Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to the exFAT Linux kernel driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux, in user-space is "exfatprogs" providing the various utilities for interacting with this file-system popular on SD/SDCX storage and flash drives. The exfatprogs 1.2 release today brings fsck.exfat support for repairing corrupted exFAT file-systems on Linux.

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3.

While the Intel Core i9 13900K is running fast and well on Linux, a few Raptor Lake IDs have come to light that have been missing from various drivers and only now being addressed.

Just last week I wrote about Glibc preparing more optimizations for AVX-512 CPUs with implementing more C library functions in EVEX512 enhanced vector extension versions. This week there is more EVEX512 function work.

Btrfs' async discard functionality will likely be turned on by default with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle when running on an SSD.

With Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" having shipped last week, Canonical engineers are moving ahead and beginning to get things going for the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle now under the "Lunar Lobster" codename.

Fedora Linux 37 has been running behind schedule and today it was decided to push it back now to mid-November over a "critical" openSSL vulnerability yet to be made public.

Valve's new Steam client beta published today has rolled out an updated Big Picture mode for enjoying the Steam client on TVs and other large format displays while this Big Picture mode was designed and optimized for the Steam Deck.

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 for the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver is "protected content" support in conjunction with the EGL_EXT_protected_content extension.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 has finally been released as the first tagged release of this Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying an increasing number of D3D12 Windows games on Linux.

As a warning and call for testing, old and "weird" laptops may broken backlight controls when moving to the Linux 6.1 kernel currently under development. Thus if invested in using an old laptop with a modern kernel version, it may be useful trying out a Linux 6.1 release candidate to help spot any regressions early.

While the Intel Alder Lake and now Raptor Lake hybrid processor support on Linux is in good shape after various improvements to the kernel for dealing with the mix of P and E cores, there are occasional caveats. Posted this week were a set of Intel P-State driver fixes around hardware P-states (HWP) calibration to ensure it's working on all Intel hybrid platforms.

At the start of the year SUSE's YaST team announced D-Installer as their new web-based distribution installer. Now as we approach the end of the year, D-Installer is ready for more widespread user testing and they are looking for help from the community in testing. Additionally, they are looking for help coming up with a new name for the "D-Installer".

Earlier this month I wrote about AMD "Morgana" and "Glinda" SoCs appearing in Coreboot for this open-source system firmware implementation. These are codenames we haven't seen talked about previously by AMD and this week more of the AMD Glinda SoC code has been published and merged into Coreboot.

The Linux kernel's networking subsystem is beginning to make preparations for 800 Gbps Ethernet networking.

Ampere Computing is mainlining a Linux kernel driver for accessing the sensors of their SMpro co-processor found with their current line of Ampere Altra server processors.

Work carried out by Google engineers and others around the Linux kernel's read-copy update (RCU) synchronization mechanism to make it "lazier" is helping with 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems. This "Lazy RCU" work is likely to be merged for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window in December.

In recent months there has been a lot of RADV ray-tracing optimizations and improvements for maturing the ray-tracing support by this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa. The RADV ray-tracing performance is about to take another step forward with a pending merge request providing a PLOC BVH builder that can improve the Quake II RTX performance by around 33%.

With the recent Linux 6.1 merge window there sadly weren't any Nouveau Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver improvements for getting the RTX 30 "Ampere" OpenGL support working yet with the mainline kernel even with RTX 40 series having launched. Needless to say, there also wasn't any progress on the re-clocking front for getting the GTX 900 series and later running in a performant manner on this open-source driver. But the Nouveau developers at Red Hat haven't simply been idling but rather have been working on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support for improving the RTX 20 "Turing" support and newer.

An updated version of the Rust "gccrs" front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was sent out today for review. The GCC Rust "v3" patches address developer comments raised during earlier review as they try to get this new Rust programming language support merged in time for GCC 13.

A change proposal drafted for next year's Fedora 40 is looking at "porting Fedora to modern C" by ensuring the contained C source code of packages is compliant with strict C99 compilers.

Daniel Stenberg has announced the release of cURL 7.86 as the newest version of this command-line utility and library for various networking purposes.

A new version of Canonical's Mir open-source display server is now available for what serves as a Wayland compositor for various Ubuntu use-cases around IoT and other niche purposes.

GraalVM 22.3 is now available as Oracle's quarterly feature release to this high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional programming languages and execution models.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has written a lengthy blog post entitled a "brave new trusted boot world" in which he outlines current issues with the Linux boot process and how there is a trajectory for providing the Linux boot experience with more robustness, simplicity, and trust.

Google today promoted the Chrome 107 web browser to their stable channel across all supported platforms.

Taking place yesterday and today in San Francisco has been the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. Talks this year ranged from how Amazon AWS is making use of OpenZFS to a number of optimizations and improvements currently being tackled by open-source developers.

After the idea has been discussed for about a year, Mesa 22.3 has landed a new performance option called "block_on_depleted_buffers" to wait on buffers at the end of a swap to reduce latency -- a possible one frame advantage.

While various Linux kernel components are increasingly making use of the Zstandard compression algorithm, the Zstd code in the kernel has tended to trail behind upstream. Fortunately, a push is underway to get Zstd 1.5.2 in the Linux 6.2 kernel cycle that kicks off at year's end.

Memtest86+ v6.0 has been released for this open-source system memory (RAM) testing utility. Memtest86+ v6.0 is the first major release of this program in nearly a decade and comes as a complete rewrite to better deal with modern hardware.

sdl12-compat is the library implementation allowing old SDL 1.2 games/software to work atop SDL2. This sdl12-compat can allow for Wayland support if there is no other direct X11 usage by the software itself, native support for PipeWire, improved input controls, and the many other enhancements enjoyed with the much more modern SDL2 library. Released yesterday was sdl12-compat 1.2.60 as the newest stable release for this conversion/support library for vintage software.

Flatpak 1.15 was released on Monday as the newest test release for this increasingly used open-source sandboxing and app distribution tech.

In addition to supporting the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Allwinner D1 Nezha, and VisionFive RISC-V board support, Canonical has formally announced Ubuntu 22.10 for the LicheeRV as a $16~19+ RISC-V board.

Python 3.11 stable is out today as a rather big update for this popular scripting language.

AMD today published AOMP 16.0-1 as their newest LLVM/Clang downstream focused on providing the latest Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading support. Notable with this AOMP build is providing initial support for GFX1100 - GFX1103 GPUs. The GFX11 IP block is coming with the soon-to-launch RDNA3 graphics cards and with this AOMP support gives us hope AMD will be providing punctual ROCm support for these next-generation graphics cards.

Last week AMD reaffirmed their 3 November announcement for RDNA3 graphics while today the company announced that one week later on 10 November they will be unveiling their next-gen server processors.

Sony recently announced the DualSense Edge wireless controller for the PlayStation 5 as an "ultra-customizable controller". This $199 USD controller isn't even available for sale until the end of January while already Sony has contributed initial support to their "hid-playstation" open-source Linux kernel driver for supporting the DualSense Edge.

In addition to Alyssa Rosenzweig leading the work on bringing up OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 SoCs with the Mesa "AGX" Gallium3D driver, developer Ella Stanforth has been working on "AGXV" as a Vulkan driver implementation for the Apple Silicon hardware on Linux. As of yesterday, she hit the milestone of being able to run the VKCube demo.

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent out the third revision to the Apple SoC CPU frequency scaling "CPUFreq" driver that is working its way toward the mainline Linux kernel.

Earlier this month marked the release of IceWM 3.0 as this X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's. IceWM 3.1 is now available with various fixes and minor additions -- including refinements to the tabbed windows support introduced in IceWM 3.0.

Queued up in FUSE's "for-next" kernel branch is a patch worked on in recent months for allowing non-extending parallel direct writes to the same file.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.1-rc2 kernel, which he characterized as "unusually large" in what started off as a quiet week.

A set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out this morning for pulling into the Linux kernel ahead of today's 6.1-rc2 release.

There has long been a debate over an "accelerator" subsystem for the Linux kernel given the increasing number of AI/accelerator devices coming to market. Currently there are accelerator drivers living within the catch-all "char/misc" area of the kernel while some driver efforts have been focused on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem integration given the commonality with GPUs and some of the core infrastructure and APIs being relevant for both GPUs and these dedicated accelerator ASICs. There finally seems to be some agreement over the future of the accelerator subsystem and some initial patches were mailed out this weekend.

A new Linux driver introduced by Intel earlier this year was the In-Field Scan for making use of new silicon failure testing functionality with upcoming Intel server CPUs. The IFS driver and associated hardware capability is for detecting potential problems not caught by parity or ECC checks on systems in production. In-Field Scan was merged in Linux 5.19 but then shortly thereafter the driver was marked "broken" due to some driver design issues coming to light. New patches for IFS have been posted to improve the driver's design and remove that "broken" tag.

Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel.