Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

It was two months ago today that an urgent security alert was issued over XZ being hit by malicious code that turned out to be a backdoor within liblzma added by a bad actor that worked his way into XZ co-maintainership. Longtime XZ developer Lasse Collin is back at the helm and has been auditing the prior XZ commits and today released XZ 5.6.2 with the backdoor completely removed.

A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.

Framework is out today with some exciting announcements from lowering the price of the existing Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 series SoC to announcing a new Framework Laptop 13 powered by Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and having a new 2.8K display option for this modular/upgradeable laptop shipping this summer.

Arm today announced the latest products in the Armv9 CPU portfolio: the Cortex-X925 as their "ultimate performance" processor and the Cortex-A725 as their processor option for sustained performance.

QuestDB 8.0 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source time-series database. QuestDB continues to cater to high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries so it can handle use-cases from financial data to IoT sensors. With today's QuestDB 8.0 release, it's even faster.

KDE's Eco group announced today "Opt Green" as a new initiative for sustainable software.

One of the newest open-source projects in-development by Ubuntu maker Canonical is a new C# written program called Flamenco.

The AMD shader compiler "ACO" alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has seen another batch of changes merged in preparations for next-generation Radeon RDNA4 GPUs.

Coming up on my radar today is a commit made to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adjusting the loop alignment with Intel's generic tuning path. In turn this should address "some random performance penalty in benchmarks" with coping better around cache lines.

The past year there's been a big Linux kernel patch series in the work by Intel to improve Sub-NUMA Clustering "SNC" support so it behaves well with Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel hardware. Hopefully that work will soon be ready for mainlining in the Linux kernel while this week brought the 19th revision to those patches.

Flowblade 2.16 is out today as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editor.

SVT-AV1 that started out as an open-source AV1 video encoder at Intel and more recently an an Alliance of Open Media project quietly released SVT-AV1 v2.1 last week. With this new SVT-AV1 release are yet more performance optimizations and tuning.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be quite busy preparing their Xe kernel driver and Mesa user-space ANV Vulkan / Iris Gallium3D driver for upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.2-devel is more Lunar Lake platform enablement work plus early support for ray-tracing with the integrated Xe2 graphics. However, more work is still needed before this Lunar Lake / Xe2 support will be ready for end-users on the Linux desktop.

Microsoft's open-source DirectX Shader Compiler that is open-source and derived from the LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure is out with a significant new release as it begins preparing for "HLSL 202x" as a big leap for the High-Level Shader Language.

The Google Chrome/Chromium 127 web browser release should finally provide support for PipeWire camera capturing support!

Sent out today as a fix for the Linux kernel's in-tree "cpupower" utility is properly handling P-State frequency reporting for upcoming AMD Zen 5 processors.

For those continuing to rely on the Enterprise Linux 8 series, AlmaLinux 8.10 has made its stable debut this morning as the newest version of this community-oriented operating system derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10.

One of the new security features coming with Linux 6.10 is TPM bus encryption and integrity protection to fend off a wave of possible attacks against Trusted Platform Module recovery keys, TPM sniffing, etc. This functionality was merged for the Linux 6.10 merge window but is now being pulled back to x86_64-only by default where it's been sufficiently tested.

The ASUS WMI platform driver for Linux that is predominantly used by ASUS laptops for enabling more functionality under Linux has a new patch series available that is enabling yet more features for the latest ASUS hardware on Linux.

Nearly one year ago to the day the openSUSE project anounced MicroOS Desktop GNOME being renamed to openSUSE Aeon while openSUSE Desktop Plasma was taking the name openSUSE Kalpa.

Canonical announced this morning an optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a "credit card sized" RISC-V single board computer.

FreeBSD 14.1-RC1 is now available for testing as this incremental update to FreeBSD 14 prepares for its stable release in June.

Intel Performance Limit Reasons (PLR) can indicate why your CPU is downclocking / limited to a lower performance limit for a given core or die. With some Windows utilities this information this Intel CPU feature has been available there while now Intel is bringing PLR support to Linux too.

The Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) is out with a new version today for this C programming language variant that features SPMD programming extensions. Intel ISPC aims to make it easy to take advantage of SIMD capabilities on their modern processors as well as GPUs.

AMD by way of their GPUOpen group have released version 3.1 of the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator.

Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling Linux to boot on the LicheeRV Nano, a mini single board computer that comes in at a mere 22.86 x 35.56 mm. As interesting as the size with this SBC is the Sophgo SG2002 SoC that features a mix of RISC-V and ARM cores.

An end-user and Phoronix reader has taken up creating his own AMD ROCm SDK build system to make it easier to setup a machine learning software stack from scratch on AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux. This open-source build system pulls in the AMD ROCm source code as well as AMD GPU-accelerated tools like PyTorch and ONNX and makes it easier to deploy and without having to rely on Docker or other solutions.

The Linux 6.10-rc1 kernel was just released to top off the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Intel's open-source NPU "iVPU" Linux kernel driver for supporting their Neural Processing Unit beginning with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors is already seeing a code refactoring. The refactoring of this Intel accelerator driver is intended for allowing more versatile CPU and NPU combinations moving forward.

With the memory management "MM" updates merged for the Linux 6.10 there is now NUMA balancing support for multi-size transparent hugepages (THPs). This is yielding some nice performance results and there is also other work in this new kernel around multi-size THPs.

One of the patch series that sadly was not ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window and thus will need to wait a few months for at least the next kernel is enabling AMD Fast CPPC support for Zen 4 processors. Fast CPPC aims to allow the processor to deliver higher performance at the same power consumption.

Merged for Linux 6.10 is DRM_Panic as a kernel panic screen for situations akin to Windows' well known "Blue Screen of Death". This is a kernel-based panic screen as an alternative to systemd's recent systemd-bsod. Patches have been posted by Red Hat for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Direct Rendering Manager driver to work with DRM Panic.

While not as exciting as XFS expanding its online repair support, Bcachefs prepping for online fsck, Btrfs seeing some performance work, or F2FS improving zoned storage support, the modern NTFS driver "NTFS3" saw a set of fixes land for the Linux 6.10 kernel.

Sneaking in as a "fix" for the Linux 6.10 kernel is an enhancement to the AMDKFD kernel compute driver used by the ROCm compute stack for better supporting small Ryzen APUs like client and embedded SoCs.

A few days ago with the main RISC-V architecture pull for Linux 6.10 was enabling Rust support within the kernel for this ISA as well as other additions. A secondary set of RISC-V changes have been merged as well ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window closing this weekend.

The Mozilla Ocho group has published their newest version of Llamafile, the open-source project that makes it very easy to distribute and run large language models (LLMs) as a single file. Llamafile is an excellent solution for easily sharing and running LLMs and supporting both speedy CPU-based execution as well as GPU acceleration where available.

This Week In GNOME is out with their newest edition to outline all of the interesting developments as we approach the end of May.

Intel software engineers did a late Friday night release of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library v1.1, their Python library for tapping into the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found on the new Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. This Python library makes it easier to interface with the Intel VPU/NPU kernel driver and in turn enjoying accelerated operations for AI.

It was a busy week for KDE developers ahead of yesterday's Plasma 6.1 Beta release. KDE developer Nate Graham in his weekly development summary outlined all of the interesting changes to make it into the Plasma 6.1 desktop ahead of the feature freeze that went into effect with the beta release.

Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.

Famed open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has landed 13 more patches in Mesa 24.2-devel to provide fixes for GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics IP while also adding more GFX11 (RDNA3) APUs.

The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.

The four month old KWin merge request by Xaver Hugl to allow for triple buffering has been merged and just in time for the Plasma 6.1 code branching!

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" OpenCL implementation that originally began as a CPU-based run-time and has expanded to support a variety of GPU and accelerator targets is out with its first release candidate of the upcoming PoCL 6.0.

Last week saw the main Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.10 that delivered on some performance optimizations while today saw a secondary set of merge window changes for this CoW file-system that is now adding back the "norecovery" mount option.

The Device Mapper changes were merged last week into the Linux 6.10 kernel, including a new "high priority" option for DM-Crypt.

Following the recent PipeWire 1.2 release candidate, a second release candidate is out today that also includes the ability to stream to Snapcast servers.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel include enabling monitoring of more all-in-one liquid coolers for CPUs, a new driver for exposing monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and other new monitoring capabilities.

The Framework 13 and Framework 16 AMD Ryzen powered laptops make use of an NPCX embedded controller that rely on the ChromeOS open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware. With the Linux 6.10 kernel the Chrome OS "cros_ec_lpc" driver is being extended to support these latest Framework upgradeable laptops.

Following the HID changes last week that brought Steam Deck IMU and ASUS ROG Ally support along with other Human Interface Device additions, on Thursday the input subsystem updates were submitted for this new kernel. The Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller is now supported along with other input additions.