Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board.

Making for an exciting Monday morning, AMD Linux engineers have kicked off the new week with a patch series introducing an exciting and long-awaited change: using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver by default for EPYC server platforms moving forward rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver.

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being "overkill and painfully slow." The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU security mitigations.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.20 for running Windows games/applications on Linux, Hangover 9.20 is now available for this extension of Wine that builds off that codebase while pairing it with an x86/x86_64 emulator for running Windows programs on other CPU architectures like ARM64 Linux. With Hangover 9.20 they have restored the ability for running Win64 applications on ARM64 Linux hosts.

The Unvanquished 0.55 open-source game that was recently teased for its OpenGL 4.6 renderer work is out today with its shiny new release. As it's been more than one and a half years since Unvanquished 0.54, this new beta comes with a load of improvements especially around optimizing its Daemon open-source engine that is long derived from id Tech 3.

Meson 1.6 was published on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular cross-platform build system.

Linux 6.12-rc4 is out today as the half-way point to releasing the Linux 6.12 stable kernel around this time of the month in November.

Since purchasing an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" laptop for Linux testing last month, the performance has been coming in below expectations. Among the tests were finding Xe2 graphics on Lunar Lake performing slower that under Windows 11 and in comparison slower than Meteor Lake graphics on Linux. Intel engineers have been able to reproduce my original findings and they uncovered the culprit is a new ASUS laptop feature called AIPT. In turn a patch was posted today for supporting ASUS AIPT controls under Linux to fix this low Lunar Lake Linux performance.

Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.

With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that... ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase.

Patches posted this week by Oracle's Lorenzo Stoakes are the latest attempt at lightweight guard pages for the Linux kernel.

Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 "X1E80100" series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git.

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.

Thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers have been working on greater USB permissions/controls for Flatpak-based Linux applications.

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.20, Wine-Staging 9.20 is now available for this experimental blend of Wine featuring 357 extra patches currently atop the upstream codebase for various testing/experimental features and functionality.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation.

Sent out overnight were a few input subsystem patches ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel release tomorrow. Notable from this pull is adding input support for the MSI Claw A1M gaming handheld as well as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless gaming controller.

KDE developers are wrapping up addressing initial fallout/regressions from the recent Plasma 6.2 desktop release as well as pushing ahead with more feature work for Plasma 6.3.

Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" platforms.

Wine 9.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development version of this open-source software to enable running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux.

Years in the making has been the idea of Proxy Execution for the Linux kernel as a means of implementing priority inheritance by leveraging information from a task's scheduler context and its execution context. While the Proxy Execution patches themselves aren't yet queued for merging upstream, some prep patches look like they'll make it for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window.

Merged today to Linux 6.12 Git were bug fixes to AMD's Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB) handling that can be optionally used as part of the Retbleed and Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigations on older AMD processors.

In a rather surprising post this morning, laptop vendor MALIBAL that offers both Linux and Windows systems is suggesting to not support the Coreboot project for open-source system firmware.

The OpenCL 3.0 compute specification has been out in finalized form since September 2020. Since then NVIDIA's official Windows/Linux drivers have been exposing OpenCL 3.0 going back to 2021, the Intel Compute Runtime stack has also been exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for years, and even with Mesa's Rusticl open-source OpenCL implementation it's beginning to see Gallium3D drivers with conformant OpenCL 3.0. Yet if installing the AMD ROCm compute stack right now, you'll see OpenCL 2.1. But it looks like OpenCL 3.0 will soon be here for ROCm.

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical has announced the availability of an Intel NPU driver Snap package within their Snap Store to make it easier to leverage the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra processors within Ubuntu Linux.

Merged to upstream SDL today is an OpenVR video driver that was developed at Valve Software.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than €23 million (about $24.94M USD) into sixty open technologies.

Microsoft announced today the new and now open-source OpenHCL paravisor for the virtualization stack for enabling Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with this Rust-written software stack. This effort by Microsoft has been five years in the making and is now open-source and will continue to be developed in the open.

Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads.

PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library.

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented in Montreal last week at the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2024) on the current state of Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers within Mesa.

Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack.

OGRE-Next 3.0 has debuted this week as the newest version of the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine Next Generation for serving as an open-source 3D graphics rendering engine.

Following last week's release of the LLVM/Clang-downstream AOCC 5.0 for optimized compiler support extended to Zen 5 CPUs, the GPU side of the house at AMD this week released AOMP 20.0-0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on GPU device offloading.

Qualcomm engineers have developed VCL as a new open-source OpenCL driver for use with VirtIO-GPU for providing OpenCL hardware acceleration within virtual machines.

Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Red Hat has announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2. RHEL AI was announced earlier this year as Red Hat's AI solution for a foundation model platform to develop / test / run Granite GenAI models. Not to be confused with the RHEL operating system itself, RHEL AI is all about building large language models for enterprise software with Granite LLMs and InstructLab tooling.

It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor.

A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files.

Microsoft has released Azure Linux 3.0.20241005 as the "October 2024" update to the company's in-house Linux distribution.

ISPC 1.25 has been released as the newest feature update to the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as the C language variant for "single program, multiple data" programming to target both Intel's CPUs and GPUs.