Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

One of the capabilities of newer Intel Xeon Scalable processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) as a way of providing for confidential virtual machines. Intel TDX allows for "isolation, confidentiality, and integrity at the VM level" which is good from the security perspective but the dependence on signed binaries is causing mixed feelings within the Fedora camp at the broader open-source community.

While Linux 6.10 is poised to merge the initial NTSYNC driver for a Windows NT Synchronization Primitive driver that can help with faster Windows gaming performance under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), the driver isn't complete. The initial patches have been in Greg Kroah-Hartman's char-misc-next branch for several weeks to expose the NTSYNC character device, it isn't the entire patch series. Greg has now marked the driver as "broken" for Linux 6.10.

Back in February I wrote about AMD having quietly funded the effort for a drop-in CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs built atop the ROCm library. This was an incarnation of ZLUDA that originally began as a CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs using oneAPI Level Zero. While AMD discontinued funding ZLUDA development earlier this year, this CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs is continuing to see some new code activity.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan just announced the stable release of XWayland 24.1 as the newest feature release for this X.Org Server code allowing X11 clients to work within the confines of Wayland compositors.

The networking subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel. As usual it's a big update with some 90,083 new lines of code and 37,889 lines removed.

It's been the better part of two months since the last AMDVLK driver update while today the AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver has been christened.

The big batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates for the Linux 6.10 merge window were sent out today that includes the new "Panthor" driver for newer ARM Mali/Immortalis graphics processors and the usual hearty assortment of Intel and AMD graphics driver changes.

https://github.com/canonical/mirCanonical engineer Matthew Kosarek just released Mir 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Wayland compositor that can be used for building Wayland-based shells and has shown some interesting potential with the likes of Miracle-WM and Miriway.

Along with the various Intel Xe2 driver changes that are ongoing for the Intel Linux graphics driver stack, over in the sound subsystem the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is bringing HDMI audio support for upcoming Intel Battlemage graphics cards.

The first release candidate of systemd 256 came just under one month ago with new features like run0 as the new sudo alternative, a new "systemd-vpick" binary, importctl as another new tool, Zboot kernel support with systemd ukify, systemd-homed improvements, and much more. Systemd 256-rc2 is out this evening with a few more features and other fixes collected over the past several weeks.

Linux kernel and Git creator Linus Torvalds is known for his current use of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation as his main system after years of using Intel hardware. The past few years he's also been doing more ARM64 testing now that he has an Apple MacBook using Apple Silicon that serves as a nice travel device and for routinely compiling new ARM64 Linux kernel builds. More recently, his ARM64 Linux testing has increased now that he has a more powerful AArch64 system to complement his collection of routine gear.

The Framework Laptops are some great systems with their upgradeable/modular design, friendly Linux support, both Intel and AMD options, the latest models making use of an open-source embedded controller, and nice build quality. The Framework Laptops have proven very popular with Linux/open-source enthusiasts but one of the recurring critiques has been the lack of Coreboot firmware support for these laptops as an alternative (or outright replacement) to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. As a promising avenue for the future, there is experimental work being done on getting Coreboot up and running with the Framework 13 laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen 7040 series.

Intel just published a new set of CPU microcode files for updating Alder lake and newer as well as Xeon Scalable 4th Gen and 5th Gen in order to address three security issues plus take care of various functional issues.

Back in late 2023 were Rust abstractions for the Linux kernel's Virtual File-System (VFS) code. Those patches by Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho have now seen a second iteration posted... In addition to various improvements to the Rust VFS bindings, the new patches bring a work-in-progress EXT2 Rust file-system driver.

Debian's APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was APT's new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver.

The Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly-opened Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Among the HID driver updates coming with Linux 6.10 are supporting the Steam Deck IMU motion sensors as well as HID coverage for the ASUS ROG Ally and ASUS ROG Z13 devices.

After the 22 patches were under review for the past eight months, merged today is the NVK Vulkan driver support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension for handling DRM format modifiers.

Along with the IO_uring improvements for Linux 6.10, the block subsystem changes have also been merged for this new kernel version.

While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support.

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ has finally launched for allowing M.2 devices like NVMe drives, WiFi adapters, accelerators, and more to be connected to the Raspberry Pi 5.

Manjaro 24.0 has been released today as the newest version of this Arch Linux derived desktop OS. Manjaro 24.0 ships with the latest the newly-released Linux 6.9 kernel and a slew of other updated packages.

There's another Rust upgrade coming for the Linux 6.10 kernel to bump the Rust version baseline required for building the Rust in-tree kernel components. This raising of the baseline will continue until a suitable minimum version is achieved where official Rust compiler "just works" well with the Rust'ed kernel bits. The Rust upgrade in Linux 6.10 also does away with its in-tree "alloc" fork for big code savings and simplifying maintenance.

The various ARM SoC/platform pull requests were already merged today by Linus Torvalds for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

The work written about one month ago on Phoronix for much faster AES-XTS on modern Intel/AMD CPUs for speeding up disk and file encryption by as much as 155% with AMD Zen 4 CPUs has been submitted for Linux 6.10! As expected, this work providing new AES-XTS implementations for modern x86_64 processors is going into Linux 6.10 as part of the crypto subsystem updates.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September already, sadly the mainline Linux kernel still lacks support for booting this popular single board computer... The support on Raspberry Pi OS and other downstream distributions/kernels is good, but the mainline kernel support for the Raspberry Pi SBCs remains a sore spot for this popular ARM single board computer. SUSE engineers have been working on implementing minimal boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 that will hopefully make it to the mainline kernel.

Mozilla has pushed out its release images of the Firefox 126 web browser ahead of its official debut on Tuesday.

Back at Supercomputing 23, the Linux Foundation announced their intent on forming the High Performance Software Foundation for helping to advance open-source software for high performance computing (HPC). The Linux Foundation is now using ISC 24 this week in Hamburg, Germany for announcing that the High Performance Software Foundation has launched.

Today marks the first official day of the Linux 6.10 merge window. Among the horde of pull requests sent out today were the numerous x86 pull requests of material that's been queuing up in TIP.git of which there are many changes benefiting both Intel and AMD.

Building off last night's release of Linux 6.9 stable, GNU Linux-libre 6.9-gnu has debuted as this kernel downstream that works on stripping out support for any drivers/hardware depending upon closed-source firmware/microcode and other alterations in the name of software freedom.

Intel, HPE, and Argonne National Laboratory have announced at ISC High Performance 2024 that the Aurora Supercomputer has broken the Excascale barrier and is now the fastest AI supercomputer currently in existence.

Arch Linux derived CachyOS is known for its aggressive performance optimizations and running well on modern hardware. It's also leading when it comes to adopting other new Linux/open-source features. With this weekend's May 2024 ISO update, CachyOS has rolled out initial support for installing to a root file-system based on Bcachefs.

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 1, this weekend brought the second beta candidate right on time.

Linux 6.9 is out! Linux 6.9 has been released on time as the newest stable kernel version for rolling-release Linux distributions and other summer releases/updates. Linux 6.9 has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version.

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, Linux 6.9 stable should release later today. In turn the Linux 6.10 merge window will then open for the next two weeks and already some early pull requests have been submitted for this next kernel version. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the Linux 6.10 kernel.

The recent AMD P-State Linux driver patches for heterogeneous core CPU topology, Fast CPPC, and Core Performance Boost haven't made it to the Linux power management's "-next" branch ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 cycle. Thus it looks like those features won't be ready to make it for v6.10 unless by chance being deemed ready in the coming days and then sent in as part of a secondary set of merge window changes. However, some other AMD P-State fixes/improvements are queued up.

With the new Intel "Xe" Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver that's been in development one of the touted benefits of the clean sheet driver design is that it would enable using Intel discrete GPUs on non-x86 CPU architectures. The long-used "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver has many x86'isms in the code-base built up over the many years of Intel integrated graphics that were only ever found within their x86/x86_64 processors. But now in the era of Intel discrete graphics, there's been issues in trying to run Intel Arc Graphics on say ARM, POWER9, and RISC-V, among others. The experimental Intel Xe driver was recently successfully demonstrated in running on ARM using an Ampere Altra workstation.

Following all of the GFX12 code and related IP landing within the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver as well as the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and other code in enabling the next-generation of AMD Radeon graphics, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for RDNA4 (GFX12) was merged this Sunday into Mesa.

Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.

The Linux 6.9 kernel should debut as stable later today unless Linus Torvalds has second thoughts and decides to delay it by issuing a v6.9-rc8 kernel instead that would then push out the official release by an extra week. In any event, as a last-minute "x86/urgent" pull request is another Zen 5 PCI ID being added.

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.

For those interested in some insightful Linux kernel mailing list reading this weekend, there's been a vibrant discussion on the ability for the Linux kernel to mitigate unexpected arithmetic overflows/underflows/wraparounds.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor.

Two years ago Cloudflare outlined how they began replacing Nginx with their own in-house creation, Pingora. Back in February of this year Cloudflare open-sourced Pingora and in April issued the maiden release of Pingora. Out today is Pingora 0.2 as the second release of this Rust framework that is already used in production by Cloudflare.

Rustls is the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with a large emphasis on memory safety and security. Rustls is backed by Google, AWS, and others as well as being a recipient of Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. The latest exciting milestone for the open-source project is that Rustls can now work with Nginx.

Wasmer 4.3 is out as the newest version of this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX, WASI, and EmScript execution. This cross-platform WASM runtime continues to be focused on driving lightweight containers that can run anywhere in a very secure manner.

KDE developers had another busy week as more features were merged ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 release.

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.

AMD last week sent out a set of patches to enhance the open-source FFmpeg multimedia library with integration around the AMD Advanced Media Framework (AMF). The AMF SDK allows for "optimal" access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing but this patch series questioned the need in an era of Vulkan Video APIs beginning to see adoption.

Linux 6.10 is introducing support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) encryption and integrity protections to prevent active/passive interposers from compromising them. This follows a recent security demonstration of TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker being demonstrated. TPM sniffing attacks have also been demonstrated against Linux systems too, thus the additional protections be made with Linux 6.10 to better secure TPM2 modules.

While Intel can be praised for their dozens (or likely by now, hundreds) of open-source projects they maintain and countless other existing open-source software projects they actively contribute to and are covered by Phoronix on a near-daily basis, not everything there is open-source. Intel is a wonderful and leading open-source promoter but occasionally there are closed-source blobs or questionable moves such as today: Intel is taking their Hyperscan library development from BSD-licensed open-source software to now the Intel Proprietary License moving forward.

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.9 kernel should be released as stable on Sunday. It's been a fairly quiet week so Linux 6.9 stable will likely happen as opposed to going through an extra week with a 6.9-rc8 candidate. With this spring 2024 kernel there are many great features and improvements, especially for modern Intel and AMD platforms.

The Vulkan API 1.3.285 spec revision is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications and another new extension developed by Valve engineering.

Building off last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (RHEL 9.4) has been AlmaLinux 9.4 and now the other notable community-focused downstream: Rocky Linux 9.4.

Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support.

Intel has released their Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.3 to succeed their earlier v2.1 derived extension. With this updated extension targeting PyTorch 2.3, Intel is rolling out more optimizations around Large Language Models (LLMs).