Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As I wrote about last week that Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it's indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer -- both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators.

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024.

Earlier this month at AMD's AI event in San Francisco they announced ROCm 6.0 while launching the MI300X and MI300A accelerators. While announced back on the 6th, today marks the actual availability of ROCm 6.0 with the source code and binaries now publicly available.

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment.

A quirk has been discovered with the AMD-powered Framework 13 inch laptop where if a user closes the laptop's lid on an already-suspended system, the system will wake up. A set of Linux kernel patches are on the way to workaround this issue.

Intel's VC Intrinsics software package that provides a set of intrinsics atop the LLVM IR instructions to represent SIMD semantics for programs targeting Intel GPUs has been updated for new hardware support.

Tim Holmes-Mitra with Canonical has shared some roadmap highlights for the Ubuntu desktop with the in-development Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

While some at Intel were busy launching the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids", other Linux engineers at the company were pushing ahead on their new hardware enablement quest for future platforms. Sent out on the same day as Emerald Rapids being announced were continued patches for enabling Grand Ridge.

In addition to Fedora 40 applying systemd hardening settings to bolster system security, another security enhancement now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is on having the linker error out on encountering possible security issues.

It's been two weeks since Mesa 23.3 was punctually released and this week has been succeeded by the Mesa 23.3.1 point release with the first batch of bug/regression fixes.

Fedora 40 is planning to provide more hardened system security by leveraging some high level security features provided by systemd.

Back in September AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) and at the time they noted the open-source code would be made available "soon". As a nice Christmas present, the FSR3 source code is public as of today.

While Intel's AI Everywhere event today was primarily focused on Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptop processors and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors, Intel also briefly announced their newest Xeon D and Xeon E series processors.

There's been nothing new on the BUS1 front this year for capability-based IPC within the Linux kernel... In fact, the BUS1 out-of-tree kernel module has gone untouched for years now. But out of the BUS1 project has been Dbus-Broker for a high performance D-Bus message broker in user-space that doesn't break existing D-Bus compatibility. Out today is the newest version of that project closely tied to systemd developers.

The unofficial "ALHP" repositories for Arch Linux have begun offering an x86-64-v4 tuned repository for packages built against this current highest x86-64 micro-architecture feature level for the latest Intel and AMD processors with AVX-512 support.

While there has been much talk this year about KDE Plasma 6.0 on the desktop as it gears up for release at the end of February, there's been less talk about the Plasma Mobile work for having the KDE stack on smartphones. But it turns out some progress is quietly being made on KDE Plasma Mobile for bringing it aligned with the "6" platform.

For those that were interested in the openSUSE logo contest, the voting wrapped up on Tuesday and the results of this logo contest for new openSUSE branding have been selected.

Holding up some laptops from shipping Linux pre-loaded around the world come down to regulatory certifications for power management not currently being met on Linux while working fine on Windows.

The GNU C Library "glibc" is the latest free software project to adopt a Code of Conduct (CoC) in aiming to encourage welcoming behavior and less controversy among developers and other stakeholders when engaging this key component to the Linux software ecosystem.

Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that they will now enable frame pointers by default when building packages. There will still selectively be some packages where they decide to disable frame pointers due to the performance overhead, but the focus on this change is to improve the out-of-the-box debugging and profiling support on the Linux distribution.

The X.Org Server doesn't see much in the way of feature work these days with Red Hat and others divesting from classic X.Org/X11 sessions. But there continues to be new point releases of the X.Org Server and the XWayland code due to long-standing security issues within the X.Org codebase. New point releases were out last night due to two CVEs for bugs dating back to 2007 and 2009.

LibreOffice 24.2 Beta 1 is available today as the latest test candidate for this cross-platform open-source office suite that is packing many new features while also changing its approach to versioning.

FreeRDP 3.0 stable was released today as this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for allowing nice remote access support.

A few months ago I wrote about AMD Linux engineers working on ACPI PHAT support for the Linux kernel. This week new patches around Linux ACPI PHAT handling have been posted with further confirmation of this functionality coming to "future" AMD SoCs.

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware.

The Linux kernel's thermal driver has the obvious notion of hot and critically-hot trip points while to this point there hasn't been the opposite: cold trip points (events) but that's finally been proposed as we approach the end of 2023.

SVT-AV1 v1.8 was released this week as the newest version of this open-source AV1 video encoder originally started by Intel and continues to be developed by Intel engineers in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media. As with most releases, optimizing this CPU-based AV1 encoder's performance continues to be a key priority.

Canonical is experimenting with x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels! They have produced an experimental build of Ubuntu Server using x86_64_v3 for requiring basically Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX capabilities. But they aren't yet committing to it as a default or when such a change may materialize.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Initoverlayfs as a scalable initial file-system. The code is currently in early form and the developers are still looking for feedback from the community as well as figuring out whether it properly belongs in kernel or user-space.

Following Canonical pulling on control of LXD and maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, LXD 5.20 was released today where they have also decided to change its license moving forward to AGPLv3 by default.

ONNX in collaboration with AMD have announced TurnkeyML as a new open-source machine learning toolchain focused on agile model development and deployment.

With Linux 6.7 there's now support for enabling/disabling 32-bit program support at boot-time. The "ia32_emulation=" argument can be used for enabling/disabling 32-bit user-space program support and the ability to support 32-bit system calls. Right now when forcing off the x86 32-bit support it can be confusing if the user is unaware as no warning is currently provided, but that is about to change.

The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.

Linux 6.6 brought an initial Intel Visual Sensing Controller "IVSC" driver. The Intel IVSC drivers have long been out-of-tree for use with Alder Lake laptops and newer. Linux 6.7 brought the La Jolla Cove Adadpter driver code as part of the IVSC controller. With Linux 6.8 there's yet more work landing on the IVSC front.

Cling 1.0 was released this week for this open-source interactive C++ interpreter that builds atop LLVM/Clang. Cling is implemented as an extension to LLVM/Clang to serve as an interpeter leveraging the read-eval-print loop (REPL) concept and relies on just-in-time (JIT) compilation.

The feature work continues pouring in for Mesa 24.0 with new OpenGL and Vulkan driver features continuing to be enabled.

Of the many new features in Linux 6.7, one of the items exciting Phoronix readers the most is the merging of the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system.

A patch merged this weekend for Mesa 24.0-devel is helping the performance of the open-source NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs but the performance remains well short still of the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.

WayVNC v0.8 is working its way toward release as a VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC continues to make it quite easy to have VNC support for Wayland desktops employing wlroots and this next release brings even more features.

Storage company Kioxia that was spun off from Toshiba several years ago has donated a software development kit (SDK) to the Linux Foundation for establishing the Software-Enabled Flash SDK. This is for opening new doors and innovative uses around flash memory.

Since earlier this year AMD has been working on Linux support for WBRF for mitigating WiFi radio frequency interference (RFI) with their latest Ryzen 7000 and forthcoming Ryzen 8000 series mobile processors. That work looks like it will be ready to land in Linux 6.8.

Following a bumpy weekend due to the EXT4 data corruption bug, Linux 6.6.6 is out with just a sole change for dealing with another headache: WiFi regressions.

Following Debian 12.3 being delayed due to an EXT4 data corruption bug briefly appearing in released Linux 6.1 LTS releases, Debian 12.3 has been replaced by Debian 12.4 and comes with dozens of bug fixes.