Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support.

The Linux Mint crew led by Clement Lefebvre released Cinnamon 6.0 today as the latest version of their customized desktop stack.

KDE today announced their first beta of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" as the Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6, and latest Gear applications.

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.

Ampere Computing has sent out its latest patch attempt at increasing the number of Arm CPU cores supported by the mainline Linux kernel. As it stands at the moment the 64-bit ARM mainline Linux kernel build supports 256 cores, which can be exceeded with Ampere's new AmpereOne processors in a multi-socket configuration.

Coming up for the Linux 6.8 kernel the Btrfs file-system is preparing to make use of the newer Linux file-system mounting API.

Generalized Memory Management "GMEM" has been proposed as a new solution to be developed for the Linux kernel to deal with memory management for external memory devices like the growing number of accelerators coming to market.

A new release of Coreboot is available today as the increasingly popular open-source system firmware solution that's used by Chromebooks, increasing hyperscaler / data center industry interest due to increased code transparency and security, System76 laptops, and more. Coreboot 4.22 is the new release and brings initial AMD OpenSIL code integration, 17 new motherboard ports, and more. Coreboot 4.22 will be succeeded next year by Coreboot 24.02.

Intel today published Compute-Runtime 23.35.27191.9 as their latest update to this open-source GPU compute stack enabling OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and Windows. With this being their first tagged release since September, it's coming in heavy on changes.

It was just last week NVK developers were celebrating Vulkan 1.0 conformance while now this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa is preparing to expose Vulkan 1.1 support.

Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.

Canonical this morning released Mir 2.16 as the latest version of this open-source software for helping to build out Wayland compositors.

With the Imagination PowerVR open-source kernel graphics driver expected for Linux 6.8, the necessary firmware binary blob has now been accepted into linux-firmware.git.

Weston 13.0 has been released as the latest major update to this reference Wayland compositor that attracts various experimental features and other innovations as developers experiment in the post-X11 world.

Queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu branch ahead of the Linux 6.8 merge window opening in a month is an optimization that should prove helpful in cloud/VM scenarios.

One thing that has never gotten old over the past nearly twenty years of covering Linux news on Phoronix are the relentless performance optimizations made to the Linux kernel, GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, and other key open-source projects over the years. Intel engineers have been responsible for so many exciting Linux performance optimizations over time at ensuring maximum Linux x86_64 performance as well as ensuring great performance at a macro-level as they've showcased with the likes of Clear Linux. It looks like they have some new innovation(s) in store soon for further maximizing compiler-assisted performance.

Last week OpenZFS 2.2.1 was released with a reported fix for a data corruption issue that was initially blamed as being a block cloning bug for a new feature introduced in the v2.2 release. Well, it turns out that the block cloning feature isn't the root cause and that v2.2.1 is still prone to data corruption and pre-v2.2 releases are also vulnerable to this file-system data corruption issue.

Thanks to prolific RADV driver developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, mesh/task shader queries have landed for GFX10.3 (RDNA2) with the in-development Mesa 24.0 while support for GFX11 (RDNA3) graphics cards is on the way.

Back in October Qt 6.6 released with Qt Graphs being introduced, more robust Wayland support, various render enhancements, and more. Out today is Qt 6.6.1 with more than four hundred bugs resolved.

FreeRDP 3.0-rc0 was released this morning as the latest stepping stone toward FreeRDP 3.0 for this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

It's been just over one month since AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 and this morning it's been succeeded by a new AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver release.

Linus Torvalds released the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.7 kernel on Sunday night.

While more applications continue enabling Wayland support and getting into a shape by default, the PCSX2 open-source PlayStation 2 emulator recently moved in the opposite direction: disabling Wayland support for their distributed builds.

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers this week sent out their first batch of drm-intel-next i915 DRM driver changes to DRM-Next of new material to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.

A Linux kernel mailing list discussion this holiday weekend that is seeing polarized views on the matter is around a new patch series proposed priority-based shutdown support for drivers/hardware.

While much of the modern graphics world these days is focused on the Vulkan API, there's no signs of Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers losing optimization focus with their OpenGL Linux driver by way of the Iris Gallium3D code. Merged this holiday week was a rather significant rework to its buffer object allocation system.

It has finally happened: PipeWire 1.0 has been released as this now very common software to the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams. With time it's proven to be a suitable replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK while pushing forward the Linux desktop with its modern design and feature set.

Intel compiler engineers remain quite busy working not only on AVX10 family support but also plumbing in the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) to be found with future Intel processors.

Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release.

Over four years after the debut of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 and in the interim since also working on the ROME rolling-release platform, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 finally debuted today.

Debian's MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an "out of sync" architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn't improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian 13 "Trixie".

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced this morning the launch of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen1, their first all-AMD powered Linux gaming laptop.

The KDE Plasma 6.0 feature freeze is quickly approaching and the Plasma Wayland showstopper bug list is nearly cleared out for being able to endorse the Plasma Wayland session over X11.

Eric Engestrom on Friday released the fifth weekly release candidate of Mesa 23.3 with this quarterly stable release hopefully debuting in the next week.

While the winter holidays are approaching so far it hasn't led to any reduced effort in the GNOME camp. In fact, fresh off the €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, there are several new exciting initiatives moving forward along with other ongoing enhancements driven by GNOME developers.

Wine 8.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and the final one prior to the feature freeze coming up in two weeks.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is well received by the community, one of the longest sought features has been an official GUI control panel for managing the driver settings and the like under Linux with ease. AMD for their part exposes much of the same tunables available under Windows but is left to just command-line controls or software to poke different ioctls directly. LACT is now the newest open-source option for those wanting an AMD graphics driver control panel for Linux.

Intel on Thursday committed Arrow Lake "ARL" support to their open-source Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and Level Zero while on Windows IGC is additionally used as their graphics shader compiler as well.

In time for any holiday gaming, Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.11 as its Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying the latest Windows games on Linux.

Following yesterday's week drm-misc-next pull that added the new Imagination PowerVRM DRM driver, the three patches for atomic DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC were queued into drm-misc-next. Now that this atomic async page flip support is in drm-misc-next, next week it should appear in DRM-Next and in turn make it for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year.

GIMP 3.0 could be finally released in a few months if all goes very well.

Released on Thursday were the Linux v6.7-rc2-rt1 real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches that now re-bases the RT patches against the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel series.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.41 debuted this week as the newest version of this OpenJDK JVM focused on a small footprint and fast performance.