Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Greg Kroah-Hartman released a trio of stable kernel updates this morning that are notable in part for having mitigated the recently disclosed i915 driver security issue affecting Intel "Gen12" graphics from Tigerlake integrated graphics up through the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics.

While the Sway Wayland compositor has long been available via the Fedora package repositories, Sway fans within the Fedora space are hoping that Fedora 38 will ship with a Fedora Sway spin being available for an easy and out-of-the-box experience for running this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

With the new Mesa 22.3 release one of the changes for vintage hardware users is the introduction of "HasVK" as a Vulkan driver forked from Intel's ANV codebase.

The lightweight Xfce 4.18 desktop is planning to release in two weeks while out now is the Xfce 4.18 Pre2 development milestone.

For those looking to enjoy the ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD platforms, OpenZFS 2.1.7 is now available.

Valve just posted their November 2022 Steam Survey results and it shows the Linux gaming marketshare continue to climb, driven by the success of their Arch Linux powered Steam Deck handheld gaming console.

Intel engineers have been busy bringing up Meteor Lake support for Linux from the improved integrated graphics to other areas of this next-gen Core processor that will eventually succeed Raptor Lake. In addition to heavy and ongoing work with the i915 kernel graphics driver, the initial Meteor Lake support has been merged now for Mesa.

It's been a while since trying out the BSD operating systems on bleeding-edge hardware while a Phoronix Premium recently asked about the BSDs on Raptor Lake. Well, here are my initial experiences trying to run FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD on the Intel Core i9 13900K desktop.

The past few months there has been a change proposal discussed around adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default compilation flags for packages being built for Fedora Linux. Adding this option would improve the profiling/debug-ability of the packages but with possible performance implications. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now rejected this contentious change proposal.

While NVIDIA users have been enjoying hardware ray-tracing with the Blender 3D modelling software for years with the OptiX back-end and RTX GPUs, the ray-tracing support for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics is still coming together for this industry-standard, open-source 3D modelling software.

With November now in the books, here is a look back at the most popular original open-source/Linux content on Phoronix from the 245 original articles written by your's truly over the past month. It was an extremely exciting month given the launch of the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors with up to 96 cores per socket, AVX-512, and with all of the improvements meant outright insane generational improvement and currently slaughtering the competition. The Linux 6.1 kernel nearing the limelight, early development work on Linux 6.2, and the continued embracing of the Rust programming language by the open-source ecosystem all made for an interesting November.

NixOS as the Linux distribution built atop the purely-functional and declarative Nix package manager is out with a new release to kickoff December.

Intel engineers have published their "2022Q3" patch queue for FFmpeg along with a "2022Q4 RC1" set too for representing the latest yet-to-be-merged patches for improving FFmpeg video acceleration with Intel graphics.

Developers behind the Genode open-source operating system framework that uses a micro-kernel design have released their v22.11 update.

Yesterday marked new releases of the SVT-AV1 and Rav1e open-source AV1 video encoders.

Mesa 22.3 is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics driver components.

While several X.Org DDX drivers in the past have implemented a "TearFree" xorg.conf driver option to try to eliminate screen tearing when running an X.Org Server without a composited environment, the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX that is widely used has lacked that option. That is until a developer finally stepped up and has pending support for the "TearFree" option.

Following several ROCm 5.3 point releases, AMD today shipped ROCm 5.4 as the newest version of their open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

Here's a last call that if you wanted to participate in this year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday holiday deal to help support Phoronix, today is the last day of the sale.

CVE-2022-4139 was made public today as an i915 kernel graphics driver security issue affecting all Gen12 graphics -- from integrated Tigerlake graphics up through the latest Raptor Lake graphics as well as the in-development Meteor Lake code plus the discrete GPUs of DG2/Alchemist and Arctic Sound.

A set of "request for comments" patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement support for CPU scheduler policies to be implemented as (e)BPF programs.

For the past two decades the RPM package manager software has relied upon its own OpenPGP parser implementation for dealing with package keys and signatures. With Fedora 38 they plan to have their RPM package shifted to use the Rust-written "Sequoia" parser instead.

While AMD EPYC Genoa launched a few weeks back and the Ryzen 7000 series launched in late September, one of the AMD Zen 4 patch series we are still waiting to arrive for the mainline Linux kernel is the Automatic IBRS enablement.

It's happening: the new "accel" compute accelerator subsystem is now queued for introduction with the Linux 6.2 kernel once that merge window opens in December.

Google released Chrome 108 on Tuesday that is the last major feature update for 2022 with this cross-platform web browser.

DXVK-NVAPI 0.6 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source project that bridges the DXVK Direct3D-on-Vulkan layer with NVIDIA's proprietary driver NVAPI library for utilizing various NVIDIA-specific features.

At the start of the year SDL attempted to prefer Wayland over X.Org/X11 thanks to the maturing Wayland support for this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer by numerous cross-platform games. But that change was later reverted over ecosystem challenges around Wayland. Now as we approach the end of the year, SDL is again trying to prefer Wayland over X11.

Beyond Intel's well regarded open-source software work deep down the stack on everything from ensuring timely new hardware support to optimizing the Linux kernel with various performance optimizations and investing heavily in the upstream GNU and LLVM toolchains (and much more!), they also make terrific software ecosystem advancements higher up the stack. One of their most promising areas of open-source software work in recent years has been around oneAPI. Next week Intel will be hosting a virtual oneAPI DevSummit for AI and HPC where they will be showing off their latest software advancements.

The much anticipated Godot 4.0 open-source game engine continues inching closer to release. When that release is finally out, Godot 4.0.x point releases will likely be coming in quick and some plans for Godot 4.1 are already being discussed.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 has been released and this collection of protocols is now headlined by the addition of fractional scaling support!

The U-Boot open-source bootloader that is widely used for embedded devices has finally landed support for HTTP and TCP along with a basic "wget" implementation for downloading images via HTTP/TCP.

Back in September was a big patch set working out classes of tasks for hybrid CPUs and more properly implementing Intel Thread Director for Linux. This work to better the performance/efficiency of modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has now advanced past the "request for comments" stage with a new patch series sent out on Monday.

The Apple SoC CPUFreq driver worked on by the Asahi Linux crew for CPU frequency scaling with the M1 and M2 chips under Linux looks like it could soon be reaching the mainline kernel.

Cryptsetup 2.6 is now available as the newest version of this utility for managing disk encryption on Linux systems in conjunction with the DMcrypt kernel module.

ClamAV as one of the leading open-source anti-virus / anti-malware toolkits for Linux / Windows / BSDs has finally reached the version 1.0 milestone.

Earlier this year the Open-Source Firmware Foundation was created to help advance open firmware development. Today the Coreboot project has officially joined the Open-Source Firmware Foundation.

A little more than a week ago AMD quietly released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise Linux 22.Q4 driver, also advertised more recently as the AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q4 for Linux driver package. With most Linux enthusiasts and gamers happily using the upstream open-source components in the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the new quarterly release slipped under the radar until now.

With KDE Gear next year there will be improved support for accessing files from Apple iOS devices like iPhones and iPads. There already exist several KDE implementations for accessing files off iOS devices while a new one written against the latest KIO code has been merged.

Following the NVIDIA 525.53 Linux beta from earlier this month, NVIDIA is closing out November by releasing the v525.60.11 driver as their first stable Linux driver in the R525 series.

Red Hat engineers this morning for the first time publicly announced their work on Composefs, a new opportunistically-sharing and verified image file-system.

Similar to SUSE/openSUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform requiring x86-64-v2 CPU support, the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed is beginning to transition to require x86-64-v2 micro-architecture support.

One of the new hardware drivers set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is the OneXPlayer sensor driver for supporting hardware monitoring on the x86_64-based handheld gaming devices. While OneXPlayer devices ship with Windows by default, Linux is becoming an increasingly sought after target particularly with prospects for running SteamOS.

OpenRGB 0.8 was released on Sunday night as this project's largest release ever and coming after nearly one year in development. OpenRGB as a reminder is the open-source, cross-vendor and cross-platform software for RGB lighting control across many different devices from GPUs and motherboards to keyboards and other lighted peripherals.

Back in October the open-source Coreboot firmware project began seeing patches for new AMD SoCs codenamed "Morgana" and "Glinda". That work has continued and over the weekend the "Mayan Morgana" was merged as the reference motherboard for the Morgana SoC.

Linus Torvalds just christened the Linux 6.1-rc7 kernel as what is now expected to be the second to last release candidate before Linux 6.1 is officially released in December.

Talked about for over two years now has been a "readfile" system call to efficiently read small files. This should be a win when dealing with small files like those exposed via sysfs while it's taken time to come together and stalled out several times. This week Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the readfile patches leading to hope that this new syscall might finally be on a path for mainlining.

While these days the Intel-owned Habana Labs Linux software stack is a shining example of an open-source AI accelerator solution with mainline kernel driver support and also helping bring together the new compute accelerator subsystem, it wasn't always so blessed. Initially there was the closed-source user-space bits that fortunately last year was opened up with SynapseAI Core.

While for years Intel has been very well regarded -- and rightfully so -- for their open-source Linux hardware support, occasionally there are exceptions. One such exception currently is Intel's IPU6 drivers for their MIPI cameras found on many newer Alder lake laptops and presumably upcoming Raptor Lake laptops too. The IPU6 drivers remain outside of the Linux kernel and will still likely be that way for sometime.

With the Linux 6.1-rc7 kernel set to be released later today, it will become easier making use of the AMD P-State driver for that enhanced CPU frequency scaling driver intended for Zen 2 and newer EPYC/Ryzen platforms that make use of ACPI CPPC.

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame has been working the past several months of adding getrandom() to the vDSO for achieving better performance and working the needs of user-space developers. Early results have been impressive and this week Donenfeld sent out the seventh iteration of these patches.