Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

There have been ongoing reports from a variety of users and systems around high power use during GPU-accelerated video playback with current-generation AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" laptops. Fortunately, an optimization is coming to benefit Phoenix and forthcoming Strix Point laptops with noticeably lower power consumption during video playback.

One year ago Meta released IGL as the Intermediate Graphics Library as a cross-platform, low-level graphics interface built atop native graphics APIs like OpenGL, Vulkam, and Metal. This MIT-licensed library has seen its first tagged version in the form of IGL 1.0.

The Mold linker is already a high-speed alternative to the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Its performance is very impressive while those using it while carrying out debug builds have the ability to achieve an insane speed-up thanks to a new option.

Colin Percival who took over as the release engineering lead for FreeBSD last November has come up with two important changes for this BSD operating system's release engineering process.

Building off last month's release of XWayland 24.1 that brought explicit sync support, improved rootful, and other changes, the first point release has now been issued.

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language.

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!

Updated AMD CPU microcode was published today and subsequently merged into linux-firmware.git for all Family 17h and Family 19h processors, spanning Zen 1 through Zen 4 models.

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is Intel's "Performance Limit Reasons" reporting for indicating why a processor may be downclocking.

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade.

Following their acquisition last year of open-source AI provider Nod.ai and other AI investments, AMD today announced they are acquiring Silo AI.

JetBrains announced this week that via their 2024.2 Early Access Program that IntelliJ-based IDEs will now offer experimental Wayland support.

DXVK 2.4 has been released for this Direct3D over Vulkan API implementation.

Over the years there have been various attempts at getting the open-source RADV Vulkan driver on Windows, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been recently hacking on it and achieving success for having this popular Radeon Vulkan API driver for Linux working under Windows.

Adding to the growing list of changes that is making September's GNOME 47 desktop release quite a delight, the Mutter compositor has merged another great feature.

AMD's GPUOpen group this morning released the FidelityFX SDK 1.1 version that incorporates FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) as the newest version of their game upscaling tech. Plus it introduces new components in the form of the Breadcrumbs Library and Brixelizer.

Merged for Mesa 24.2 is a massive set of patches providing a new platform abstraction for NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. With this new platform abstraction it begins to open the door toward running the NVK driver on alternative kernel (DRM) drivers.

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed.

With CentOS Stream 10 beginning to take shape as the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the Hyperscale Special Interest Group (SIG) has begun crafting CentOS Stream Hyperscale 10.

For those using an Apple Magic Keyboard with a T2-secured Mac, the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel will enable working keyboard backlight support.

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours.

While Loongson's LoongArch processors have been supported under Linux from the start, there remain some missing/late elements still being pursued by Loongson engineers for better upstream support. One of the areas being worked on recently is a proper CPUFreq driver for Loongson 3 series processors for CPU frequency scaling for better performance and power management.

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled.

Canonical today released LXD 6.1 as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused solution for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers.

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line.

Back in February I wrote about Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers working on a new adaptive sharpening filter capability to be found with upcoming Xe2 graphics starting with Lunar Lake. This new adaptive sharpening filter has minimal power and performance impact and at least according to the driver engineers is working out rather well. Besides the Intel Xe kernel driver support around enabling this adaptive sharpening filter, Intel has also been readying the rest of the Linux desktop stack for exposing this capability.

For those with an ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard or thinking of getting one for this high-end AMD Ryzen 7000 series platform, the Linux support is taking another small step forward.

Both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers today saw support for Intel's Branch Hint extension merged today for this feature of Redwood Cove P cores as found with current generation Meteor Lake processors as well as upcoming Intel Granite Rapids server processors.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc7 as the latest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.10 kernel.

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution.

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux.

Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 22 aims for release this month after a busier than usual period of bug fixing.

Upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel last year was HID BPF as a means of more easily shipping new drivers and in particular quirks/workarounds for different HID devices. This allows for some nice continued innovations around (e)BPF within the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.11 there is yet more HID BPF capabilities to be upstreamed as well as new drivers.

When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC.

The Linux kernel's block subsystem for storage is poised to introduce support for atomic writes with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.