https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us 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 https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-s390-Linux-Kernel-Rust https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-s390-Linux-Kernel-Rust An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture... Tue, 12 May 2026 12:55:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b70-four https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b70-four It's been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GPU state of the Arc (Pro) graphics cards on Linux with their open-source driver code. Tue, 12 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/ARCTIC-Fan-Controller-Linux-7.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/ARCTIC-Fan-Controller-Linux-7.2 A new driver expected to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is the ARCTIC Fan Controller driver to allow fan speed monitoring and PWM controls for this upcoming ARCTIC product. Making this new driver all the more exciting is that it was worked on by ARCTIC directly compared to the typical workflow for such desktop/consumer hardware peripherals often being left up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community... Tue, 12 May 2026 08:27:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Flatten-The-Pick https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Flatten-The-Pick Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a "potato" -- an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too... Tue, 12 May 2026 06:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fwupd-2.1.3-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fwupd-2.1.3-Released Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems... Tue, 12 May 2026 06:17:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LPMD-Kernel-Source-Tree https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-LPMD-Kernel-Source-Tree For years Intel has been developing the Low Power Mode Daemon "LPMD" to help their hybrid laptop and desktop CPUs deliver optimal power efficiency under Linux. Intel LPMD leverages hardware hints and other features for optimizing active idle power of the processor and putting the system into lower power modes where possible. This tool could soon call the Linux kernel source tree its new home... Tue, 12 May 2026 06:04:04 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Haiku-OS-ARM64-SMP https://www.phoronix.com/news/Haiku-OS-ARM64-SMP The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April... Tue, 12 May 2026 05:51:39 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/R300g-Code-Cleanup-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/R300g-Code-Cleanup-2026 The open-source Radeon "R300g" driver living within the Mesa codebase for supporting the aging ATI (AMD) Radeon 9500 "R300" through Radeon X1000 "R500" series graphics processors is going through a big code restructuring as part of a big undertaking in 2026... Yes, 24 years after the ATI R300 GPUs first released, thanks to a devoted open-source developer fan, there is a significant improvement in the works... Mon, 11 May 2026 20:33:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.351-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.351-Released Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API... Mon, 11 May 2026 16:24:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-DSC-AMDGPU-FRL https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-DSC-AMDGPU-FRL At the beginning of the month was the surprise milestone of AMD posting AMDGPU kernel driver patches for HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support. The HDMI FRL patches have since been updated to also enable HDMI 2.1's Display Stream Compression (DSC) functionality for higher resolutions and higher refresh rates with the open-source AMDGPU driver... Mon, 11 May 2026 13:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/system76-thelio-major-9980x https://www.phoronix.com/review/system76-thelio-major-9980x A few weeks back we reviewed the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics for delivering a very powerful, all-AMD and open-source high-end Linux workstation. Mon, 11 May 2026 12:40:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Help-Viewer-2026-Sandbox https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Help-Viewer-2026-Sandbox GNOME's help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There's a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector... Mon, 11 May 2026 10:36:29 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGC-2.34.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGC-2.34.4 The Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows... Mon, 11 May 2026 09:20:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/F2FS-FSERROR https://www.phoronix.com/news/F2FS-FSERROR Introduced in Linux 7.0 was FSERROR as generic I/O error reporting infrastructure. Linux to that point had no standardized mechanism for reporting metadata corruption or file I/O errors to user-space with each file-system doing its own thing. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now the latest Linux file-system preparing for FSERROR usage... Mon, 11 May 2026 08:26:47 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Switchtec-Gen6 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Switchtec-Gen6 The upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel will be adding support for Microchip's Switchtec PCIe Gen6 switches... Mon, 11 May 2026 07:14:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Intel-NPU-Drivers-Power-7.2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Intel-NPU-Drivers-Power-7.2 Last week's drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager and accelerator driver feature material destined for Linux 7.2 include some new power management control features both for the AMD Ryzen AI and Intel NPU drivers... Mon, 11 May 2026 06:19:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sculpt-OS-26.04 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sculpt-OS-26.04 Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS Framework is out with a new feature release... Mon, 11 May 2026 06:01:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0.6-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0.6-Released Linux 7.0.6 is out as stable this morning to finish mitigating the Dirty Frag vulnerability that was made public last week... Mon, 11 May 2026 05:51:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-rc3-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-rc3-Released Linus Torvalds just issued the third weekly test candidate of the Linux 7.1 kernel with around a third of the patches being for the networking subsystem... Sun, 10 May 2026 17:45:11 -0400 Michael Larabel