https://www.phoronix.com/ Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News en-us https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.6-Next-Week https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.6-Next-Week KDE's Plasma 6.6 desktop release is due out next week (17 February) and there's been some last minute fixes to land. Additionally, KDE Plasma developers continue to be quite active in already landing feature work for Plasma 6.7... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:40:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Godot-4.7-Dev-1-Vulkan-RT https://www.phoronix.com/news/Godot-4.7-Dev-1-Vulkan-RT One of the latest exciting developments for the open-source Godot game engine is beginning to lay out support for Vulkan ray-tracing... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:17:25 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-50-Beta https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-50-Beta The GNOME 50 beta release is now available ahead of the official GNOME 50 desktop due out in March... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:09:26 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-GSP-NVIDIA-GA100 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-GSP-NVIDIA-GA100 One of the latest NVIDIA open-source contributions this week wasn't for the in-development Nova kernel driver but for enhancing the existing Nouveau kernel driver. The patch posted is for bringing up the NVIDIA GA100 GPU under Nouveau using the GPU System Processor (GSP)... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:36:21 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Multi-Lane-SPI https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Multi-Lane-SPI With the Serial Peripheral Interface "SPI" subsystem updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel comes support for multi-lane SPI... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:32:47 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Crypto-ML-DSA https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Crypto-ML-DSA Adding to the exciting features for the big Linux 7.0 kernel release is support for the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm "ML-DSA" quantum-resistant signature algorithm... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:20:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9005-sev-snp https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9005-sev-snp AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) provides memory encryption and integrity protections that can be especially useful in modern cloud computing. Typically a 2~10% performance overhead is reported when engaging AMD SEV-SNP for these hardware-backed security protections. In this article is an extensive look at the current AMD SEV-SNP performance impact for confidential computing on EPYC 9005 "Turin" servers. The current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was tested as well as an Ubuntu 26.04 development snapshot in evaluating the latest optimizations and what is on the horizon this year for AMD EPYC Linux server performance. Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:17:19 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Drops-Old-440BX-EDAC https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Drops-Old-440BX-EDAC As some long overdue housekeeping, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed an Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver for the Intel 440BX and 440GX chipset. The driver is being removed not only because that chipset was just used by old Celerons and Pentium II / Pentium III CPUs but that it's been in the kernel all this time while being known to be broken for 19+ years... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:25:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Slab-Sheaves https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Slab-Sheaves The slab memory allocator feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Most notable this cycle is expanded use of the recently-introduced Sheaves functionality... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:04:51 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Sound https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Sound Merged for the Linux 6.19 kernel was initial Nova Lake S audio support. Now merged this week for the Linux 7.0 kernel is enabling sound support for additional Nova Lake platforms... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:03:02 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Libinput-1.31 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Libinput-1.31 Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release overnight of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X.Org and Wayland desktop sessions... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:45:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-HWMON https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-HWMON All of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:36:44 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Haiku-OS-January-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Haiku-OS-January-2026 The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS kicked off 2026 by making many improvements to its kernel, device drivers, and user-space software... Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:25:10 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-MM https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-MM All of the memory management "MM" related patches have now been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:40:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Linux-7.0 https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Linux-7.0 The XFS file-system has some interesting new feature work and performance tuning with the Linux 7.0 kernel that will be used by the likes of Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS this spring... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:30:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cache-Aware-Scheduling-Linux-v3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cache-Aware-Scheduling-Linux-v3 Not in time for the current Linux 7.0 cycle but posted for another round of review is Intel's latest work around Cache Aware Scheduling for enhancing the performance of modern CPUs with multiple cache domains. This is the first set of updates to Cache Aware Scheduling for the new year and succeed the v2 patches from early December. This work not only benefits modern Intel CPUs but our testing has shown can also provide some very nice gains too for AMD EPYC processors... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:18:33 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-EXT4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-EXT4 Sent out and already merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are the EXT4 file-system updates... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:54:22 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RadeonSI-RADV-Video-Unified https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RadeonSI-RADV-Video-Unified Merged today to Mesa 26.1-devel is unifying of the AMD video decode implementation between the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:20:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-SPARC-Alpha-m68k https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-SPARC-Alpha-m68k In addition to all of the exciting Intel and AMD x86_64 enhancements that have been landing this week so far for the Linux 7.0 kernel, the aging SPARC, Alpha, and Motorola 680x0 "m68k" CPU ports have also seen some patches for this new kernel... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:30:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/review/arch-linux-loongarch https://www.phoronix.com/review/arch-linux-loongarch Earlier this month I posted benchmarks of the Loongson 3B6000 for this 12-core / 24-thread LoongArch Chinese CPU with DDR4 ECC memory. Those initial benchmarks were done with Debian LoongArch64 while since then I've shifted over to using Arch Linux on LoongArch. Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:05:23 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04.4-LTS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04.4-LTS Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS today as the newest point release to the Noble Numbat... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:45:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Networking https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Networking The Linux 7.0 networking pull request showcases two extremes and the diversity and robustness of the open-source kernel ecosystem. Linux 7.0 is laying the groundwork for WiFi 8 Ultra-High Reliability (UHR) support while this kernel version is also bidding farewell to the last Ethernet driver for use over parallel printer ports... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Workqueue https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Workqueue The Linux kernel's workqueue for async task handling within a dedicated kernel thread is seeing some useful improvements with Linux 7.0... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:35:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Perf-Events https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Perf-Events The performance "perf" events changes for the Linux 7.0 kernel are continuing to prepare for next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to current Xeon 6 Granite Rapids... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:15:51 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Resource-Control-Linux-7 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Resource-Control-Linux-7 Intel has upstreamed some Resource Control "resctrl" improvements to Linux 7.0 for enhanced telemetry monitoring. This is the good kind of telemetry with this new code being useful for being able to monitor how much energy or work is attributed to a group of tasks / process IDs on the system... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:31:22 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Modules-No-SHA1-Sign https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Modules-No-SHA1-Sign The Linux 7.0 kernel has removed support for signing kernel modules using SHA-1 as it's no longer considered secure but existing SHA-1 signed modules can still be loaded... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:12:07 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Media https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Media All of the media subsystem driver updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel and brings some new work around AV1 acceleration as well as other driver updates... Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:56:50 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Graphics-Drivers https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Graphics-Drivers The massive set of Linux kernel graphics/display driver Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates were sent out and merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. This also includes the growing work around accelerator "accel" drivers for AI NPUs and the like... Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:35:14 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-No-MMC-Changes https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-No-MMC-Changes The Linux MultiMediaCard "MMC" subsystem was set to see some new hardware support, optimized support for secure erase/trim on some eMMCs, and a variety of other improvements. But all of the MMC changes are rejected and will be for the duration of the Linux 7.0 cycle due to an apparent lack of testing and vetting via linux-next that led Linus Torvalds to calling it "complete garbage" and "untested crap"... Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:33:03 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DRM-AI-Code-Review https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DRM-AI-Code-Review Well known open-source Linux graphics driver developer David Airlie of Red Hat, who is the co-maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers and accelerator "accel" drivers, announced experimental work on AI-drive code/patch review for these open-source kernel drivers... Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:44:00 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sabayon-Linux-To-matrixOS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sabayon-Linux-To-matrixOS Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he's begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS... Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:30:44 -0500 Michael Larabel https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-26.0-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-26.0-Released Mesa 26.0 was just officially released as this quarter's new feature release for these open-source OpenGL / Gallium3D and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and elsewhere like within the confines of Microsoft's WSL... Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:36:00 -0500 Michael Larabel