Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Wine 11.22 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release and inching quite closely toward the Wine 12.0 stable release preparations.

Earlier this year Cloudflare announced Kitesurf as a stateless web browser for AI agents. After building out its features, they have now made good on their word to open-source it.

Since 2023 I and many open-source advocates have been very eager for AMD's openSIL project for delivering open-source CPU silicon initialization as a replacement to the traditional AGESA code. With Zen 5 there was proof-of-concept support that we have enjoyed with Coreboot on an MSI Ryzen motherboard and a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard thanks to the Coreboot-based Dasharo ports by 3mdeb. The goal for production readiness was for Zen 6, but with this week's EPYC 9006 SP7 announcement the openSIL topic wasn't touched on. So I asked around.

KDE Frameworks 6.32 shipped today as the newest monthly update to this set of KDE components. Notable this month is a fix for the previously-reported 15 year old bug around inaccurate notifications for USB file transfers.

Following the recent release of HRX Loom v0.1 and leveraging an AI agent workflow, a team at AMD experimented with bringing 50 trending Hugging Face models over to AMD client GPUs. They accomplished this feat in just around three days, thanks to their HRX software work paired with the power of Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" hardware.

A new tool expected to be merged to the Linux 7.5 source tree provides a new exercise for the kernel and in the process bringing down the system.

In addition to AOCC 6.0 releasing this week as their updated C/C++ compiler along with the new "AOF" Fortran compiler, AMD also released AOCL 6.0 as the AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries.

Longtime Linux developer Christoph Hellwig today announced the initial public release of XRAID. XRAID is a declustered parity RAID implementation integrated into the XFS file-system. XRAID is focused on RAID for zoned XFS deployments.

Sent out today was the drm-misc-next pull request for the week of new material to queue in DRM-Next until the Linux 7.5 merge window gets underway in late December. Most notable this week is the introduction of the new GlandaGPU driver.

One of the consistent wonderful praise I have for Intel over the past 22+ years of covering the Linux hardware scene has been their upstreaming of new CPU targets into the open-source compilers like GCC well ahead of product launches. Particularly with GCC on an annual feature release cycle and not being quickly picked up by new Linux distribution releases, Intel upstreaming their new CPU targets and ISA features at times years in advance of product releases has helped ensure smooth compiler ecosystem support by the time their products ship. The latest example, today they posted their patches providing new ISA features and enabling for both Coral Rapids and Razor Lake processors.

The Rust-based NVIDIA Linux kernel driver "Nova" is set to take on an important role in the official NVIDIA Linux driver stack of the future. This mainline kernel driver continues seeing a flurry of activity to bring it into a usable state and eventually parity and beyond compared to the existing out-of-tree NVIDIA Linux driver code or the incomplete and largely reverse engineered Nouveau kernel driver. Presented at this week's KVM Forum was the current status of NVIDIA bringing vGPU support to the upstream kernel.

The 3mdeb consulting firm that has ported their Coreboot-based open-source firmware stack to the likes of an AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard from MSI and a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard, among others, has posted a new Linux kernel driver for supporting fan controls with Dasharo firmware.

Sent out today was the latest batch of AMD kernel graphics/compute driver patches destined for the Linux 7.5 merge window opening up at year's end/ Besides a lot of fixes and continued work around new IP enablement for upcoming GPUs, there is even a fix for old ATI/AMD Radeon R600 era hardware after help from OpenAI's Codex.

Rust 1.100 is out today as the newest version of this popular programming language.

PostgreSQL 18.7, 17.12, 16.16, 15.20, 14.25, and 19 RC2 all released today due to 52 new security issues being disclosed.

The Khronos Group, the industry consortium responsible for OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and other industry standard APIs has formed an exploratory group to evaluate the possibility of a high-level remote offloading API.

ReactOS as the open-source operating system project working on Microsoft Windows driver and application compatibility had a pretty successful 2026. Following two hackfests, a lot of new features have landed recently for ReactOS and some others are nearing the finish line.

In addition to Jensen Huang resigning, coincidentally the embargo just expired on the first two of 25 more NVIDIA graphics driver security vulnerabilities coming. ForgePtr and NvRoot are particularly volatile for those renting GPU slices in the cloud.

Following reports of two extramarital affairs, one with an alleged Chinese spy and the other with a VP that is a direct report to him, Jensen Huang is no longer CEO of NVIDIA.

For those that happen to have ASUS Transformer devices as the roughly decade old convertible/hybrid 2-in-1 laptop/tablet computers, the Linux 7.5 kernel in 2027 is improving support for these aging systems powered by either NVIDIA Tegra or Intel Atom SoCs.

With the upcoming Linux 7.5 kernel cycle the Intel Xe graphics driver is preparing SR-IOV provisioning for vGPU profiles.

For those fond of the GNOME 2 forked MATE desktop but wanting to take it into the native Wayland world, Polo 1.0 released today as a new compositor option for modern desktop computing with MATE.

The Linux kernel already has network drivers for the AMD Pensando networking hardware while coming for Linux 7.5 is an Ionic HWMON driver to support hardware monitoring with temperature, voltage, and power monitoring for this high-end networking gear.

Intel's intriguing Crescent Island Xe3P-based AI accelerator hardware now known as the Intel GPU D Series continues seeing a lot of Linux kernel driver activity. The upcoming Linux 7.5 kernel is continuing to build out the support for this upcoming hardware.

After AMD posted GFX13 patches for the AMDGPU Linux driver earlier in the week, today they opened the Mesa merge request for introducing the very primitive GFX13 support for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D/OpenGL drivers.

The FreeBSD Project published its Q3'2026 status report on Tuesday that outlines a number of development initiatives to ongoing work around an AI policy for this BSD operating system.

Over 24 years old, the ATI (AMD) Radeon R300 graphics processors are still seeing improvements in the open-source Linux driver space. Merged to Mesa 27.0-devel this week were a number of shader compiler optimizations for the R300g driver that benefits not only the original R300 series graphics cards but also the R400 and R500 (Radeon X1000 series) too.

With yesterday's launch availability of the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" SP7 processors headlined by the incredibly fast EPYC 9996 and EPYC 9686F processors, AMD also launched AOCC 6.0 as the newest version of their in-house LLVM/Clang-based compiler stack.

Intel on Tuesday released the microcode-20261110 package that ships updated CPU microcode binaries for recent Intel Core (Ultra) and Xeon processors. The updated CPU microcode is for Core Gen 13 "Raptor Lake" and newer while on the Xeon server side is for Sapphire Rapids and newer. This is also the first time Clearwater Forest has seen microcode updates.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has seen new work on drivers and other improvements during the course of October.

With Ubuntu 26.10 that shipped in October there is a little talked about feature with upki revocation support beginning to roll out. Due to the late change, upki for certificate revocation was only enabled for Ubuntu 26.10's curl package but with more plans ahead.

This summer AMD acquired the company MEXT for their AI-powered predictive memory technology to make flash memory such as NVMe SSDs behave more like DRAM. AMD MEXT with EPYC servers allows for flash memory as DRAM tiering and uses a predictive AI engine for handling the tiering in an effective way. There is a Linux driver but this is one of the few offerings in the AMD space that isn't open-source as part of their typical open ecosystem approach.

During the AMD briefings for 6th Gen EPYC SP7 availability, they did already tease next-gen EPYC processors.

In addition to today's announcement of AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 availability, complete with reviews of the AMD EPYC 9996 256-core flagship and EPYC 9686F 96-core 5.3GHz part, AMD also announced the EPYC Embedded 9006 Series SP7 processors.

Blender 5.3 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

Backed by Samsung, Square Enix, and others, KORA Systems announced KORA OS today as a Linux distribution built for the age of "intelligent PCs".

With the assistance of AI/LLMs, eight more security vulnerabilities were made public today for the X.Org Server. These issues also end up affecting the XWayland code too.

Linux memory management expert Lorenzo Stoakes at Arm who has been contributing to the kernel since 2014 is stepping away from some reviewership roles within the Linux kernel due to all of the noise from the flood of kernel patches resulting fro AI/LLMs.

While there aren't any processors released yet with AI Compute Extensions (ACE) or AVX10.2 quite yet, the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by AMD and Intel have now posted their ACE v2 and AVX10.3 specifications.

With openSUSE Leap making use of the modern Agama installer developed by SUSE engineers, the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed is now preparing to make the same transitioning in replacing the YaST Installer.

With Fedora 45 having shipped last week, developers are turning more of their attention to Fedora 46 that will debut by the end of next April.

KDE Plasma 6.8.3 is out today as the newest bug-fix release for last month's major Plasma 6.8 debut.

The exfatprogs 1.4.4 release was issued today for these user-space open-source programs for managing exFAT file-systems on Linux.

Mesa 26.3 is out today as the fourth quarter Mesa3D feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The Firefox 160.0 release builds are now available as the latest bi-weekly stable update to Mozilla's web browser.

Since the beginning of the year there have been AMDGPU LLVM back-end patches for GFX13 as AMD's next-generation graphics IP. This is most likely for RDNA 5 graphics. Now out today are the GFX13 patches finally surfacing for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver.

Darling is the software project more than a decade in development that is designed to run macOS binaries on Linux. This macOS compatibility layer for Linux is now gaining more brisk developments as it turns to AI/LLMs to assist in this creation.

The Linux kernel's ChaCha symmetric stream cipher code has long had an AVX-512 optimized code path but it was catering to the early generations of Intel CPUs with AVX-512 (Skylake) that suffered from down-clocking under use. But now slated for arrival with Linux 7.5 is tuning the code to perform better on today's AVX-512 Intel and AMD processors that don't suffer from this limitation. In turn the ChaCha performance is as much as 99% faster with current-generation AMD Zen 5 processors.

MSI's latest Ryzen motherboards with AMD 800 series chipsets feature a new capability marked as Mystic Light for RGB lighting controls of the motherboard as well as compatible graphics cards and cases. MSI Mystic Light control software is only offered for Microsoft Windows but thanks to an open-source developer with the help of Claude Code, a Mystic Light open-source driver is being worked on for the Linux kernel.

Merged for Linux 6.13 back in 2024 was multigrain timestamp support for being able to switch between coarse and fine-grained change/modification time reporting on a per-file basis. This is useful if caring about accuracy more than the once-per-jiffy timestamps on files and was originally devised as a way of addressing NFS caching issues. A limitation of multigrain timestamps though has been the lack of user-space to know whether a file's timestamps are multi-grain or not.

Samsung's Galaxy XR headset runs on Android XR by default with its own downstream kernel patches. A user leveraging AI with multiple LLMs has now drafted an initial set of patches getting the Galaxy XR headset working on the mainline kernel along with bringing up the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 "Halliday" SoC that powers this VR/XR headset.

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on enhancing the Vulkan Video support in the Mesa ANV driver for better open-source video acceleration support.