Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Arch Linux derivative CachyOS that is optimized for a nice desktop experience and shipping a nice set of performance optimizations/tuning by default is out with its June 2024 refresh.

In addition to debuting their "Peano" LLVM compiler back-end for Ryzen AI NPUs on Friday, AMD also submitted a new batch of feature code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver of new feature code aiming for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

Intel's IGB and IXGBE network drivers within the mainline Linux kernel are being adapted to support firmware updates for the underlying driver. To date such functionality was limited to Intel's out-of-tree versions of these drivers for their higher-end network hardware.

Mold 2.32 is out as the newest feature release for this high speed code linker that rivals LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

There was a very exciting Friday evening code drop out of AMD... They announced a new project called Peano that serves as an open-source LLVM compiler back-end for AMD/Xilinx AI engine processors with a particular focus on the Ryzen AI SOCs with existing Phoenix and Hawk Point hardware as well as the upcoming XDNA2 found with the forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series.

GNOME developers continue to be quite busy this summer from enhancing their desktop with more security and accessibility features to further crafting GNOME OS.

Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications.

Out for testing this weekend is the OBS Studio 30.2 beta software for those into live-streaming their desktop and other screen recording purposes. With the OBS Studio 30.2 release there are video encode improvements for Linux, support for multi-track video streaming, hybrid MP4 output, and other new features.

The KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop is due for release in a little more than one week. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham thinks this is going to be a "good one" with a lot of new features, better performance, and more.

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack.

The patches have been years in the making around AMD SEV-SNP encrypted virtualization and various elements have been upstreamed in prior kernel versions while for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle are finally the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) bits for launching SEV-SNP protected guest virtual machines.

The patches recently covered on Phoronix for up to 162% faster AES-GCM encryption/decryption with modern Intel and AMD processors is now queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle!

SPIR-V used by the likes of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan is a common intermediate representation (IR) / intermediate language for consumption by device drivers. With code now merged into LLVM, AMD has introduced the notion of vendor "flavored" SPIR-V for containing extra information pertinent to the GPU device/driver being targeted.

The second beta is now available for testing of the upcoming Python 3.13 release that is bringing an experimental JIT, a new interactive interpreter, and other big features for this annual Python feature release.

On Thursday the first set of Intel Xe driver feature updates were submitted to DRM-Next of material intended for merging with the Linux 6.11 kernel in July.

Merged to the Linux kernel back in 2018 was an LG Gram laptop driver for supporting various hotkeys and extra functionality of these LG laptops. That driver is now being extended to support the latest LG Gram laptop models.

With this week marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, as part of the commemorative articles this week has been looking at the most popular Linux/open-source news over 20 years. In the piece today is looking back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles on Phoronix since 2004.

It's like magic with one line of code changed in the Linux kernel that Intel is reporting up to 19% performance improvement for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" and up to an 11% improvement in performance per Watt. Or in another EPP mode, the power consumption during video playback can be reduced by 52%!

When it comes to the RDNA 3.5 / RDNA 3+ integrated graphics found with upcoming AMD products, the graphics driver IP has been referred to as "GFX1150" and "GFX1151" of the AMD GFX 11.5 graphics IP. But now appearing today within the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler is a new GFX1152 variant.

With this week's Computex announcement by AMD of the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop processors built atop Zen 5, one of the pleasant aspects has been several laptop models being announced already to be powered by either the Ryzen AI 9 365 or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 flagship models. Some models are also already available for pre-order ahead of launch day. This is quite nice compared to in the past there was often at times quite a delay between the initial AMD Ryzen mobile announcements and being able to (pre)order any hardware. And thus I've already been looking around to coordinate near launch day Linux testing of the new AMD Zen 5 powered Ryzen AI 300 series hardware.

Microsoft has published its first tagged preview of the upcoming Azure Linux 3.0 operating system.

AMD has published a new set of AMDGPU firmware binaries for Linux users. In particular, this should benefit AMD APUs the most and these firmware improvements were focused on Valve's Steam Deck to make the device more robust against buggy applications.

This week's pull request of power management fixes for the Linux 6.10 kernel has an important change for the in-tree cpupower utility to fix P-State frequency reporting on upcoming Zen 5 (Family 1Ah) processors.

With yesterday marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, I was curious what the most popular news articles were over these past two decades. There's a lot of compiler fodder, news from the early days of AMD Ryzen, Linus Torvalds commentary, and more.

The latest funding for open-source from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is providing €300,000 over the course of the next year for improving GNU libmicrohttpd for building high performance HTTP web servers.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer is out with two important updates to the Linux input stack: libinput 1.26 has released for this input handling library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems and then secondly he has announced the "gsetwacom" CLI program as a replacement to the "xsetwacom" program.

For those typically waiting until the first point release of a new Mesa3D driver series before upgrading, today it's your chance to upgrade! Mesa 24.1.1 is now available with the first round of Mesa 24.1 fixes to the prominent OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Coincidentally the bi-weekly release times nicely for the Phoronix 20th birthday today as a nice present with our love for the open-source Linux graphics stack.

The beta process has begun for the Blender 4.2 open-source 3D modeling software. Making Blender 4.2 all the more significant is that it's a Long Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used program by 3D artists across platforms.

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support with Apple Silicon on Linux has been maturing nicely and is quite capable these days, the Vulkan support hasn't been coming together as quick or for as long. But a new Apple Silicon Vulkan driver was recently started by Asahi Linux / Mesa developers and is looking positive for being able to become a compliant Vulkan 1.3 driver for the Apple M1 on Linux.

Well, it's been a wild ride to say the least... Today marks twenty years since I started Phoronix.com devoted to reviewing Linux hardware and ultimately enriching the Linux hardware experience with more benchmarks, open-source/Linux hardware news, and more over the years.

A few weeks ago NVIDIA introduced their much anticipated R555 beta driver with NVIDIA 555.42.02 for Linux bringing Wayland explicit sync support, the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware being used by default, and a variety of Wayland improvements. Today the NVIDIA 555.52.04 beta driver is out that offers additional fixes for the R555 series.

Back in 2022 the KDE project laid out new goals to improve accessibility, develop more environmentally sustainable software, and automate more processes for easing the development of KDE. These overarching KDE Goals are refined every 2~3 years and they are now soliciting ideas from the community for what they should focus on ahead.

The latest performance optimization work for the Linux kernel's Device Mapper (DM) comes thanks to Red Hat's Mikulas Patocka.

Intel released a new version of its NPU Acceleration Library, the user-space Python library for leveraging the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops and upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake hardware as well.

Building off last month's AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver adding Phoenix 2 support, AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q2.2 as the newest update to their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver.

ROCm 6.1.2 is out today as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems and with growing support for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Queued into the x86 platform drivers' "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is the "Dell PC Extras" driver. Initially this new dell-pc driver is used for controlling fan modes via the Platform Profile setting on capable systems.

Building atop the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver's mesh shader support that's been enabled by default since last year, the newest Mesa 24.2-devel code as of today now adds support for mesh shader queries.

Back in April I noted that Fedora was considering replacing Redis with Valkey given the upstream Redis software licensing changes. At yesterday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they have now signed off on replacing Redis with Valkey.

IBM compiler engineers are ready to flip-on their POWER11 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in wiring up the "-mcpu=power11" option.

John Ogness of Linutronix today sent out the second iteration of his patches working on threaded printing support for printk() and related rework of that code that is a necessary step before the real-time (RT) kernel patches can be finally mainlined.

Raspberry Pi teamed up with Hailo to develop the Raspberry Pi AI Kit as a $70 add-on for the Raspberry Pi 5 that offers a 13 TOPS AI accelerator module.

FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE is now available as the newest stable release to this leading BSD operating system. There are a number of package updates, new features, and expanded hardware support to find with FreeBSD 14.1.