Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Due to Linus Torvalds traveling over this US Memorial Day weekend, he released Linux 6.4-rc4 about twelve hours ahead of schedule.

Vulkan 1.3.251 is out today as a rare Sunday morning spec update for this Khronos graphics/compute API.

A few days ago I wrote about a Linux kernel patch being prepared for fixing Intel hybrid CPU SMP/HT topology reporting due to the way the Linux kernel was currently counting the number of Hyper Threading siblings for each core. Fortunately, that fix which is apparently becomes more pressing for upcoming Meteor Lake processors, has now been picked up in time for today's Linux 6.4-rc4 release and is set for back-porting to stable kernel series.

Following the release of Wine 8.9 on Friday for enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux, Wine-Staging 8.9 is now available for this more testing/development-focused flavor of Wine that more liberally picks up in-development patches.

The Debian 12 "Bookworm" release is quickly approaching with an early June release date while for helping facilitate more last minute testing is a fourth release candidate of the updated Debian Installer.

The Virgl driver within Mesa for allowing open-source OpenGL support within virtualized environments in conjunction with the Virglrenderer is now capable of exposing OpenGL 4.6.

An updated set of patches were posted on Friday that seem to improve the Linux guest VM performance when the host is under heavy memory pressure.

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers are looking at making use of Netlink for exposing RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and telemetry features of kernel graphics drivers to user-space for their modern GPUs.

Even with summertime approaching KDE developers remain very busy further enhancing the desktop stack and continued efforts around Qt6 porting and the Plasma 6.0 desktop.

Ahead of the US holiday weekend is the latest bi-weekly release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications running well on Linux and other platforms thanks to this open-source project.

A new AMD open-source driver posted for code review that's aiming for the upstream Linux kernel is the QDMA driver.

Multiple users have been reporting metadata corruption issues on the XFS file-system when upgrading to the Linux 6.3 stable kernel.

For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Announced on Thursday was the Ubuntu High Performance Computing (HPC) team to promote Ubuntu Linux for running AI/ML, energy, bioinformatics, meteorology, and other workloads on Ubuntu Linux.

A fix is on its way to the mainline Linux 6.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel series to fix x86 topology reporting for Intel Hybrid systems. The topology bug within the kernel becomes more pronounced for Meteor Lake laptops where currently internal Intel test laptops can report the systems having 11 CPU sockets rather than the proper number of cores all contained within one CPU socket.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.5 cycle kicking off in about one month is a new Linux x86 optimization patch for further tuning csum_partial, the function used within the kernel for calculating 32-bit checksums on blocks of data. Much lower latency and higher throughput can be observed with the newly-optimized csum_partial on the latest Intel/AMD processors.

The Qt 5.15 Long-Term Support branch as the last release in the Qt5 series is one step closer to retirement with The Qt Group now having ended its standard support for legacy license holders.

Following the recent sdl12-compat test release, sdl-compat v1.2.64 has been released as the newest version of this library implementing the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for enhancing game compatibility on modern Linux environments.

For those that prefer waiting to the first point release before shifting to a new Mesa3D quarterly feature release, Mesa 23.1.1 is out today so you can now begin upgrading to this latest set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

PostgreSQL 16 is up to its first beta milestone today with new performance optimizations and continued security enhancements.

IBM engineers have been working through some multi-block allocator improvements for the EXT4 file-system driver. In particular, they aim to address some shortcomings that were discovered when running various tests on IBM POWER hardware with a 64k block size.

Sent out last week by Alexandre Bailon with Bay Libre is the AI Processing Unit "APU" Direct Rendering Manager driver to interface between CPUs and AI Processing Units. The hope is this APU driver could be re-used by various hardware drivers while the initial focus is on bringing up the AI capabilities of the MediaTek MT8183 SoC.

Going back to 2020 has been work by Intel's open-source engineers on implementing Key Locker support for Linux. Intel Key Locker allows for encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw/actual key. AES keys are converted into handles with Intel Key Locker that can then be used for carrying out encryption/decryption on that system until revoked or system state changes. Intel engineers on Wednesday posted their seventh iteration of the patches for supporting Key Locker on Linux.

In addition to Microsoft's Build 2023 conference this week where they announced expanded archive/compression format support, Windows Terminal improvements, more AI tech, and other initiatives, they also happened to release CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution.

Since the early bits of Wine Wayland support were merged back in March for building up a native Wayland display driver, Alexandros Frantzis has continued submitting more of the code for review and upstreaming. Wednesday marked the third chunk of Wine Wayland code to be merged.

Among Intel's dozens of terrific open-source components -- including the many components making up their oneAPI software suite -- is Open Image Denoise. Open Image Denoise for years has been a terrific, high-performance denoising library for ray-tracing use The software has long been CPU-based while being highly performant thanks to leveraging modern instruction set extensions. Today though Open Image Denoise 2.0 is released and brings GPU acceleration across Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics processors.

Following the release at the start of the month of ROCm 5.5, today it's been succeeded by the ROCm 5.5.1 point release.

The Intel IPU6 web camera tech found in Alder Lake laptops and newer has unfortunately no upstream Linux driver yet and has resulted in kernel developers avoiding these laptops where web camera support is needed. Intel maintains an out-of-tree IPU6 Linux driver while they have been making progress toward ultimately getting it upstreamed. To ease the situation for Fedora Linux users, an experimental IPU6 software stack has now been added to the RPM Fusion repository.

With some basic additions to the amd64_edac Linux kernel driver, the Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors are being treated like the EPYC 9004 series for EDAC reporting, including ECC error reporting on supported RAM/motherboard configurations.

Melissa Wen of Igalia along with developers from AMD and Valve have been working on improved AMD color management support with a particular focus on the Steam Deck but will also benefit other AMD Radeon Linux users as well.

Following the recent removal of the SLOB allocator, SLAB is the latest on the chopping block. In order to push users to the SLUB allocator as the preferred solution, SLAB is now going through its deprecation and eventual removal process.

Mageia 9 beta 2 has been released with this Mandriva/Mandrake-lineage Linux distribution nearing its next major release.

The AMD k10temp Linux driver is used for CPU temperature reporting with all modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors plus going back all the way to many earlier FX / Athlon / Sempron / Opteron / Phenom CPUs starting with the Family 10h line-up. While this driver has been in the Linux kernel for years, it's carried a limitation until now that it can't handle reporting negative temperatures. That is changing thanks to new patches from AMD.

The Radeon Software for Linux driver was quietly updated earlier this month with one noted fix.

Released this week from the Red Hat Summit is Podman Desktop 1.0 as a container management tool akin to Docker Desktop.

The embedded Linux experts at Bootlin have released Snagboot as a new open-source project aiming to make it easy to recover and re-flash embedded platforms.

AMD today announced the Ryzen 7020 C-series processors. These processors are interesting for at least having integrated RDNA2 graphics but are based on the aging Zen 2 architecture.

There's been a proposal for Fedora Linux to become a new Fedora immutable variant and now it's been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) to happen for the Fedora 39 cycle.

Last year Fedora and Red Hat developers began discussing the idea of dropping legacy BIOS support and to then only focus on UEFI platforms. There was a plan to deprecate BIOS support in Fedora 37 but ultimately it didn't go through due to some cloud providers still booting VMs in BIOS mode and some systems having broken UEFI implementations. An idea has now been raised over the possibility of using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to provide a UEFI-like experience from the Fedora perspective.

For those feeling adventurous and wanting to see how things are coming along for KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks Qt 6 porting, the KDE Neon Linux distribution with its "unstable" edition has begun building against the Qt6 components.

The bug I wrote about this weekend where Intel is now disabling PCID for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake under Linux until updated CPU microcode is issued for addressing an issue with the INVLPG instruction when Process Context Identifiers are enabled, has now been merged to Linux 6.4.

The GNU Assembler "Gas" as part of the GNU Binutils collection has landed support for Intel FRED and LKGS instructions.