https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-openSIL-Phoenix-AM5-PR https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-openSIL-Phoenix-AM5-PR Last week the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm released the first open-source firmware for a modern AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with their work to port AMD openSIL and Coreboot in their downstream Dasharo flavor to an MSI desktop ATX motherboard. Now that it's working out well, 3mdeb is working to upstream their AM5 platform support and Phoenix SoC support into upstream AMD openSIL as well as Coreboot... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:07:29 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Premier-Sponsor-LVFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Premier-Sponsor-LVFS Now this is a pleasant and very unexpected surprise... NVIDIA has become the latest premier sponsor of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:43:44 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Foundation-Tokenomics https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Foundation-Tokenomics Last month the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents as their latest AI play. That followed other "AI" initiatives from dealing with AI exploits to AI asset and data exchange. Today they have another AI foray being announced with the creation of the Tokenomics Foundation... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:14:14 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Staging-Reject-LLMs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Staging-Reject-LLMs While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:29:29 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wild-Linker-0.10 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wild-Linker-0.10 Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:14:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MSI-Claw-M-Center-Key https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MSI-Claw-M-Center-Key For those with a MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM handheld gaming system, the model powered by the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, an important addition is coming to the Linux 7.3 kernel so that the M-Center keys will be properly supported... Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:57:59 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-9.0-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-9.0-Released FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:49:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX7-Soft-Reset-Linux-7.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX7-Soft-Reset-Linux-7.3 In addition to the AMDGPU feature pull request to DRM-Next last week that landed DRM format modifiers for old AMD GPUs and a variety of other improvements, a secondary set of AMDGPU feature work followed that last week in preparation for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:36:30 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Expects-FailFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Expects-FailFS Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:46:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-laptop-13-pro-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-laptop-13-pro-linux With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H. Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:42:55 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/zlib-rs-0.6.7 https://www.phoronix.com/news/zlib-rs-0.6.7 zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:19:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Boxes-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Boxes-2026 GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:06:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-610.57.04-Linux-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-610.57.04-Linux-Driver NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:58:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Retiring-FreeVxFS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Retiring-FreeVxFS It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-ssytem used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:35:52 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KGamma2-Gamma-Wayland https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KGamma2-Gamma-Wayland KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:58:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Shell-Mutter-51-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Shell-Mutter-51-Beta Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:23:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Linux-July-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Linux-July-2026 With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:56:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MCTP-Over-USB-1.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MCTP-Over-USB-1.1 Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:47:40 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-RTL8261C-RTL8261D https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-RTL8261C-RTL8261D Queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window is adding support for the Realtek RTL8261C and RTL8261D 10 Gigabit PHYs that launched last year... Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:35:55 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AerynOS-Big-Update-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AerynOS-Big-Update-2026 It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:23:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-Released Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:38:50 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Starfire-Starts-Linux-7.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Starfire-Starts-Linux-7.3 Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:32:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MSM-DRM-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-MSM-DRM-Driver Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:47:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Touch-Toward-26.04 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Touch-Toward-26.04 Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:37:06 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-Fixing-Zen-5-IDs https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-Fixing-Zen-5-IDs Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:25:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Box64-0.4.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Box64-0.4.4 Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems... Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:06:15 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-July-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-July-2026 Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:25:24 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-11.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-11.0 NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:49:21 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/July-2026-Highlights https://www.phoronix.com/news/July-2026-Highlights Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Foxboron https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Foxboron Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:47:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-ATA https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-rc6-ATA Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:49:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-rtx-5090-laptop-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-rtx-5090-laptop-linux With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer's certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I had run some graphics benchmarks to see how Nouveau+NVK was performing for this Razer Blade RZ09-0582 with the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU. Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0400 Michael Larabel