Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS is available today as the newest point release for those continuing to employ this older long-term support releases.

One month ago NVIDIA released the 530 series Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to stable with the NVIDIA 530.41.03 driver release.

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors.

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Out today is a new version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment as the hyper-converged infrastructure software with hosted hypervisor.

Chinese fabless semiconductor company Zhaoxin, which was started ten years ago as a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government to create domestic x86 CPUs, is now in the process of working on supporting their newest Yongfeng processors with the Linux kernel.

A new version of MoltenVK has been released, the open-source library that maps the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for making use of this industry standard graphics/compute API on modern iOS and macOS devices.

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election.

On top of today seeing the KDE XWaylandVideoBridge announcement, the debut of GNOME 44 with its many Wayland improvements, and XWayland 23.1 being released with multiple new features/improvements, there is more good news for Wayland fans. Google has merged to the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code support for Wayland fractional scaling via the fractional-scale-v1 protocol.

Following recent rumors and leaks, Valve today officially announced Counter-Strike 2 that they announce as the largest technical leap in Counter-Strike's history.

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

GNOME 44 is now officially out as the latest half-year update to this widely-used open-source desktop.

KDE developers David Edmundson and Alex Poi have begun working on XWaylandVideoBridge as a new project to help improve Linux desktop screen sharing for X11-based applications that may try to share the contents of Wayland screens, such as could be the case for some software like Discord, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and others.

Mozilla announced today they are investing $30 million USD to build Mozilla.ai as a new start-up focused on "building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem."

Canonical is preparing to ship an updated set of Ubuntu Font files for the Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release but is hoping to see more user testing ahead of the official release next month.

Canonical has been preparing to ship a Linux 6.2 based kernel for Ubuntu 23.04 and now it's in the process of rolling out over the coming days.

AMD has upstreamed a basic RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism for GPU use to LLVM's libc and wired it up for AMDGPU use.

Introduced last week with the Vulkan 1.3.244 spec update was a new extension, VK_KHR_map_memory2, which is seeing fast support from the open-source Intel "ANV" and Mesa Radeon "RADV" drivers as well as NVIDIA's newest Vulkan driver beta.

Earlier this month I wrote about Linux 6.4 planning to start removing old, unused, and unmaintained PCMCIA drivers. That began with the PCMCIA "char" drivers queued for removal in this upcoming kernel cycle and now joining them are removing two PCMCIA/CardBus to USB adapter drivers.

Prominent Intel leader Raja Koduri who currently serves as the company's Chief Architect is leaving to focus on a new software start-up.

After being in development for years, Intel's shadow stack support is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle. The shadow stack support is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) security functionality.

Promoted to general availability (GA) status today is the OpenJDK Java 20 update with a number of new features.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed another Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement today for Mesa 23.1-devel to further along its VKD3D-Proton capabilities for enjoying Windows Direct3D 12 games on Linux with Steam Play.

Red Hat developer David Airlie has shown off the progress being made on bringing up not only the open-source Mesa NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" but doing so while making use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware that ultimately is needed for being able to deliver better open-source driver support and performance.

Asahi Linux developer Asahi Lina has posted an update on the ongoing work bringing up their Rust-written DRM kernel driver along with the AGX Gallium3D Mesa OpenGL driver as well as progress towards the in-development Vulkan driver too.

Besides the ongoing work around the reverse-engineered Apple Silicon graphics driver being brought up in the Rust programming language, the other notable Rust effort within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel subsystem is a rewrite of the basic VGEM driver in this increasingly-used programming language. That Rust VGEM driver has now been sent out on the mailing list for review as part of a request for comments.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel the Habana Labs AI driver has moved to the new "accel" accelerator subsystem/framework while for the Linux 6.4 cycle this summer this Intel driver is continuing to speed ahead as it prepares support for the new Gaudi2 AI hardware and making other improvements for this open-source training/inference stack.

Trisquel 11 is now available as the latest major release for this one of a few Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved Linux distributions that is "100% libre" and meets all of the fully free software requirements. Trisquel 11 is re-based against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while making various other changes in the process.

Labwc 0.6.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox.

In addition to the ASUS Z590 motherboards seeing sensor monitoring support with patches queued for Linux 6.4 that were talked about earlier this month on Phoronix, the latest nct6775 driver activity now queued in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch is allowing support for another three dozen ASUS motherboards.

GNU Coreutils 9.2 is out today as the newest feature update to this widely relied upon collection of core utilities commonly found on Linux systems as well as other platforms.

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 23.04 release, Canonical has published Mir 2.13 as the latest version of their software project that in its current incarnation is focused on serving as a Wayland compositor and abstraction layer.

More Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" code was merged this weekend into Coreboot as part of enabling this latest generation Intel server platform to enjoy this open-source system firmware solution when paired with the necessary Intel FSP binaries.

Apache CloudStack 4.18 LTS has been released as the newest version of this open-source cloud computing software that allows building out your own cloud atop various hypervisors and allows easy management for large networks of VMs.

Getting back on track for its new release rhythm, Intel today published the Compute-Runtime 23.05.25593.11 version along with the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.13230.7.

The open-source cURL project providing the widely-used curl CLI program for downloading of data across numerous network protoocols along with its associated library is celebrating 25 years of the project. As part of the celebrations, curl 8.0 was released today.

Dragonfly as what's a high performnace in-memory database compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has reached version 1.0.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc3 as the latest weekly test candidate for the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel that is slated to debut as stable toward the end of April.

Libreboot 20230319 has been released as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing only pure open-source firmware replacements to proprietary BIOS/UEFI platforms compared to all the blobs permitted in upstream Coreboot.

A change sent in this Sunday ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc3 release is a late addition adding a throttling mechanism to protect the hypervisor from potentially malicious AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) guests. The change is to protect the AMD Secure Processor from being potentially overloaded with requests by nefarious guest VMs.

Serpent OS as the new Linux distribution project by Solus Linux founder Ikey Doherty has made public its build infrastructure as it begins building more packages and opening up packaging work to outside contributors.

The third and potentially last release candidate of FreeBSD 13.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable 13.2-RELEASE around the end of March.

While Linux 6.3 adds AMD P-State EPP as the "Energy Performance Preference" mode for enhancing the power/performance on recent Ryzen and EPYC systems on Linux, with Linux 6.4 the P-State Guided Autonomous Mode is coming to round out AMD's current CPU frequency scaling driver efforts.

The focus of this new effort isn't to immediately rewrite the Xen virtualization hypervisor in Rust but to begin gradually working toward rewriting some of the smaller Xen Project components in the Rust programming language and to see how everything pans out.

A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

LLVM 16 was released on Friday night as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source compiler stack. From initial AMD Zen 4 support to bringing up new Intel CPU instruction sets and processor targets for their new processors being introduced through 2024, there is a lot of exciting hardware additions in LLVM 16.0. LLVM 16.0 is also notable for faster LLD linking, Zstd compressed debug sections, stabilizing of its LoongArch target, defaulting to C++17 for Clang, and much more. Here's a look at all the exciting changes of LLVM 16.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary that highlights all of the interesting desktop changes made over the course of the past seven days. This week he particularly calls out more Wayland fixes -- a common occurrence in the KDE camp.