Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

The first beta release of Python 3.12 is now available that also marks the beginning of the feature freeze for this year's major Python update.

Cloudflare is making it easier for non-profit open-source projects to tap into the premium services offered by the company for speeding up their web infrastructure and protecting against attacks.

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 while today it's been succeeded by the AMDVLK 2023.Q2.2 update.

Google engineers this month have begun posting new patches for the Linux memory management subsystem and related components for a feature dubbed Working Set Reporting.

With Linux going to disable PCID support on Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake while waiting for mitigated microcode due to a CPU bug, I was curious if this disabling of Process Context Identiifiers would have any overall performance implications. So I ran some benchmarks this weekend.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has implemented smooth lines support for in turn to be leveraged by the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

The 61st edition of the TOP500 supercomputer list has been published this morning. The Frontier supercomputer continues to hold the top spot and the only true Exascale system.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.4-rc3 kernel following a rather uneventful week.

A patch is pending via x86/urgent to workaround an issue with Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors that is leaving the kernel developers for the time being to disable Process Context Identifiers (PCID) with these Intel mobile/desktop processors.

Arch Linux on Friday began its Git repository migration and as part of that discontinuing SVN access and some changes to how their package repositories are setup. Arch Linux's Git migration has now been successfully completed.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed a new set of patches for Mesa 23.2 that are further optimizing the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for lower overhead in some code paths.

Being merged into LLVM's libc library recently are an optimized memory copy function "memcpy" implementation for the RISC-V architecture.

There is pending patches for adding support for the LEAKSHIELD device to the Aquacomputer Linux device driver. German PC component manufacturer Aquacomputer has been enjoying support for their various products on Linux and the latest seeing support in this open-source driver is the Aquacomputer Leakshield for reporting any water cooling leaks and other performance metrics around your cooling setup.

As covered a few days ago on Phoronix, there's been early progress on HDR display support for the KDE desktop among other highlights this week.

Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture.

While the Vulkan high performance graphics and compute API is backed by many vendors, Microsoft and Apple are two notable organizations that haven't backed this Khronos Group standard. For Microsoft's part, they obviously prefer their in-house Direct3D. However, Microsoft is making preparations for submitting their first Vulkan extension.

AMD engineers have been working out many quirks and oddities in system suspend/resume handling to make it more reliable on their hardware particularly around Ryzen laptops. In addition to suspend/resume reliability improvements and suspend-to-idle (s2idle) enhancements, one of their engineers also discovered an easy one-liner as a small step to speeding up system resume time.

Ivan Orlov this past week posted the patches for VALSA, the Virtual ALSA sound driver that aims to help Linux kernel developers in testing and fuzzing of the sound subsystem.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux.

CodeWeavers, the company known for its CrossOver software for running Windows games/apps on Linux / macOS / Chrome OS and in turn being the main corporate backer to the Wine project, is now transitioned to being an employee ownership trust. This comes with Jeremy White deciding to leave the company after 27 years.

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors.

There's been a Fedora 39 proposal under evaluation for boosting the kernel's vm.max_map_count to help with some Windows games on Steam Play. Though concerns were raised that bumping this kernel tunable too high may not be wise. As such, further testing is to happen for tuning Fedora's stock vm.max_map_count value.

Nearly forty years after the MIDI digital music protocol was first introduced, in 2020 the MIDI 2.0 protocol was announced as a major overhaul for this widely used standard by musical devices. A big patch series sent out today prepares the Linux kernel sound drivers for MIDI 2.0.

Intel's open-source Mesa Vulkan Video driver "ANV" has added support for H.265 (HEVC) video decoding.

Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn't always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability.

The sdl12-compat project that implements the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for better game compatibility on modern Linux systems is out today with a new pre-release.

NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 4060 series consisting of the $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB while in July an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB version will come along with a $299 RTX 4060.

Following last month's Red Hat hosted HDR hackfest that brought together many Linux desktop stakeholders from GPU driver developers to desktop environment developers, KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared an update on the progress being made for high dynamic range (HDR) display support from the KWin side.

With development of the MIPS architecture having officially ended two years ago in favor of focusing on RISC-V for future CPU designs and the overall decline of that CPU architecture, it's been years since the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has seen its MIPS code well maintained. However, now a capable developer has stepped up willing to serve as the GCC maintainer for MIPS.

Earlier this month Red Hat released RHEL 9.2 and at the same time they also released RHEL 8.8 for those continuing to rely on the stable RHEL8 series. AlmaLinux managed to provide a same-day release of AlmaLinux 9.2 while now one week later they have also shipped AlmaLinux 8.8.

Valve released a new Steam client beta overnight and contains a few notable fixes for NVIDIA Linux gamers.