Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While the Linux 6.4 merge window is closing this weekend, today on the last full day of the period is Jens Axboe submitting pipe FMODE_NOWAIT support as what he's described as a big performance and efficiency improvement.

One of the missing RISC-V features now in place for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is system hibernation / suspend-to-disk support.

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs.

While these days Linus Torvalds is mostly dealing with herding new code into the Linux kernel and being a gate keeper rather than actively developing new kernel code himself, for the in-development Linux 6.4 he's found himself doing a bit of coding.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham shared that key KDE developers are currently in Germany for an in-person Plasma 6.0 development sprint.

Today's Steam client beta will be a delight for some Linux gamers with the Steam client finally recognizing the GNOME and KDE desktop global scaling factor for text sizing.

For those that haven't yet watched the AMD openSIL presentation from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague from April, the most interesting takeaway was deserving of its own article... AMD openSIL is planned to eventually replace the well known AGESA and that it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack -- just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned but will support all AMD processors.

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward.

Going back to mid-2022 AMD engineers have been working on Virtual NMI support with SVM for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an efficiency optimization. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the AMD VNMI support has been merged.

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support.

Chinese tech company Loongson continues working on improving the upstream Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired domestic CPU architecture. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is another batch of optimizations and implementing more kernel functionality for the LoongArch CPU architecture.

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media.

Dav1d as the open-source AV1 video decoder developed as part of the VideoLAN project is out with a new minor feature release.

A new set of patches were posted today to enable cluster scheduling for x86 hybrid CPUs. In turn thos latest attempt at cluster scheduling for modern Core CPUs of Alder Lake and newer is yielding some small performance benefits over the current code.

Merged today to LLVM 17 Git is now recognizing -std=c++23 rather than just -std=c++2b for the Clang compiler now that C++23 has been deemed technically complete.

It's been just under two years since Amazon's Lumberyard game engine was spun into the Open 3D Engine and the Open 3D Foundation established under the Linux Foundation. Today the project is celebrating its newest open-source game engine update with Open 3D Engine 23.05.

X.Org members have approved of the X.Org Foundation letting the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) become its fiscal sponsor.

Going back to 2016 Intel began working on MIPI SoundWire support for Linux and now in 2023, AMD has joined the party with their initial AMD SoundWire support driver landing in the mainline kernel.

The printk code changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window and it's notable not for what is in the pull request but rather what is still outstanding.

At the end of last year AMD's GPUOpen group released the Render Pipeline Shaders "RPS" SDK for graphics applications and engines leveraging Direct3D 12 or Vulkasn as an open-source render graph framework. On Wednesday the Render Pipeline Shaders SDK 1.1 was released and is complemented by Linux support.

Following this week's release of the Chrome 113 web browser with faster AV1 encoding, Google engineers have promoted Chrome 114 to their beta channel.

Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.

While many Linux distributions look at Btrfs or F2FS when evaluating new root file-system options or even something like OpenZFS, in the case of Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution only this month have they even gotten to supporting XFS as a root file-system option.

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

VK_KHR_present_wait is an extension originally started by Keith Packard working for Valve on improving the Linux graphics stack. The VK_KHR_present_wait extension allows for waiting for present operations to complete and can be used for monitoring/pacing the application by managing the number of images not yet presented. This Vulkan extension had been supported by Mesa Vulkan drivers under X.Org and now is being enabled for Wayland environments too.

Back in March Framework Laptop announced an AMD Ryzen upgradeable laptop model but were initially light on details. Today they've revealed more information on this forthcoming product as well as opening up pre-orders.

Raspberry Pi has released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS as their Debian Linux based distribution currently built atop the Debian 11 "Bullseye" base.

One of the most exciting open-source software announcements so far this year has been around AMD openSIL for providing open-source CPU silicon initialization that works with the likes of Coreboot. The video from the AMD openSIL announcement in Prague is now available for those interested in learning more about this AMD open-source firmware effort.

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 23.04, the "Lunar Lobster", Ubuntu 23.10 development is now officially opened under the "Mantic Minotaur" codename.

The input driver updates were merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window.

To help facilitate the exploration of the Rust programming language for Linux storage purposes within the kernel, Samsung engineer Andreas Hindborg has published a null block driver written in this memory-safe programming language.

Debian's APT packaging tool that is also used by downstreams like Ubuntu has begun seeing initial support for "snapshots" introduced.

OBS Studio 29.1 is shipping today and it features AV1 and HEVC RTMP streaming support.

Google has rolled out Chrome 113 to its stable channel that includes faster AV1 video encoding for video conference calls, WebGPU is finally rolling out to everyone, and other enhancements.

Less than a month has passed since Proton 8.0-1 shipped as the software that powers Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Already out today is the Proton 8.0-2.

You may recall last year how several prominent upstream kernel developers recommended avoiding Intel's latest laptops for Linux use that bear their IPU6 MIPI camera over the lack of upstream open-source support. It's taken some months but the initial IPU6 Linux kernel driver patches are out for review and will hopefully make it to the mainline Linux kernel in the months ahead.

While distributions like Fedora Linux have been using Dbus-Broker for years already as their high performance D-Bus compatible implementation to, for Ubuntu 23.10 later this year is finally where it looks like Ubuntu will be transitioning to this better alternative to dbus-daemon.

A set of patches to the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver would allow more easily relaying information about the reasons why a GPU hang/reset occur so that the user-space software can be more informed about any issues.

The USB/Thunderbolt changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel and it ended up being a net reduction in the number of lines of code as a result of ditching two outdated USB drivers.

As expected following yesterday's AMD Git activity, ROCm 5.5 was officially released overnight as AMD's latest version of their open-source GPU compute stack that is their alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA or Intel's oneAPI / Level Zero.

The Device Mapper "DM" subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel and it includes some notable performance optimizations.

Last week System76 released System76-Scheduler 2.0 as their Rust-written Linux desktop scheduler that serves as a user-space daemon to dynamically manage process priorities to favor performance and responsiveness. That's now been succeeded by a v2.0.1 update with a few more features and improvements.

Last year DreamWorks announced they would be open-sourcing their award-winning MoonRay renderer. Back in March that dream was realized with OpenMoonRay being published for this renderer that has been used for films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other films. OpenMoonRay 1.1 is now available as the first update to this professional renderer since it was open-sourced last quarter.

At the start of April there were the Steam Survey results for March 2023 that showed a 0.54% dip to the marketshare. With that were als some strange shifts in the Windows 10 vs. 11 marketshare as well as a big boost to the Chinese marketshare. The March numbers were not revised but with the start of May comes the April numbers... Showing a boost to Linux and largely recovering from the April anomaly.

Last November ClamAV 1.0 was released for this anti-virus/anti-malware solution currently developed via Cisco and the open-source community. Following ClamAV 1.0 LTS, today marks the availability of ClamAV 1.1 as the first post-1.0 feature release.

AMD has begun publishing ROCm 5.5 source packages for the Radeon Open eCosystem components making up their GPU compute stack that is also being extended to cover Xilinx products and more.

Red Hat organized an HDR hackfest to bring together all the Linux desktop stakeholders around the desktop, display drivers, and related infrastructure for helping to make progress on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support. The event took place last week at Red Hat's Brno office in the Czech Republic and sounds like it was quite a success.

Since last November has been a kernel bug report from a Canonical engineer after finding that the Intel Thunderbolt USB controller on various laptops was "dead" after resuming the system. That problem is now resolved with Linux 6.4 and this generic fix may end up helping other hardware as well.

While there is already Fedora Silverblue as a Fedora Workstation variant leveraging RPM-OSTree for creating an ummutable OS image and Fedora Kinoite as a KDE-based alternative, Fedora Onyx has been proposed as a new immutable variant of Fedora Linux.

With Linux running on everything from tiny single board computers with basic WiFi or Ethernet networking up through massive super-computer clusters, the Linux networking subsystem continues seeing immense improvements each kernel cycle. With Linux 6.4 the networking changes are heavy from new hardware support (including Apple M1 Pro/Max WiFi!) to continued work around WiFi 7 support as well as never-ending work on performance optimizations.

Intel's open-source "cartwheel-ffmpeg" project is their repository where they collect all of their FFmpeg patches prior to upstreaming. While the patches have been available in Git form, prior to the weekend Intel released their 2023Q1 queue of patches to this widely-used, open-source multimedia library.

Near the start of 2022 engineers out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center posted Linux driver patches for their Gunyah hypervisor. Gunyah is an open-source type-1 hypervisor developed by Qualcomm with an emphasis on security and other features. More than one year later the Gunyah drivers have yet to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel but work on them persists.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel were all of the VirtIO and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (VDPA) changes. Interesting from that pull request is delivering a big performance bump for VDUSE.

In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code.