Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

It looks like next-generation RDNA4 graphics will feature a new iteration of the Video Core Next (VCN) for accelerated video encode/decode. VCN 5.0 patches were posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver.

Mitchell Baker announced today she is stepping down as CEO of Mozilla Corporation but will retain the position of Mozilla Corporation Executive Chairwoman.

Cyberus Technology announced today the open-source release of a KVM back-end developed for VirtualBox. This new back-end allows the VirtualBox VMM to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module relied upon by the standard Oracle VM VirtualBox software.

Fwupd 1.9.13 was released today by Red Hat's Richard Hughes as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems and more.

As the first of Arm Mali firmware to be added to the linux-firmware.git repository, the Gen10 Mali "Panthor" firmware has been added as part of the effort on the new open-source Panthor DRM kernel driver currently working its way upstream.

Canonical is continuing the emphasis on Snaps for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release.

Asynchronous device shutdown support for the Linux kernel has been pursued in the past as with hyperscalers like Google having too many NVMe storage devices can slow the shutdown/reboot process. Red Hat on Wednesday submitted a new patch series aiming to implement async device shutdown support.

Merged today to DragonFlyBSD Git is the WireGuard protocol driver for leveraging this popular tech.

When running Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks one of the real-world areas where Linux consistently dominates across both AMD and Intel platforms is Blender 3D modeling software's rendering performance. For CPU-based rendering in Blender as well as other 3D modeling software, Linux typically dominates by wide margins. With the upcoming Blender 4.1 release, it looks like Linux's lead will only further expand.

There's been recent reports that Microsoft is bringing sudo to Windows as discovered in recent Windows 11 Insider previews. This was briefly confirmed today by Microsoft in a since-removed blog post as well as noting that it's open-source.

There's been much excitement around the Bcachefs file-system since it was mainlined in the Linux kernel at the end of last year. Looking ahead to Linux 6.9 it's looking like it may be one of the first file-system drivers to begin making use of the Rust programming language.

Canonical engineer Till Kamppeter was at FOSDEM 2024 last weekend in Belgium to talk up the Snap packaging format spearheaded for Ubuntu Linux as well as their ongoing work around Ubuntu Core Desktop for providing an all-Snap based operating system.

When it comes to open-source compiler toolchain components and more broadly often unsung heroes in the low-level open-source space, one of the most interesting successes in recent years has been the Mold linker that has proven itself a viable alternative to GNU ld and Gold or LLVM's lld linkers. Mold is already in great shape and typically proving itself well while moving ahead they are working toward kernel/embedded programming support as one of the last grounds to tackle.

AMD has merged updated video processing engine "VPElib" code into their Mesa driver with their latest feature work.

AMD engineers on Monday posted a few new patch series for enabling some updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within their open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. This new IP is presumably part of the ongoing hardware enablement work for their next-generation RDNA4 graphics.

Intel Arrow Lake platform support has been merged to Mesa 24.1 for providing the ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) open-source drivers with support for the next-generation Intel Core integrated graphics.

Last month it was noted on Phoronix that Canonical's kernel team is looking at folding their low-latency kernel optimizations into their generic kernel builds. Right now Ubuntu maintains a separate "lowlatency" kernel flavor with Kconfig tweaks in the name of low-latency responsiveness as an alternative to their "generic" kernel default, but for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS it continues looking like they'll move forward with this change of incorporating the changes into their default kernel build.

While there are a lot of Wayland compositors out there that aren't too different from each other in terms of features, one of the more unique ones is Greenfield. The Greenfield Wayland compositor has been out there for a few years now as an in-browser HTML5-based solution that is continuing to prove itself capable and even fast enough for handling Linux gaming.

Mozilla's latest non-browser foray and attempt at generating additional revenue is Mozilla Monitor Plus, what formerly was known as the free service Firefox Monitor for monitoring of exposed personal information such as email addresses as part of security breaches to various web services.

Last year at FOSDEM 2023 there was a presentation on the state of AMD open-source firmware and since then a lot has changed from the AMD openSIL announcement to new platforms being in the process of being enabled. At FOSDEM 2024 this past weekend in Brussels was a fresh look at the current state of AMD open-source firmware.

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high-performance Java Virtual Machine formerly developed by IBM as the J9 VM.

Stemming from work done at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better handling hypervisor live updates, a "request for comments" patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list for Pkernfs. The Pkernfs proposal was first detailed publicly by AWS last year and is for persisting guest memory and kernel/device state safely across Kexec.

When it comes to making use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel, one of the areas where it makes a lot of sense is for the video codec drivers given the amount of unknown/untrusted data submitted by user-space for video processing and it being a wide attack surface for bad actors. With the memory safety features of Rust this can be a big benefit to such drivers and Collabora is currently experimenting with a virtual codec driver Rust implementation to prove the concept.

Overnight the latest fixes to the Linux 6.8 kernel were merged including two that are "serious" and will be back-ported to the existing stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well.

Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release.

Daniel Kiper with Oracle has provided a status update on current GRUB bootloader development activities, a look ahead, and plans for hopefully having out the next release in November.

When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console.

Google is announcing today they are contributing $1M USD to the Rust Foundation to focus on enhancing interoperability between the C++ and Rust programming languages.

Ahead of any processors being released with support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and Advanced Vector Extensions 10 (AVX10), Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution is already beginning to roll-out binaries compiled for APX+AVX10 use.

While the performance of LLVM/Clang is on-par with GCC these days on both x86_64 and AArch64 and the C/C++ support is very robust compared to many years ago, most Linux distributions continue using the GCC compiler and GNU toolchain by default. OpenMandriva is a well known Linux distribution that for several years has been a Clang-built Linux distribution while for three years now the Chimera Linux distribution has also been relying exclusively on an LLVM toolchain.

With PipeWire 1.0 having been released toward the end of last year and is now commonly used by Linux distributions out-of-the-box for managing audio/video streams, you may be wondering about the future plans for this open-source software from Red Hat. Well, Wim Taymans was at FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels and shared some of the plans ahead for PipeWire.

A pull request open for the past eight months for implementing a VOPD scheduler for the Valve-developed ACO "AMD Compiler" back-end has now been merged for Mesa 24.1-devel.

It's been just shy of four months since the Incus 0.1 release as a fork of the LXD project after Canonical re-asserted control over LXD last summer. Incus though is showing great potential and should be an interesting 2024.

Gentoo ended out last year by beginning to optionally provide binary packages for direct installation. This lowers the barrier for using Gentoo Linux and also works out well for low-end/embedded systems rather than always compiling source packages locally. They've now taken their binary position a step further by also offering up x86-64-v3 packages.

Linus Torvalds is up early today and already issued Linux 6.8-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel.

Cassia is an in-development effort for running Microsoft Windows desktop games on Android. This work-in-progress effort is essentially akin to the Steam Play approach but targeted for Android users by leveraging Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and then FEX for emulating x86_64 binaries on AArch64.

In addition to exploring low-latency changes for the "generic" kernel image, frame pointers by default, and possible x86-64-v3 optimizations, another area being invested into feature work for this next long-term support release is on the desktop provisioning side. Building off work of their new Ubuntu desktop installer and unifying the installation tech that has already been used by Ubuntu Server, Canonical is hoping for a nice desktop provisioning experience in facilitating automated installations, managed desktop setups within enterprises, and OEM/ODM deployments.

The AMD ROCm Debugger "ROCgdb" is maintained as a fork of the GNU Debugger (GDB) with support added for the heterogeneous debugging of the ROCm compute platform. ROCgdb works well and is distributed as part of the ROCM stack. The good news is that AMD is also working on getting this AMDGPU/ROCm debug support added into the upstream GDB debugger.

FreeBSD 14 has been out as stable since last November, but for those still on the FreeBSD 13 stable series, FreeBSD 13.3 beta was released this weekend ahead of its planned stable release in March.

On newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops (2024+ models) there is a new key combination appearing to make it easy to switch between ACPI Platform Profiles for toggling your power/performance preference of the system. With the Linux 6.9 kernel coming in a few months this key will now work under Linux too.

The latest all-in-one liquid cooler receiving a Linux driver to monitor pump speeds and coolant temperatures as well as managing radiator fan speeds under Linux is the ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360.

Intel's hybrid core handling for modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has largely been in good shape under Linux for a while. Intel Thread Director support has come along with various Linux kernel improvements to better handle task placement between the P and E cores. One area seeing new work now though is for virtual machines (VMs) running on Intel hybrid systems with a new Linux kernel patch series working on Thread Director Virtualization.

In case you missed it debuting last week was Niri v0.1 as a new, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the GNOME extension PaperWM. Out today is a follow-on release with more fixes and a few additional features for this new Wayland compositor.

KDE Plasma 6.0 is due to be released at the end of this month! KDE Megarelease 6 RC2 released this week in facilitating more testing ahead of this big KDE desktop milestone and there's been no let-up in the amount of bug fixes and last minute work being prepped for this milestone.