Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Following last week's branching and feature freeze along with the Mesa 22.2-rc1 release, released on Wednesday evening was Mesa 22.2-rc2 as the first week's worth of bug fixing.

Following recent upstream discussions around the -O3 compiler optimizations for the Linux kernel, the Kconfig switch advertising this option is being removed in Linux 6.0.

While last week saw the main set of thermal and power management updates for Linux 6.0, a few more items were sent in this week for the v6.0 merge window.

Weston 11.0 Alpha is out as the newest feature milestone for this reference Wayland compositor that has seen quite an uptick in development activity this year.

With AMD EPYC showing some nice gains on Linux 6.0, I've been eager to begin testing Linux 6.0 on more systems especially now that the v6.0 merge window is winding down... With now having the shiny new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5965WX, I decided to take this high-end 24-core chip for a run with Linux 6.0 Git to see how it performs over Linux 5.19 stable.

The EFI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.0 cycle and contain two notable improvements on the ARM64 side.

IPFS as the "InterPlanetary File-System" protocol for peer-to-peer network support in decentralized file sharing as a distributed file-system is now supported with FFmpeg 5.1. IPFS developers at Protocol Labs are also looking at expanding support for this protocol to other open-source projects.

The Linux kernel continues making preparations around the very exciting Compute Express Link (CXL) thanks to the work of Intel engineers.

The NFS server improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.0 merge window.

In addition to Intel's busy Patch Tuesday, AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the "SQUIP" attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors.

Today's busy patch Tuesday for Intel continues with the Linux kernel getting mitigated for EIBRS Post-barrier Return Stack Buffer (PBRSB). This PBRSB is the latest handling on the "CPU vulnerability nightmares front", the pull request calls it.

As part of today's "Patch Tuesday", Intel has made a new round of security vulnerabilities public -- including a new processor advisory that affects their latest Xeon Scalable and Core wares resulting in new CPU microcode being required.

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs!

AMD engineers have released an updated version of AOMP, their LLVM/Clang downstream that carries the company's latest patches around OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs.

Going back years has been an effort to get 30-bit deep color support on the GNOME desktop under Wayland. Ubuntu and others have been interested in getting 30-bit color support working nicely for the Linux desktop, but while that milestone hasn't yet been crossed, thankfully there is some renewed work in that direction.

The FreeBSD project has published their latest quarterly status report highlighting the advancements made to this open-source BSD operating system.

A patch coming about earlier this year allows setting the system's hostname before user-space starts by way of the hostname= kernel parameter. That patch has now landed as part of Andrew Morton's accumulated changes for Linux 6.0.

With the Linux 6.0 multimedia subsystem changes, the H.265/HEVC user-space API is now being considered stable.

Intel used SIGGRAPH to announce their forthcoming Arc Pro A-series professional GPUs. The initial products include the Arc A30M mobile GPU, the Arc Pro A40 single-slot GPU, and the Arc Pro A50 dual-slot GPU.

Intel used SIGGRAPH today to announce OpenPGL as what they say is the industry's first open-source library for path guiding so renderer developers can integrate "start of the art" path-guiding methods.

Red Hat has been working on a web-based UI for its Anaconda operating system installer and for the Fedora 37 release this autumn they are planning to have an optional preview of this new installer interface.

AMD Automatic Mode Transition (AMT) is a new feature wired up for Ryzen-powered ThinkPad laptops that is being introduced with the Linux 6.0 kernel.

The "char/misc" changes were merged a few days back for the Linux 6.0 kernel with this pull being the rather "random catch-all" area of the kernel for drivers not fitting within other subsystems. Most notable with the char/misc updates for Linux 6.0 is introducing support for Intel's Habana Labs Gaudi2.

OpenBLAS as the high performance, open-source BLAS / LAPACK implementation debuted a new version on Sunday with more CPU optimizations and expanded processor coverage.

The IBM Power CPU architecture updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.0 kernel.

You may recall the Phoronix news earlier this year around an AMD "Sabrina" SoC appearing in Coreboot for open-source system firmware support. Over the past few months we've cited a number of AMD Sabrina hits in open-source code but outside of that haven't heard much else about "Sabrina" or seen it on AMD's roadmaps.

The Linux CIFS/SMB3 client updates were merged on Sunday for the Linux 6.0 merge window. Notable with this round of updates is a performance improvement for the multi-channel mode.

SUSE had been one of the big supporters of ReiserFS two decades ago when it was using the ReiserFS file-system by default but that practice ended in 2006. While SUSE/openSUSE hasn't defaulted to ReiserFS for many years, it has remained an install-time option and retained support for mounting ReiserFS file-systems, but that practice is likely soon ending.

Along with his various other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the Linux 6.0 staging changes this week.

Being merged into Mesa 22.3 this morning for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" are rewritten acceleration structures for the ray-tracing support.

BUS1 started out as a Linux kernel IPC module following the failure of KDBUS and while there still are occasional commits to that out-of-tree BUS1 kernel module, the involved (Red Hat) developers have been primarily working on Dbus-Broker as the high performance, user-space D-Bus implementation that delivers greater speed and reliability over the reference D-Bus code. Now also popping up under the BUS1 umbrella is "r-linux" as a Rust-written, capability-based Linux runtime.

Each new kernel cycle there continues to be more maturity to the RISC-V processor architecture code. With Linux 6.0 there are a few new features wired up as well as bug fixes / clean-ups.

The ACPI and power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.0 landed this week with continued preparations for upcoming Intel and AMD hardware as well as improving existing hardware support.

Earlier this year a developer stepped up willing to maintain Linux's FBDEV subsystem for frame-buffer device drivers since it fell into an unmaintained state in 2016 but even prior to that had been on the decline in the era of more proper DRM/KMS drivers. Helge Deller continues that work overseeing the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem and this week sent in the new patches for Linux 6.0.

Takashi Iwai of SUSE as the Linux sound subsystem maintainer has submitted all the new hardware support and feature updates targeting the Linux 6.0 merge window. The Linux 6.0 sound driver changes are notable when it comes to new AMD and Intel hardware support among other changes.

NetBSD 9.3 has been released as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system known for running on many diverse platforms thanks to its focus on code portability.

For those with a newer ASUS gaming laptop boasting RGB lighting for the keyboard, that functionality could soon be working nicely thanks to work happening within the Linux kernel and the open-source Asusctl project.

Going back to late 2020 there has been bits of Intel Vulkan ray-tracing preparations landing within their Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver in anticipation of Xe HPG with hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Support for old NEC VR4100 CPUs based on the MIPS R4000 core is being removed with the Linux 6.0 kernel leading to devices like the old IBM WorkPad Z50 no longer being supported.

KDE developers have started the month of August to a lot of fixes and polishing for the Plasma desktop.

OpenJ9 v0.33 was released on Friday as the newest version of this Eclipse Foundation Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that was formerly developed by IBM.