https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/review/zimacube-2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/zimacube-2 Earlier this year we reviewed the ZimaBoard 2 for building a Linux home storage server. That was a nifty little device but for those looking for a more polished product than assembling your storage devices in cardboard cut-outs and the like, IceWhale has launched the ZimaCube 2. The ZimaCube 2 is a nice and polished, literal cube, to serve as your personal cloud / network attached storage (NAS) device. Fri, 15 May 2026 09:15:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-Security-Repo https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-Security-Repo In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner... Fri, 15 May 2026 08:15:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dasharo-Firmware-MZ33-AR1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dasharo-Firmware-MZ33-AR1 3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!.. Fri, 15 May 2026 07:17:47 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cloud-Hypervisor-52 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cloud-Hypervisor-52 For what originally began as an open-source Intel software project, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing robust development outside the confines of Intel Corp these days with ongoing improvements driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Ant, and other organizations for this Rust-based VMM for cloud workloads... Fri, 15 May 2026 06:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-rc4-HID https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-rc4-HID Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 release due out on Sunday, a variety of HID subsystem patches were merged overnight to Linux Git... Fri, 15 May 2026 06:18:38 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.352-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.352-Released Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support... Fri, 15 May 2026 06:07:26 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-ssh-keysign-pwn https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-ssh-keysign-pwn Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn... Thu, 14 May 2026 21:35:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Steam-Controller-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Steam-Controller-2026 Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam... Thu, 14 May 2026 20:46:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Dynamic-EPP-Fallout https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Dynamic-EPP-Fallout Dynamic EPP is one of the new AMD P-State features in Linux 7.1, but, unfortunately is causing some fallout in early usage of this power-savings related functionality... Thu, 14 May 2026 18:46:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.7-Beta-Big-Screen https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.7-Beta-Big-Screen With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release... Thu, 14 May 2026 13:32:26 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/MSI-Claw-Configuration-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/MSI-Claw-Configuration-Driver One of the latest Linux gaming handheld drivers being worked on is the MSI Claw Configuration Driver for controller configuration... Thu, 14 May 2026 12:24:19 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-rocm7-723 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-rocm7-723 With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the user-space ROCm components from the end of last summer to the latest ROCm 7.2.3 milestone. Thu, 14 May 2026 10:20:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-72-drm-misc-next-More-AIE https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-72-drm-misc-next-More-AIE Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver... Thu, 14 May 2026 09:47:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Cache-Aware-Sched-Nears https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Cache-Aware-Sched-Nears I have been writing about the Cache Aware Scheduling work led by Intel engineers on the Linux kernel for more than a year. I've also tested out Cache Aware Scheduling on both Intel and AMD CPUs with the patched Linux kernel to great success. And thus very happy to see the Cache Aware Scheduling patches inching closer to the mainline Linux kernel... Thu, 14 May 2026 08:23:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-Beta-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.7-Beta-Released In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7... Thu, 14 May 2026 07:31:18 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-AMDGPU-FRL-Regs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-AMDGPU-FRL-Regs Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge... Thu, 14 May 2026 06:20:45 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-KVM-CET-Hanging-Hosts https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-KVM-CET-Hanging-Hosts Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature... Thu, 14 May 2026 06:07:19 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-DRM-Format-Modifiers-GCN https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-DRM-Format-Modifiers-GCN Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers... Wed, 13 May 2026 20:49:23 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-Mali-G1-Pro-Mesa-26.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-Mali-G1-Pro-Mesa-26.2 The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported... Wed, 13 May 2026 20:45:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-ISSEI-Linux-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-ISSEI-Linux-Driver Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI)... Wed, 13 May 2026 13:03:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Fragnesia https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Fragnesia Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability... Wed, 13 May 2026 11:52:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/gcc-16-vs-clang-22 https://www.phoronix.com/review/gcc-16-vs-clang-22 GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM/Clang open-source compiler, which is the focus of today's benchmarking showdown. Wed, 13 May 2026 09:45:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Compute-26.18.38308.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Compute-26.18.38308.1 Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware... Wed, 13 May 2026 07:01:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Discord-Better-Linux-Client https://www.phoronix.com/news/Discord-Better-Linux-Client Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client... Wed, 13 May 2026 06:17:35 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-11.0-RC4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-11.0-RC4 In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate... Wed, 13 May 2026 06:06:56 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-1M-EUR-Investment https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-1M-EUR-Investment KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack... Wed, 13 May 2026 05:41:54 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-Linux-FEAT-D128-Patches https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arm-Linux-FEAT-D128-Patches A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later... Wed, 13 May 2026 05:30:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Wayland-Pointer-Warp https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Wayland-Pointer-Warp Wine's Wayland native driver has taken another step forward with now supporting the pointer warp "wp_pointer_warp_v1" protocol... Tue, 12 May 2026 20:41:53 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-2.4.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-2.4.2-Released For those making use of OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD, OpenZFS 2.4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation... Tue, 12 May 2026 18:28:56 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.2-KDE-Desktop https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.2-KDE-Desktop FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn't end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2... Tue, 12 May 2026 17:25:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Patch-Tuesday-May-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Patch-Tuesday-May-2026 Today's Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don't appear to be too widespread or impactful... Tue, 12 May 2026 13:52:07 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-NVAPI-0.9.2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-NVAPI-0.9.2-Released DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support... Tue, 12 May 2026 13:16:08 -0400 Michael Larabel