Last month on Phoronix there were 294 original news articles and 18 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Beyond [1]Phoronix.com turning 22 years old in June, there were also a lot of exciting Linux hardware and open-source software developments worth recapping.

Below is a look at the most-viewed content on Phoronix during the past month that ranged from NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks to other exciting new hardware, the Linux 7.2 merge window taking place following the Linux 7.1 stable debut, new Linux distribution developments, and also unfortunate developments around the Arch Linux AUR malware attacks and AI frustrations in the open-source space. If you enjoy all of the original content on Phoronix each and every day that is written by your's truly, please consider [2]joining Phoronix Premium to help support the site's continued existence now in its 23rd year. Thank you for your support.

The news captivating readers the most in June included:

[3]Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages

The day started out with Arch Linux's AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages.

[4]Linux Finally Eliminates The strncpy API After Six Years Of Work, 360+ Patches

Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy interface within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated.

[5]ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life

ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform.

[6]macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux

Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation.

[7]Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware

The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised.

[8]Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack

Just a day after Arch Linux developers believed they got their malware AUR incident under control with 1,500+ packages affected by malware, another round of of AUR malware is now being discovered. This latest round is more sophisticated as with code obfuscation to better conceal the intent.

[9]Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding

As an exciting development for GPU-accelerated video decoding within the Mozilla Firefox web browser, initial support for Vulkan Video has landed in the web browser!

[10]Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR

After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware, the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages.

[11]systemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS Installer, IMDSD & Storagectl

Systemd 261 is out as stable today with a number of new features and ready to coincide with H2'2026 Linux distributions.

[12]"Disgusting" Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds

Last week the main set of sched_ext changes were merged for Linux 7.2 that included continued work on sub-scheduler support. While Linus Torvalds didn't object to any of the features being worked on for this extensible scheduler framework that relies on user-space BPF programs, he was frustrated by the layout of the new C source files and remarked, "please don't do this disgusting thing...proper hierarchical filesystems have been available since 1965."

[13]Red Hat ARM Engineer Abandons ARM64 Linux Personal Desktop, Goes Back To AMD Ryzen System

Red Hat senior software engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz of Red Hat's ARM Team had been dogfeeding with an AArch64 Linux desktop being used as his primary, personal system for nearly the past year. But now he shared he has gone back to using his AMD Ryzen desktop instead over AArch64 Linux issues encountered with his Ampere Altra desktop.

[14]COSMIC Desktop's Frosted Glass Is Giving Windows Aero Vibes

Some of the latest feature work for the Rust and Wayland based COSMIC desktop environment is on creating their new "Frosted Glass" appearance. It's getting closer to release and giving off Windows Aero vibes for that design language from the Windows Vista days.

[15]Open-Source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan Driver Now Supports DLSS

With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play.

[16]The Linux Kernel Ready To Make TSC A Hard Requirement For x86 CPUs

Now that the Linux kernel has been removing Intel 486 CPU support and also proceeding to drop other vintage CPUs like the AMD K5 CPU support and AMD Elan, the Linux kernel is ready to make the TSC support unconditional for x86 processors.

[17]Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Intelligent Terminal"

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source creation... Under the MIT license it's the Intelligent Terminal.

[18]YSERVER: Modern X11 Server Written In Rust With The Help Of Claude Code

Open-source developer Jos Dehaes wrote in to Phoronix today in announcing a new X11 server he has been working on from scratch that has been quietly developed to this point but now ready to announce to the world... The YSERVER.

[19]AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform

AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux.

[20]Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics

Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it's coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.

[21]Google's Gemini Partially Figures Out A Lengthy Linux Boot Time On Modern ASUS Laptop

Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn't be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while discussions are ongoing in getting the vendor to provide a proper firmware fix.

[22]Qualcomm Gets The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 Laptop Working On Linux

For those interested in the prospects of running Snapdragon X2 laptops on Linux rather than Windows 11 on ARM, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 has emerged as one of the initial X2 laptops with tentative Device Tree handling to allow Linux to boot on this latest-generation Qualcomm-powered laptop,

And then the most popular featured articles/reviews:

[23]Benchmarking The Different CachyOS Linux Kernel Flavors

CachyOS ships with a good Linux kernel configuration by default balancing the different features as well as performance. But they also ship a variety of other kernel builds for those preferring a more leading-edge kernel or the current LTS series, a hardened kernel configuration, and more. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution with some of its main kernel flavors.

[24]Benchmarking The Performance Benefits To Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Packages

With Canonical engineers again experimenting with x86_64-v3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux using an "amd64v3" archive for the current Ubuntu 26.10 development, I decided to see how these latest amd64v3 packages comparing to their conventional Ubuntu 26.10 amd64 packages.

[25]Benchmarking The BORE Scheduler Performance With CachyOS Linux

Earlier this week I ran benchmarks of different CachyOS Linux kernel flavors that proved interesting from the performance overhead of their hardened kernel build to various other interesting performancr takeaways. One kernel flavor I hadn't tested though was their build with the BORE scheduler. Given the interest and feedback from Phoronix readers, here is an article focused on looking at the performance of the BORE scheduler for the Linux kernel on CachyOS.

[26]RISC-V CPU Performance Up 8x In Five Years: SiFive HiFive Unmatched To SpacemiT K3

Recently I published some initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has come compared to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board from five years ago.

[27]How NVIDIA Vera CPU Performance Compares To The Ampere Altra Max

Last month on Phoronix was an exclusive first look at the NVIDIA Vera CPU performance compared to prior-generation NVIDIA Grace as well as the current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition. Following that was looking at how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved over the past eight years of AArch64 Linux servers. A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested wanting to see how Vera compares to Ampere Altra. While Ampere Altra has been in the marketplace now for more than five years, they are some of the most readily available ARM Linux server options for DIY/enthusiast builds given the scarcity of AmpereOne and lack of other readily available socketed ARM CPU options. This article shows how the performance compares between Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA Vera.

[28]How NVIDIA GB10 CPU Performance Compares To Vera

Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA's GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera results.

[29]Benchmarking Bcachefs 1.38.6: The First Release No Longer "Experimental"

Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.

[30]AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Linux Performance

Yesterday AMD kicked off Computex 2026 in announcing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE alongside a number of other product announcements. With the Radeon RX 9070 GRE going on sale today, the review embargo has now lifted on this new RDNA 4 consumer graphics card slated to be priced around $549 USD. Here is an initial look at the Linux performance benchmarks of this new AMD graphics card offering.

[31]ARM Linux Server Performance Up More Than 7x Geo Mean In 8 Years, As Much As 15x With NVIDIA Vera CPU

NVIDIA's Vera CPU is delivering the fastest ARM performance I have ever seen. For putting it into perspective how far the ARM server CPU hardware has come in just the last decade and for some "fun" benchmarks as part of Phoronix marking 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, here are some benchmarks showing the Ampere eMAG from September 2018 to the performance now with NVIDIA Vera. Not even factoring in the many software optimizations across the stack over the period, from simply the hardware side the ARM server CPU performance has advanced by more than 7x in eight years and in some workloads nearly 15x faster.

[32]Updated Raspberry Pi OS With Linux 6.18 LTS Delivers Some Performance Benefits

Last week marked the release of an updated Raspberry Pi OS that moved to Linux 6.18 LTS from its former Linux 6.12 kernel base along with making a number of other package updates. Given the jump to the newer Long Term Support kernel and other improvements, I ran some fresh benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) to see the performance difference out of the updated operating system.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Phoronix-Turns-22

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-More-Than-1500

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Drops-strncpy

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-Running-Half-Life

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/macOS-27-Beta-Breaks-Asahi

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-More-Malware

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Vulkan-Video-Merged

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-Russian-Spam

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-261

[12] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Sched-Ext-Restructured

[13] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-ARM-Engineer-Back-Ryzen

[14] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Frosted-Glass

[15] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-NVK-Vulkan-Does-DLSS

[16] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-TSC-Unconditional

[17] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Intelligent-Terminal

[18] https://www.phoronix.com/news/YSERVER-Rust-X11-Server

[19] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-AI-Halo-Pre-Order

[20] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Released

[21] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gemini-ASUS-Laptop-Boot-Time

[22] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Yoga-Slim-7x-Gen11-Linux

[23] https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-flavors

[24] https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2610-amd64v3

[25] https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-bore

[26] https://www.phoronix.com/review/risc-v-5-year-performance

[27] https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampere-altra-nvidia-vera

[28] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-gb10

[29] https://www.phoronix.com/review/bcachefs-1386

[30] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-9070-gre

[31] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-arm-server

[32] https://www.phoronix.com/review/raspberry-pi-os-linux-618