Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost.

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on preparing for next-generation hardware support within the kernel well ahead of launch. The latest on the recent enablement around next-gen Panther Lake processors is enabling a new "5th Gen" neural processing unit (NPU) to be found with Panther Lake P.

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced Fwupd 2.0 as a major release to this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems. Fwupd 2.0 clears out a lot of long deprecated and legacy bits while adding new features and shipping many fixes.

Blender 4.3 is available today in beta form to encourage public testing of this next feature release to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath.

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.

A new set of patches from AMD Linux engineers today aim to boost the performance for heterogeneous CPU designs such as the recent Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs that have multiple core types.

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD.

Mesa 24.2.4 is out today as the newest stable point release to this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers.

Now that sched_ext was upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the many great features in Linux 6.12, Fedora's kernel builds are prepared to enable this innovative scheduler feature that allows for new scheduling policies to be loaded via (e)BPF programs.

Google engineers have been working on support for the Linux kernel to leverage AutoFDO feedback directed optimizations and Propeller optimizations when compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang. In turn this can help Linux systems see 2~10% better performance thanks to the more optimized kernel.

After years of AmpereComputing talking about AmpereOne AArch64 server processors, it looks like we are finally on the cusp of seeing broader availability of the processors and servers/motherboards for this ARM server platform up to 192 cores. At the end of August I finally received a temporary review system with the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship SKU. That server was the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR and is supposed to be seeing availability real soon. Now the latest on the AmpereOne front is Giga Computing (Gigabyte) announcing general availability of their servers.

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.

The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL Foundation), which was formed out of Intel's oneAPI software efforts, will be hosting a virtual developer summit.

Steam's Remote Play feature that allows playing Steam games on phones / tablets / TVs / other PCs while streamed from your main gaming system now is able to handle AV1 video streaming.

If you have been trying out Linux 6.12-rc1 or a recent Linux Git snapshot and discovered your laptop's touchpad is no longer working, you are far from alone. The good news is the issue has been quickly tracked down and has led to a new input driver being reverted.

With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.

The Redox OS open-source Rust-written operating system project has published their September 2024 status update.

A roadmap/schedule has been published for the lightweight Xfce 4.20 desktop. If all goes well this next iteration of the Xfce desktop will be out before Christmas.

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version.

The Linux 6.11 kernel introduced getrandom() in the vDSO for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. In addition to patches pending for Glibc to make use of getrandom() vDSO support, Golang is now another early user of this functionality.

For those making use of OpenVPN for your virtual private network (VPN) needs, years in the making has been an "OVPN" Linux kernel driver to enhance the performance by offloading more of the work to kernel-space.

Manjaro 24.1 "Xahea" debuted on Tuesday as the newest update to this Arch Linux based distribution. Manjaro 24.1 is the first new tagged release since May and with it comes updated desktop options, the Linux 6.10 kernel, and other package upgrades.

Back in May Steam on Linux usage crossed the 2% threshold and remained that way until August when it dropped back below 2% for all Steam gamers. The September 2024 Steam Survey results were just published and point to another downward bump for Steam on Linux gaming.

Python 3.13 had been scheduled for release today with a new interactive interpreter, experimental free-threaded build mode to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), an experimental JIT, and other shiny new features. But a performance regression has delayed the Python 3.13 release to next week and in turn an unexpected Python 3.13-rc3 final test release.

Intel is preparing a new staging feature for better handling of CPU microcode updates. Initial patches for the Linux kernel are out for discussion in enabling this feature that can yield around a 40% reduction in latency during the CPU microcode updating process.

Taking place last week in Paris was the annual Kernel Recipes conference devoted to a variety of Linux topics and sponsored by Meta, Dell, Arm, AMD, and other organizations. The slides and videos from the different Linux/open-source talks are now online for those wanting to watch some interesting technical content.

Building off last year's release of the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors featuring up to sixty-four Zen 4C cores, AMD today announced the EPYC Embedded 8004 series.

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser.

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver.

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come.

During the month of September on Phoronix there were 265 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. Here's a look back at the most exciting content for September.

Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week's systemd "All Systems Go" developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language.

The Linux Mint project has published their status update for September 2024 that outlines work on this desktop-focused, Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution as well as its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment.

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU.

The newly-merged sched_ext allows for the Linux kernel scheduler to be made more extensible by allowing BPF programs to be loaded to affect the kernel's scheduling behavior. There's now a similar take on CPU frequency scaling: cpufreq_ext. There's a "request for comments" patch series on cpufreq_ext for making extensible CPU frequency scaling algorithm adaptations with BPF.

With the third quarter drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source related content for the quarter. This quarter there's been more than 730 news articles and 50 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles all written by your's truly covering a range of areas.

FFmpeg 7.1 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. With FFmpeg 7.1 the VVC video decoder has been promoted to stable, there are a number of Vulkan Video improvements, and an assortment of other exciting enhancements.

Open-source developer Simon Ser has released Sway 1.10-rc1 as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor. With Sway 1.10 there are many new features coming.

AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 as their latest open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems prior to ending the quarter.

As expected the Linux 6.12-rc1 kernel is out today in marking the end of the very exciting two-week Linux 6.12 merge window that saw many high profile features land.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system that is known for pursuing aggressive performance while still delivering a nice Linux desktop experience is out with its September 2024 release.

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for Linux 6.12 added some new drivers as well as adding new device support to some of the existing drivers.

Submitted today as the "x86 fixes" for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc1 release this evening is adding two new Intel CPU model numbers.