During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing.
For those that missed some of the content on Phoronix each and every day of the year, below is the monthly recap of the most viewed content from February. As always, if you enjoy all of the daily Linux hardware/software and open-source coverage unique to this website, please consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium or at least not engaging any ad-blockers on this website. Tips via PayPal and Stripe remain graciously accepted as well during these tiring times for web publishers with the unfortunate state of the online ad industry, rampant ad block use, and other factors while being a one man band putting out all of the content on Phoronix.
With the monthly PSA out of the way, the most popular reviews / featured articles for February included:
Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China’s LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.
Intel Panther Lake Shows Strong Linux CPU Performance & Power Efficiency With Core Ultra X7 358H Benchmarks
For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” performance on Linux, today’s the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux software stack in with around 300 benchmarks.
Intel Arc B390 Graphics Performance On Linux With Panther Lake
Yesterday was our first look at the Intel Panther Lake Linux performance with the Core Ultra X7 358H and focused on the CPU performance. In today’s benchmarking is a look at the very exciting Xe3 graphics found with the top-tier Panther Lake models: the Arc B390 Graphics with 12 Xe cores.
Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance For Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake
Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state.
Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn
For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 “Penryn” was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support on Ubuntu 26.04 development. On a geo mean basis over the past 18 years from Penryn to Panther Lake, the performance was at 21.5x in over 150 benchmarks. At the most extreme was a 95x difference going from Intel’s 45nm Penryn to the 18A Panther Lake.
Pushing The Intel Panther Lake CPU Performance Further On Linux
Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel’s much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today’s article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in looking at the performance potential when pushing the Core Ultra X7 358H with a higher power budget.
Evaluating The Performance Cost To AMD SEV-SNP On Modern EPYC VMs
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 modern EPYC 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.
Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC
When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 “Panther Lake” in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed there at least it’s much faster to carry out bisecting of the kernel performance regressions. But with that initial testing wrapped up, I didn’t find any regressions like with Panther Lake and standing out were some rather enticing PostgreSQL database server performance benefits when running atop Linux 7.0.
Google Cloud N4 Series Benchmarks: Google Axion vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance
Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the N4A performance against the Intel Xeon N4 and AMD EPYC N4D series.
Arc B390 Graphics With Panther Lake Performing Great On Open-Source Intel Compute Runtime
This month I have been doing a lot of Panther Lake benchmarking under Linux with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of much interest has been the Arc B390 Xe3 graphics that have been working nicely out-of-the-box with the Intel open-source driver stack on Linux although there still are some gaps to fill against Windows. Those Intel Arc B390 Linux benchmarks so far have been focused on OpenGL and Vulkan graphics, but what about OpenCL and GPU compute with the open-source Intel Compute Runtime? Today’s article is looking at the performance of the Xe3 Panther Lake graphics on the newest Compute Runtime release compared to prior Intel graphics generations and the AMD Ryzen AI competition.
And the most popular news of February:
Linus Torvalds Rejects MMC Changes For Linux 7.0 Cycle: “Complete Garbage”
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”.
Linux 7.0 Officially Concluding The Rust Experiment
While Linux 7.0 is the next kernel version solely over Linus Torvalds’ numbering preference, there is a notable symbolic change that was sent in overnight for this new kernel merge window: formally concluding the “Rust experiment” with upstream kernel developers now in acceptance that Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay.
Linus Torvalds Confirms The Next Kernel Is Linux 7.0
Following Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 6.19 stable, Linus Torvalds is now out with his customary release announcement. Notably he officially confirmed that the next kernel version is Linux 7.0 as the successor to Linux 6.19.
Toyota Developing A Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine – Using Flutter & Dart
Well, here’s an unexpected combination… Toyota’s Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite.
GNU Hurd Is “Almost There” With x86_64, SMP & ~75% Of Debian Packages Building
Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year’s was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.
AI Helped Uncover A “50-80x Improvement” For Linux’s IO_uring
Linux block maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe recently was debugging some slowdowns in the AHCI/SCSI code with IO_uring usage. When turning to Claude AI to help in sorting through the issue, patches were devised that can deliver up to a “literally yield a 50-80x improvement on the io_uring side for idle systems.” The code is on its way to QEMU.
Linux 7.0-rc1 Released With Many New Features:
Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features.
Linux Prepares To Support Microsoft’s “Turn On Display” DSM To Address Laptop Issues
Microsoft in Windows 11 22H2 introduced a new ACPI Device Specific Method (DSM) “Turn On Display” notification that the Linux 7.0 kernel will be adding support for in dealing with some otherwise problematic laptop behavior.
Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot
The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo’s desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft’s Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.
KDE Linux To Provide Better Hardware Support & Better Performance
Following the September release of the KDE LInux reference distribution for the KDE desktop in alpha form, KDE Linux developers have been working toward the beta release with more improvements to this open-source desktop distro.
Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year’s talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10’s adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.
Ubuntu 26.04 Begins Its Feature Freeze
Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” has entered its feature freeze.
X.Org Server’s “Master” Branch Now Closed With Cleaned Up State On “Main”
This Valentine’s Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior “master” codebase.
A Lot Of Exciting Changes To Look Forward To With Linux 7.0
With Linux 6.19 due for release later today it then opens up the next kernel merge window. It could be Linux 6.20 but more than likely the next kernel version will be called Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds’ past tradition of bumping the major version number after X.19. Whatever it ends up being called, here is a look at various “-next” changes that have been queuing up ahead of the merge window.
Experimental Zones Protocol Merged To Wayland After 2+ Years, 620+ Comments
After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones “xx-zones” implementation for area-limited window positioning.
Debian’s Challenge When Its Developers Quietly Drift Away
You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian’s data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian’s all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don’t properly communicate it to the Debian project.
ollama 0.17 Released With Improved OpenClaw Onboarding
The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with a new release. The ollama v0.17.0 release is driven by new functionality around enhancing the OpenClaw onboarding process.
sudo-rs Breaks Historical Norms With Now Enabling Password Feedback By Default
On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improved UX.
Intel Hiring More Linux Developers – Including For GPU Drivers / Linux Gaming Stack
As some good news out of Intel today on the Linux/open-source side following last year’s layoffs, they’re hiring for some new Linux software development roles — including for enhancing their Linux graphics driver stack that also includes a focus on Linux gaming with the likes of Valve’s Proton (Steam Play).
Mesa 26.0 Released With Much Better Radeon Ray-Tracing, Many Vulkan Driver Improvements
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.
