https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Harvested-GPUs-Linux https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Harvested-GPUs-Linux Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements for Kaveri and other GCN 1.1 era APUs. Now Timur's out with some more fixes for helping select GCN 1.0 hardware... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:25:50 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Sound https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Sound The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:07:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-Super-Charged-Linux-7.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-Super-Charged-Linux-7.0 The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS has now rolled out the Linux 7.0 kernel to its users. But beyond re-basing against the latest upstream kernel version it is also carrying some extra patches... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:44:05 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Crypto-QAT-Zstd https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Crypto-QAT-Zstd In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements... Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Block-Changes https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Block-Changes The block subsystem and IO_uring changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 in continuing to enhance Linux storage capabilities... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 20:25:46 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GhostBSD-26.1-R15.0p2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GhostBSD-26.1-R15.0p2 GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:15:53 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-2026-New-SMCA-Bank-Types https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-2026-New-SMCA-Bank-Types The AMD Machine Check Exception "mce_amd" driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:41:23 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/WireGuard-For-Windows-1.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/WireGuard-For-Windows-1.0 For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:40:05 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Scheduler https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Scheduler The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:06:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Graphs-2.0-Maps-Transit https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Graphs-2.0-Maps-Transit For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:45:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HRTIMER-Overhaul https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HRTIMER-Overhaul Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:36:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-Session https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-Session KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn't published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks... Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:05:54 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-New-NTFS-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-New-NTFS-Driver As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!.. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:57:44 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FP-DSS-Zen-1-Bug https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FP-DSS-Zen-1-Bug Made public today was the Floating Point Divider State Sampling bug (stylized as FP-DSS or FPDSS) affecting original AMD Zen 1 (and Zen 1+) processors. The Linux kernel is already to go with a security fix for those still relying on the very first Ryzen or EPYC processors... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:35:23 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.7-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.7-Released For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:24:56 -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 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RDNA4m-RADV-ACO https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RDNA4m-RADV-ACO The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD's GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as "RDNA 4m"... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:48:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Faster-LoongArch-glibc-THP https://www.phoronix.com/news/Faster-LoongArch-glibc-THP Loongson's LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library "glibc" release... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:47:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Crypto https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Crypto Linux libcrypto cryptography subsystem changes for the v7.1 kernel are enabling more optimizations by default and in turn helping to achieve better crypto/hashing performance on this next kernel version... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:27:20 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-44-Not-Next-Week https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-44-Not-Next-Week Fedora 44 final had been aiming for an early release target of 21 April, but due to outstanding blocker bugs, it's now revised to target a release on 28 April... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:17:40 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Arm-AGI-CPU https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Arm-AGI-CPU The GCC open-source compiler has landed initial targeting support for Arm's newly-announced AGI CPU... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:19:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-x86-Custom-Restart https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-x86-Custom-Restart With the vast majority of x86/x86_64 systems supporting restarting the system using ACPi, BIOS, or even the KBD keyboard controller, with Linux 7.1 is now support in place for using custom restart handlers registered by drivers, such as in place for other CPU architectures... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:07:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HWMON https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-HWMON All of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:53:13 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Proton-11.0-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/Proton-11.0-Beta Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 11.0 Beta as their first beta milestone for this software that powers Steam Play now rebased against upstream Wine 11.0... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:33:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-sched-ext https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-sched-ext The extensible scheduler "sched_ext" code for allowing Linux scheduling behavior to be defined via BPF programs is seeing some useful improvements with the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:24:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mir-2.26-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mir-2.26-Released Canonical today released Mir 2.26 as the newest feature release for this compositor for building Wayland-based shells. Notable with Mir 2.26 is a Rust-based input platform is in development as part of their broader effort for bringing Rust code into Mir... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:51:08 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Media-Pull https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Media-Pull The media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window and includes new hardware support... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:41:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-core-ultra-7-270k-plus https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-core-ultra-7-270k-plus Last month Intel began shipping the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus "Arrow Lake Refresh" desktop processor. This is a mighty interesting processor for the $349 USD price point with more cores and a larger cache compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K and capable of delivering much of the performance of the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake processor. In today's article is a look at how well the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus performs under Linux with more than 340 different benchmarks representing a range of Linux workloads from gaming to creator to developer and technical computing uses. Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-Kitten-i686-Userspace https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-Kitten-i686-Userspace The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:20:40 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Core-3-Wildcat-Lake https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Core-3-Wildcat-Lake Intel today formally announced the Core Series 3 low-end mobile processors previously known as Wildcat Lake. These are the new Intel 18A offerings that are a step below the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs that began shipping earlier this year... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:43:41 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-1.95-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-1.95-Released Rust 1.95 was released to the wild today as the latest feature update to this popular programming language... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:19:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mint-23-Alfa https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mint-23-Alfa The Linux Mint project published their March 2026 monthly status update where they note the ongoing work toward Mint 23 "Alfa" that will be released under their new longer development lifecycle. Linux Mint 23 will be out for Christmas (December) 2026 atop an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:58:05 -0400 Michael Larabel