.phoronix.com/news/Godot-4.7-With-HDR The upcoming Godot 4.7 open-source, cross-platform game engine release is rolling out support for high dynamic range (HDR)... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:25:54 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x3d2-benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x3d2-benchmarks With this week's launch of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition I've found some of the commentary quite surprising among those arguing it's really not a competitive or interesting product. While the cost may be hard to justify at $899 USD compared to the existing Ryzen 9000 series products or Intel's new Core Plus CPUs, particularly for developers, technical computing, etc the performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is quite interesting. I've had much enjoyment benchmarking the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 for technical use-cases. In this article is a complementary look to my launch day AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 review to better condense the 300+ benchmarks I've run to date on this flagship processor. Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Server-26.04-HWE-OEM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Server-26.04-HWE-OEM Ubuntu LTS releases on the desktop have automatically installed OEM vendor kernels where needed and hardware enablement "HWE" kernels in later point releases by default. This provides a better out-of-the-box experience for Ubuntu desktop users and one less chore post-install if desiring a newer/better kernel. With Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, the server installer is finally doing the same... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:23:57 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Thelio-Major-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Thelio-Major-2026 Following the recently-launched Thelio Mira redesign, System76 today announced the new Thelio Major workstation with improved thermals and more performance... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:49:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04-With-ROCm https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04-With-ROCm Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:28:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBLAS-0.3.33-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBLAS-0.3.33-Released OpenBLAS 0.3.33 is out today as the latest update to this vendor-neutral, optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:23:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-USB https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-USB Ready to go ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window closing at week's end are numerous new USB device support additions and other USB subsystem enhancements... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:28:45 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-MFD https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-MFD The Linux Multi-Function Device "MFD" subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 ahead of the merge window closing on Sunday... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:12:52 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeRDP-3.25-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeRDP-3.25-Released FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has introduced experimental AV1 codec support... Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:56:35 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-SoCs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-SoCs All of the SoC updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Most of the activity as usual is on the Arm side but also with some RISC-V additions too for the Linux 7.1 kernel... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:22:23 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Ends-OSS-Evangelism-Repos https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Ends-OSS-Evangelism-Repos Over the past number of months there has been a steady flow of Intel open-source projects archived on GitHub amid the corporate restructuring at the company and realigning of their open-source focus. This week another batch of Intel open-source projects were formally archived... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:28:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Audit https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Audit Ahead of tomorrow's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, Canonical published a blog post today outlining the state of Rust Coreutils for its premiere in this long-term support (LTS) version. Canonical also commissioned a security audit recently of Rust Coreutils that turned up 44 CVEs and 113 issues in total... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:21:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-16.1-Coming-Soon https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-16.1-Coming-Soon GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is nearly ready for its official debut as this year's major feature release for this open-source compiler... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:53:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q1-2026-Progress https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q1-2026-Progress FreeBSD is out today with their Q1-2026 status report to outline the many different development initiatives their open-source developers have participated in over the past quarter. There is a lot of hardware enablement efforts ongoing as well as continuing to make a more compelling desktop experience and also improving GUI and management options for FreeBSD systems... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:30:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KMSCON-9.3.4-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/KMSCON-9.3.4-Released KMSCON 9.3.4 is out today for this virtual terminal (VT) emulator in user-space that runs atop the Linux DRM/KMS APIs for those wanting to enjoy a CONFIG_VT=n Linux kernel experience... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:26:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Networking https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Networking Merged recently to Linux Git were the big set of networking changes for the Linux 7.1 kernel... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:11:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-More-Devpacks-Future https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-More-Devpacks-Future Canonical is out with a new blog post today outlining toolchain changes to Ubuntu Linux from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due for release tomorrow. While those changes over the past two years aren't too news worthy if you have been following the interim Ubuntu releases, what's interesting is their road ahead on the Ubuntu toolchain front for developers... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:50:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LLM-Scaler-vllm-0.14-b8.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LLM-Scaler-vllm-0.14-b8.2 As part of Intel's LLM-Scaler initiative for AI inferencing on Intel Arc hardware, out today is their vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 update that includes officially supporting the Arc Pro B70 graphics card... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:54:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Media-Driver-2026Q1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Media-Driver-2026Q1 Intel today published their official quarterly feature release to their open-source Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux... Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:26:06 -0400 Michael Larabel