Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds released the latest weekly test candidate of the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

GNU Binutils 2.41 is out today as the latest major update to this important collection of binary utilities present on most Linux systems and other platforms.

GNU Emacs 29.1 is out this morning as the latest update to this popular and powerful text editor.

As one of the last blockers for getting real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support mainlined in the Linux kernel, this week saw a revised patch series around non-blocking consoles.

Linux 6.5 upgraded its Rust toolchain against Rust 1.68.2. This was the first upgrade of the Rust toolchain from the original v1.62 requirements when the first Rust kernel code was mainlined. A second upgrade is now planned to take it to Rust 1.71.

Last weekend I wrote about Zen 4's Automatic IBRS security feature needing STIBP enabled for protecting user-space processes. Single-Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors though haven't been enabled up to now with the Auto IBRS functionality on Linux. But the x86/urgent pull request sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc4 tagging makes that change.

LPython is the latest open-source Python implementation aiming to be a very performant version of Python among other interesting features.

A new per-application workaround/optimization to the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has sharply reduced the time required for compiling Cyberpunk 2077 game shaders for this popular title running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play.

For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation.

Going back to May I wrote about AMD's "k10temp" Linux temperature driver being updated to handle negative temperature readings and now finally merged on Friday as a fix ahead of Linux 6.5-rc4 is a change to that open-source driver for properly displaying negative temperatures.

With most developers having recovered from the recent Akademy KDE developer conference, Plasma 6 is back to seeing a lot of new development activity for what will be the next major open-source desktop release likely debuting in early 2024.

The first release candidate of LLVM 17 is now available for testing as what will be the next half-year update to this innovative open-source compiler stack.

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics drivers for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in about one month.

Vulkan 1.3.260 is out today with a handful of specification clarifications/fixes as well as two new extensions.

It appears the OpenZFS 2.2 file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems will see its release very soon while out today is the third release candidate.

Systemd 254 is out today in time for appearing in the late-2023 Linux distribution releases.

Announced in early June by Intel-owned Codeplay Software was the oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL codebases to new processor/accelerator architectures with an emphasis on AI and HPC. Today marks the release already of the oneAPI Construction Kit 3.0.

Richard Hughes is the Red Hat developer who is most prominently known for leading the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd development as well as formerly being behind the ColorHug monitor color calibration hardware effort and PackageKit, among other open-source software. He's recently been developing a new software project called Passim that today he announced to the world.

Going along with LLVM's recent additions around supporting new Intel instructions coming with future generation Core CPUs, the LLVM 18 Git development code has now landed support for actually honoring -march=arrowlake, -march=arrowlake-s, and -march=lunarlake targets.

AMD lifted the embargo this evening on the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, their first mobile processor sporting 3D V-Cache technology for boosting gaming performance and other cache-happy workloads.

This afternoon AMD announced the availability of the HIP SDK for Microsoft Windows as a portion of their ROCm computing platform with support for various professional and consumer GPUs.

For over a year Fedora / Red Hat has been planning for major package management changes with DNF5. The hope for months has been to use DNF5 by default for Fedora 39 but that is no longer going to work out... FESCo has decided to reject DNF5 for Fedora 39 and then due to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 branching with Fedora 40, this means DNF5 isn't expected by default until at least Fedora 41 in late 2024.

FreeBSD developers have published their Q2-2023 status report where they outlined various technical milestones and software accomplishments for this leading BSD operating system.

Going along with Intel adding Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support to the GCC compiler, Intel has also now contributed the new ISA extensions for these future processors to the GNU Assembler "Gas" support as part of their early compiler toolchain enablement.

Earlier this month Canonical asserted control over the LXD project. As another step in tightening up control over this container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) is now apparently limiting LXD maintainership rights to only Canonical employees.

Following the recent KDE Akademy developer conference, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has provided more insight into some of the features being removed with the in-development Plasma 6 desktop.

GNOME 46 or later will likely be seeing work to overhaul the default window management behavior of the desktop.

Released back in April was GCC 13.1 as the first stable release in the GCC 13 series that brought Modula-2 language support, more C++23/C23 features, and other new CPU targets supported from Arm to Intel. Debuting today is GCC 13.2 as the first point release in the series to ship dozens of bug fixes.

Mold 2.0 is out today as a major update to this high performance linker developed by Rui Ueyama. Mold has consistently shown to outperform GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers while today is making another shift with it now turning to MIT licensing.

NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed for Mesa has to this point been developed out-of-tree as it's been in its early stages, depends upon Nouveau DRM kernel driver improvements, and ultimately isn't too useful until the Nouveau GSP/re-clocking situation is sorted out upstream. But overnight the merge request was opened to introduce NVK to mainline Mesa.

There's been talk of new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards this quarter and adding some weight to that is AMD publishing several new firmware files for different intellectual property blocks of IP versions previously not seeing firmware binaries in the linux-firmware.git repository.

Thanks to work carried out by Sony engineers and then offered for upstream, over the past few weeks support for a unified LTO bitcode front-end has materialized within the LLVM codebase.

For a few years now Canonical has partnered with Intel to offer Ubuntu images optimized for their hardware like with IoT initiatives while the latest now are new Ubuntu real-time images optimized for Intel Core usage.

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

For processors supporting CPU performance boosting with higher performance states available beyond the base states, Linux allows toggling the boosting on a per-CPU basis. However, a new patch proposed this week would allow per-policy performance boosting where capable.

As part of AMD's recent Linux graphics driver development approach of enabling new GPU support gradually on a IP block-by-block basis rather than big monolithic patch series marked by colorful fishy codenames, it's worked out well for getting new hardware support rolling into the kernel early and without revealing any combined details on yet-to-be-released graphics processors. This week has seen some new IP block patches surface.

Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Loongson Binary Translation aims to help speed-up and handle ARM / x86 / MIPS binary translation on LoongArch more efficiently with capable LoongArch processors.

While the EROFS Linux read-only file-system already supports LZ4 and microLZMA support, Zlib DEFLATE support is also being worked on and could be introduced in the next Linux kernel cycle.

The first beta is out of FreeRDP 3.0, the open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation of that proprietary Microsoft protocol for remote desktop/GUI handling.