Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

As the latest effort in the quest of bringing Rust programming language usage to the Linux kernel, sent out on Thursday were initial patches for bringing Rust infrastructure to the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) framework within the media subsystem.

While going back a year there has been "GFX940" open-source driver work happening within the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel drivers and the like, only this week was support merged for GFX940 into Mesa.

Earlier this week Intel sent out AMX-COMPLEX support for the GCC compiler as a new instruction set extension for Xeon Scalable Granite Rapids. That enablement work was already merged for the imminent GCC 13 release while now AMX-COMPLEX support has also been added to GNU Binutils.

This week Intel formally debuted its oneAPI 2023.1 Tools package that contains the collection of various compilers, libraries, debugging tools, and related open-source offerings like OSPRay Studio and Embree 4.0.

André Zwing on Thursday released Hangover 0.8.5 as the third alpha release of this software for running Windows x86 32/64-bit applications and Wine on other CPU architectures like AArch64 and POWER PPC64LE.

Over the years the Free Software Foundation has certified various devices that to their standards "Respect Your Freedom" from USB to parallel printer cables to re-branded and re-flashed motherboards to the Talos II at the higher-end. They've also certified different network hardware and other devices. The newest that they announced today is backing a $99 mini VPN router that supports WireGuard and other solutions.

Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2.

While the release of GCC 13.1 as the first stable GCC 13 compiler is due out in the next few weeks, ahead of that milestone dozens of Rust "gccrs" patches were merged today for furthering along that new language support.

Following the Intel Meteor Lake VPU driver being added to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem in Linux 6.3 along with converting over the Habana Labs AI driver, coming in Linux 6.4 is now the Qualcomm QAIC Cloud AI driver to this subsystem that lives within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella.

PipeWire 0.3.68 is out today as a significant update for this alternative to JACK and PulseAudio as well as managing both audio and video streams on the Linux desktop.

Intel today submitted their final batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes that they have planned for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support! WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web.

Huawei's Bolt project is a deep learning library focused on high performance and heterogeneous flexibility and supporting a variety of neural networks. Bolt claims to outperform other deep learning acceleration libraries while supporting models from TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe, and more.

VVenC is an open-source project from the Fraunhofer Institute for providing H.266/VVC video encode/decode capabilities. Out today is VVenC 1.8 with the latest enhancements for speeding up CPU-based H.266 video coding.

Ahead of the Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze coming up in the next week or two, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have been landing some last minute performance optimizations to benefit their "ANV" Vulkan driver.

A patch was posted this week introducing a new "hp-wmi-sensors" Linux kernel driver for HP business-class computers for exposing WMI sensor functionality.

Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12.

Ubuntu 23.04 is being talked up for how it can aide developers that want to begin programming with Rust code for Linux kernel modules. It's possible to get started with Rust kernel development on Ubuntu 23.04 thanks to its generic kernel having the necessary kernel configuration, but ultimately it's still in an early state and there isn't much to do with the stock kernel.

Just two months after Zstd 1.5.4 was published, Zstd 1.5.5 has been released as the newest version of this Zstandard compression algorithm implementation. Zstd 1.5.5's release is motivated by addressing a rare corruption bug fix but also has various performance optimizations.

It's been two weeks already since the release of LLVM 16.0 as the latest shiny feature update to this widely-used, open-source compiler stack. LLVM release manager Tom Stellard today issued LLVM 16.0.1 as the first point release with a wide collection of fixes and other maintenance work to LLVM and its contained sub-projects.

Building off last month's release of MidnightBSD 3.0 for this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-forked operating system the v3.0.1 update is now available.

Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms.

Ahead of hopefully enabling the RADV Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries "GPL" support by default for this quarter's Mesa 23.1 release, the RADV driver has now landed on-disk shader caching support for GPL libraries.

The CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is focused on providing new packages and features atop CentOS Stream for use by hyperscalers like Meta and Twitter have now established a "hyperscale-intel" repository for Intel-optimized packages.

While for a number of years now System76 has manufactured their own Thelio desktop line of Linux PCs from their facility in Denver, Colorado (and their Launch Keyboard), they have long talked up ambitions for eventually manufacturing their own Linux laptops rather relying on other white-label manufacturers as they currently do. Today a first glimpse of their in-house laptop prototyping was shared,

As part of the process for getting Intel's new Xe DRM kernel driver upstreamed as the eventual replacement to the existing i915 driver for Gen12 graphics hardware and newer, Intel engineers on Monday posted the initial Xe DRM scheduler patches that have been separated out to get review on them, figure out what can be common/shared among drivers, and get those bits upstreamed.

NVIDIA has published updated NVIDIA TU10x /TU11x "Turing" GPU firmware to support newer RTX 20 hardware revisions and fix outstanding issues affecting the open-source Nouveau driver.

As I pointed out at the end of March, AMD has begun bringing up a new CDNA GPU in their Linux kernel driver code, past the currently known Instinct MI300 "GFX940" series. This "GFX943" part is some new CDNA multi-XCC accelerator and the open-source AMD engineers have begun posting many patches for this new GPU target. The initial bits of that support will appear in the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

A currently-testing implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock has been published for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This Vulkan fragment shader interlock support is used by some game emulators as well as being useful in running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan and similar purposes.

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat's leading Linux input expert, today released xf86-input-libinput 1.3 as the newest version of this X.Org Server driver for making use of libinput in an X.Org Server world.

Wayland 1.22 is now available as the newest feature update to this core set of Wayland protocol and helper code.

Fedora Workstation developers and those involved at Red Hat have been working to improve the state of disk encryption on Fedora with a end-goal of possibly making the installer encrypt systems by default.

The Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release has reached its release candidate phase.

SUSE announced today the release of "Piz Bernina", its latest quarterly update to the SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform that is working to establish the next-generation SUSE/openSUSE computing platform.

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process.

One of several notable open-source projects to rewrite key Linux software components with the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language is uutils as an alternative to GNU Coreutils. Released this weekend was uutils v0.0.18 that continues to enhance compatibility with the upstream GNU Coreutils programs.

Intel compiler engineers have sent out the initial GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler patches for enabling the newly-disclosed AMX-COMPLEX extension with next year's Xeon Scalable "Granite Rapids" processors.

In addition to today marking the release of Qt 6.5 LTS, Slint 1.0 has been released as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that also supports bindings for other programming languages. Slint aims to deliver efficient and fluid GUIs from embedded to desktop and features its own markup language.

Apache IoTDB 1.1 has been released today as this database for the "Internet of Things" as a high performance time-series database solution. Like with most time-series databases, ApAche IoTDB aims to provide a high performance solution for data management and analysis from the edge to the cloud with high throughput, efficient data storage, and robust open-source software integration.

While WebKitGTK already provides accelerated compositing support, there are different code paths depending upon whether Wayland or X11 are used and various other complexities involved as well as differences between using the GTK3 and GTK4 toolkits. WebKitGTK developers have been working to instead shift their multiple different code paths toward one route by way of DMA-BUF.

Out today is the Qt 6.5 toolkit that is also now the second Qt6 long-term support release.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc5 and it's looking to be in good shape for this stage of development.

Along with the Phoronix Q1'2023 recap, here is a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most in March when it came to all of the original open-source and Linux focused content. During March on Phoronix were 240 original news articles and 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly.

If you have been wanting to experiment with running the open-source Coreboot on a modern Intel Alder Lake (Z690) motherboard, the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 that works thanks to 3mdeb's Dasharo is now for sale at its lowest price ever at just over $150.

Earlier this week I wrote about a budget Gigabyte motherboard for AMD Ryzen CPUs seeing Linux sensor monitoring support with the addition to the Gigabyte WMI sensors driver. Two more Gigabyte motherboards are now enabled for this driver in time for the Linux 6.3-rc5 release.

Sent to Linus Torvalds on Saturday and already merged ahead of today's Linux 6.3-rc5 release were a set of input driver fixes. Most notable with that round of fixes were addressing some touchpad and keyboard issues with some TUXEDO Computers laptops when resuming from suspend.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was scheduled to be the last release candidate for this BSD operating system update but then 13.2-RC5 came with one fix. Now in dragging out the release into April, FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 has been released with another fix.