https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Beta-9-September-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Beta-9-September-2026 Tonight Valve released a big Steam client beta update with a number of new features and fixes... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:27:02 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-FEX-ARM64-Stacking https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-FEX-ARM64-Stacking A ReactOS developer for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications has achieved an intriguing software stack. With the experimental ReactOS ARM64 build for running on 64-bit ARM hardware like Raspberry Pi SBCs, he's paired that "open-source Windows" OS with the open-source FEX emulator for in turn being able to run Windows x64 games/apps on ReactOS atop native ARM hardware... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:15:11 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-b850p-coreboot-opensil https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-b850p-coreboot-opensil Earlier this year the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm ported AMD openSIL CPU open-source silicon initialization library and Coreboot to an EPYC motherboard, the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. Their next feat now achieved is bringing AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a desktop AMD Ryzen motherboard with their downstream Dasharo firmware solution. I have been running this alternative firmware on the MSI PRO B850P WiFi motherboard and it's been working out and performing well as an alternative to the closed-up motherboard firmware. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:10:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-26.1-RC2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-26.1-RC2 Following last month's initial release candidate of XWayland 26.1 with its many new features, a second release candidate is now available with a number of fixes... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:52:32 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Thelio-Mira-AI https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Thelio-Mira-AI System76 today unveiled their newest desktop computer as the Thelio Mira AI. The System76 Thelio Mira AI is designed for multi-GPU AI training, model fine-tuning, AI inferencing, computer vision and image generation tasks on tthe AI side. Or with its AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPU and NVIDIA/AMD GPU options is also a good candidate for simulations and other HPC-type workloads... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:57:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenSSL-4.1-Alpha-1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenSSL-4.1-Alpha-1 The first alpha release of the upcoming OpenSSL 4.1 release is now available for testing with some GREASE and DTLS 1.3 support along with more AVX-512 performance optimizations... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:46:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-615.71.09-Linux-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-615.71.09-Linux-Driver NVIDIA today debuted the 615.71.09 Linux driver that comes with a number of improvements, especially from the Vulkan API perspective... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:02:37 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Btrfs-Zstd-Faster-Decompress https://www.phoronix.com/news/Btrfs-Zstd-Faster-Decompress In addition to the still-pending kernel work for improving the in-kernel Zstd code, sepaarately the Btrfs file-system driver has an improvement on the way in its decompression code path for the Zstd transparent file-system compression... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:52:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GCC-Extended-Load-Opt https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GCC-Extended-Load-Opt It's nice seeing a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch out of AMD today that is a general optimization for the x86_64 compiler code and not exclusively tied to their Zen processors. It's an Extended Load Optimization to benefit code where there is a narrower type and then an arithmetic type with a wider type... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:26:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Experiment-Nouveau-NVIDIA-GB10 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Experiment-Nouveau-NVIDIA-GB10 Red Hat's David Airlie has managed another open-source graphics engineering feat... Getting the Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver running on the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip with the DGX Spark system... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:13:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/YSERVER-1.5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/YSERVER-1.5 Announced a few months back was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in the Rust programming language. In getting the project off the ground quickly and given the size of X11, it was largely vibe coded with Claude Code. The project continues and is attracting contributions from more users with today marking the YSERVER 1.5 release... Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:03:31 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AI-To-Faster-Linux-Kernel-Comp https://www.phoronix.com/news/AI-To-Faster-Linux-Kernel-Comp An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to "significant speed up" the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated "a lot of code, much of it hideous" but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:49:03 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-262-rc2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-262-rc2 One week after releasing systemd 262-rc1, systemd 262-rc2 is now available with further fixes and refinements for this init system and service manager. Systemd is also the latest open-source project introducing an AI canary for aiming to detect AI/LLM-based code contributors that weren't reviewed by an actual person in advance of the pull request... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:30:34 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DLSS5VKLayer https://www.phoronix.com/news/DLSS5VKLayer An interesting new open-source project for those looking to make use of NVIDIA DLSS 5 on Linux is DLSS5VKLayer. The DLSS5VKLayer is a Linux Vulkan layer that works for both native Linux games as well as Steam Play (Proton) Windows games for experimental DLSS 5 support... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:31:22 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KWin-Wayland-Commit-Timing https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KWin-Wayland-Commit-Timing Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland's important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:55:36 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dropping-Old-ARM-Ahead https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dropping-Old-ARM-Ahead For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:06:16 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/chuwi-unibook-wildcat-lake https://www.phoronix.com/review/chuwi-unibook-wildcat-lake CHUWI recently launched the UniBook laptop powered by the Intel Core 3 304 "Wildcat Lake" SOC and priced at just $449 USD. Especially with today's high component pricing, a brand new sub-$500 laptop is extremely rare. Rather than using some dated SoC, it uses Wildcat Lake as Intel's new value option alternative to the Core 3 Series Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs. This was our first time testing out Intel Wildcat Lake and that SoC plus the overall CHUWI UniBook has been working out well on Linux for those looking at a laptop in the sub-$500 space. Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:05:00 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/DaVinci-Resolve-21.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/DaVinci-Resolve-21.1 For those using the Linux-friendly DaVinci Resolve video editing and color correction/grading and visual effects software, DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is out today as a major update to this cross-platform solution... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:58:41 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-HDMI-1.4-3D-Mode https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-HDMI-1.4-3D-Mode It turns out one of the feature limitations of the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver is HDMI 1.4 3D output support with frame packing, top-and-bottom, and side-by-side options for transmitting simultaneous video streams. I wasn't aware of this limitation for the lack of any 3D displays and many Linux enthusiasts/gamers as well, but if you happen to have a compatible HDMI 1.4 3D display, there are pending patches to finally make this a reality... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:11:10 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-RTL8127atf-RTL8116af https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-RTL8127atf-RTL8116af Queued this past week into the net-next development tree of the latest networking additions for the Linux kernel is enabling support for Realtek's newer RTL8127atf and RTL8116af wired networking ASICs... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:41:09 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-DirectX-Backend-Official https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-DirectX-Backend-Official Over the past four years there has been a lot of work on a DirectX back-end within the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft has backed the initiative for being able to lower LLVM IR into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for execution by Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers. This back-end is now officially supported... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:21:51 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-2609-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-2609-Released FEX 2609 was released overnight as the newest monthly feature release for this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Steam and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling Windows games to run rather well on ARM64 Linux systems... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:09:20 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Zen5-Zen6-RMPOPT https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Zen5-Zen6-RMPOPT With the Linux kernel still working toward landing support for AMD's RMPOPT optimization for helping to reduce overhead on SEV-SNP enabled servers, the LLVM/Clang compiler has in turn prepped for the milestone by landing support for the RMPOPT, RMPREAD, and RMPCHKD instructions for Zen 5 and newer... Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:58:27 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-14.5-RELEASE https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-14.5-RELEASE For those that haven't yet made the move to FreeBSD 15 with still relying on FreeBSD 14 in production, out today is FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:35:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/x86-CPU-With-APX-x86S https://www.phoronix.com/news/x86-CPU-With-APX-x86S The mystery deepens around an x86 implementation from a corporate entity other than AMD and Intel and has been making some very intriguing changes for coming from a seeming start-up. Beyond 16 tile and 32 tile AMX implementations that already surpass Intel's current Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) capabilities in shipping Xeon CPUs, new disclosures were made today concerning Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED), and even x86S as the effort that Intel previously stopped for cleaning up the x86 baggage... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:54:23 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.10-amd64v3-Daily https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.10-amd64v3-Daily As an interesting development for Ubuntu 26.10, the daily ISOs of the "Stonking Stingray" now include amd64v3 images... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:36:20 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Preps-AMD-BTB-CTX https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Preps-AMD-BTB-CTX A recently posted Linux kernel patch has revealed a new security improvement with Zen 6 processors... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:55:33 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-DRM-Misc-Next-1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-DRM-Misc-Next-1 Last week's set of DRM-Misc-Next changes submitted to DRM-Next with targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle features HDMI 2.1 related work for both the AMDGPU kernel driver as well as the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:48:48 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Dynamic-PAMT-For-7.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Dynamic-PAMT-For-7.4 Intel's Dynamic PAMT feature looks like it's finally going to be ready for mainline with Linux 7.4. The Intel Dynamic PAMT is used for helping to reduce memory overhead when making use of Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential VMs... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:21:12 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rustls-0.23.44-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rustls-0.23.44-Released Rustls as the modern TLS library implementation written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release. This morning's Rustls 0.23.44 release enables post-quantum secure ML-DSA certificates by default... Mon, 07 Sep 2026 05:59:42 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-rc2-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-rc2-Released After the Linux 7.3 merge window concluded last weekend, today we are up to the Linux 7.3-rc2 test kernel release in working toward the stable v7.3 kernel during the second half of October... Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:22:25 -0400 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Shotcut-26.9-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/Shotcut-26.9-Beta Following the recent Shotcut stable release with a stock asset library and other improvements, Shotcut 26.9 Beta is out today with yet more improvements for this open-source video editing application for Linux, macOS, and Windows systems... Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:58:05 -0400 Michael Larabel