Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While for years Intel has been very well regarded -- and rightfully so -- for their open-source Linux hardware support, occasionally there are exceptions. One such exception currently is Intel's IPU6 drivers for their MIPI cameras found on many newer Alder lake laptops and presumably upcoming Raptor Lake laptops too. The IPU6 drivers remain outside of the Linux kernel and will still likely be that way for sometime.

With the Linux 6.1-rc7 kernel set to be released later today, it will become easier making use of the AMD P-State driver for that enhanced CPU frequency scaling driver intended for Zen 2 and newer EPYC/Ryzen platforms that make use of ACPI CPPC.

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame has been working the past several months of adding getrandom() to the vDSO for achieving better performance and working the needs of user-space developers. Early results have been impressive and this week Donenfeld sent out the seventh iteration of these patches.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.8 Wayland compositor is now available for testing.

At the start of the calendar year Samsung engineers posted Linux patches bringing to enable the Tesla full self-driving "FSD" SoC within the mainline Linux kernel. Linux 5.18 picked up the initial Tesla FSD SoC support and since then other support remnants have continued to be worked on like media functionality. The latest open-source, upstream-focused Tesla FSD SoC work is on enabling PCIe functionality.

Open-source graphics driver engineer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux team landed a number of stream-out fixes this week for RADV's Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) Stream-Out handling.

As we approach the end of 2022, an initial "request for comments" was sent out this week on a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver for supporting Atari systems from the early 90's.

The US Thanksgiving week showed no signs of slowing down the global KDE development with there being many user interface improvements, bug fixes, and other improvements to have landed for this open-source desktop environment.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard issued a Black Friday release with Wine 7.22.

Just some quick "Black Friday" / holiday reminders for those that enjoy the daily original open-source news, Linux hardware reviews, performance benchmarks, and more put out each and every day on Phoronix.

The UBports community continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for running this Linux distribution on smartphones and tablets is out with OTA-24 as their newest over-the-air update.

Red Hat engineers are working on changing their BIOS RAID "fake RAID" support within the Fedora installer for the F38 cycle.

After many months of work, the wp-fractional-scale-v1 protocol for Wayland is set to be merged imminently for fractional scaling support.

While Sound Open Firmware 2.3 was released back in September with AMD Rembrandt and Intel Raptor Lake support, among other changes, out this weekend is a new point release to the prior v2.2 series.

The Broadcom V3DV VideoCore open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a rewritten occlusion queries implementation for better performance and reliability.

Landing this week within Mesa 23.0 is an initial implementation of Vulkan's VK_KHR_present_wait extension, which Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team and VKD3D-Proton notoriety has referred to as a "very useful" extension but due to current spec limitations is for now only being made opt-in via a DriConf option so it can be handled on a per-game/app basis.

It was just last week that Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC and thanks to their work with Linaro engineers, there are already patches under review for enabling this high-end Snapdragon chipset for the mainline Linux kernel.

Mesa 22.3 had been expected to release this week but instead Mesa 22.3-rc4 was issued and in turn the v22.3 introduction is now expected for next week.

Red Hat is out this week with a new version of Stratis, its Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM that is intended to provide features and functionality akin to ZFS and Btrfs but with the proven reliability of XFS.

The Qt Group today announced the release of Qt Creator 9 as the newest feature release to this open-source Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment.

After more than a half-year of development work, Redox OS 0.8 released today as the newest version of this from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system.

A patch was merged today to Mesa 23.0 as part of the effort for building the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers for non-x86/x86_64 architectures. This is part of the ongoing effort to enable Intel discrete GPUs to eventually work on the likes of AArch64, POWER, and RISC-V systems.

Back in August an Intel engineer posted a patch series to help Linux on Intel hybrid CPUs with Hypr Threading. That work benefiting newer Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors is around avoiding unnecessary migrations within SMT domains. Finally an updated version of that patch series has now been posted as this Intel hybrid improvement works its way toward the kernel.

Over the past year since being the first to report on Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) for license-activated hardware features with future CPUs, we've been left to wonder all what will be incorporated into this controversial Software Defined Silicon. Intel recently shared that SDSi will be marketed as Intel On Demand and now they have published a web page outlining more about this after-purchase upgrades for activating extra processor features.

Valve has officially released Proton 7.0-5 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for enjoying countless Windows games on Linux, most notably now with the Steam Deck. Valve has also introduced "Proton Next" as their new testing grounds for future Proton updates.

It was just a little more than 24 hours ago that SDL 2.26 released for this widely-used library by cross-platform games and other software for abstracting software/hardware interfaces. With SDL 2.26 released, SDL 3.0 is now in development. One of the first stages of that big Simple DirectMedia Layer update is removing a lot of old platform code and other obsolete targets.

PoCL 3.1 is nearing release as the "Portable Computing Language" that is most known for serving as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation but via its LLVM usage also allows supporting OpenCL execution atop NVIDIA CUDA and other targets.

OBS Studio 29 Beta 1 has been released as the newest test version for this widely-used, cross-platform open-source software for screen-casting and screen-recording purposes. OBS Studio 29 most notably is adding AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding for Intel Arc Graphics and AMD Radeon GPUs.

While the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has been around for six years now and with WSL2 is on to running graphical Linux apps with GPU acceleration and a wide array of capabilities, including the ability to run systemd and the like, only today has Microsoft promoted WSL to "general availability" status on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

It's that time of the year with "Black Friday" this week and the start of the holiday shopping season. As usual, there is the annual holiday deal for Phoronix Premium to enjoy it at a discounted rate. Unfortunately the state of the ad industry and rampant ad-block use continue to greatly hurt the sustainability of the site while Phoronix Premium allows for enjoying the website ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page.

Alpine Linux as the distro that is focused on being lightweight, simple, and secure with its use of OpenRC, BusyBox, musl libc, and other components is out with a big update.

The Asahi Linux crew has published their November 2022 status report highlighting recent open-source progress on supporting Apple Silicon M1/M2 devices under Linux.

One of the exciting open-source milestones this year was Dasharo/Coreboot being ported to a modern Intel Alder Lake Z690 motherboard that is readily available and at a decent price. That work by the open-source firmware engineers at 3mdeb was focused on the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard while with today's v1.1 release there is also support now for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR5.

After open-sourcing its Radeon Raytracing Analyzer code last week, this week AMD's GPUOpen team has a new open-source project announcement: Brotli-G.

Intel has published a new version of its oneVPL library as its open-source oneAPI Video Processing Library for video encoding/decoding and media processing across CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators.

Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has written a year-end summary about the ongoing work for supporting Wayland-based screen sharing for the Google Chrome/Chromium web browser. The code still isn't enabled by default but given the strides being made that could change "sooner than later" if all goes well.

SDL 2.26 has been officially released as the latest version of this widely-used library by cross-platform games and other software wishing to abstract various hardware/software differences between systems. With the release of SDL 2.26 out, SDL 3.0 is now officially under development.