Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Since late 2020 there had been work by AMD Linux engineers on adding Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support to RadeonSI as the Gallium3D OpenGL driver and improved since that point in the name of performance. However, for this OpenGL driver now they've come to realize the benefits haven't necessarily panned out and the developers went ahead and disabled this SAM/ReBAR support followed by removing the support from this driver.

Back in December initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support was merged for the LLVM/Clang 16 compiler. While the "-march=znver4" targeting at least flips on the newly-added AVX-512 instructions with these AMD processors, it was re-using the existing scheduler model from Zen 3. Finally today a tuned Zen 4 scheduler model has landed for what will be found in the LLVM 17 compiler later this year.

Mesa 22.3.7 has been released as the last planned point release for that driver Q4'2022 driver series.

Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board.

Samba 4.18 is out today as the popular open-source implementation of the SMB networking protocol that allows for file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems in an Active Directory (AD) environment.

A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes.

In wanting to avoid waiting for pipes via the IOCB_NOWAIT option in order to further enhance IO_uring performance, Jens Axboe has implemented said functionality and in a simple test is seeing 10x to 23x performance improvements.

If you are an AMD Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" GPU owner and don't mind running bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code, you'll want to pull down today's Mesa 23.1-devel Git snapshot.

One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid.

Python 3.12 Alpha 6 was released on Tuesday as the newest development release toward this next major Python release.

Last month you may recall the news of Intel having an extremely fast AVX-512 sorting library they published as open-source and found adoption already by the popular Numpy Python library. In the case of Numpy it could deliver some 10~17x speed-ups. That header-only library has now reached version 1.0.

After being in development for several months, Asahi Lina with the Asahi Linux project has posted the initial Rust Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem abstractions for review as well as a preview of the experimental state of the AGX DRM driver providing the open-source kernel graphics driver support for Apple M1/M2 hardware.

In addition to Intel's Linux patches in recent days working on broad performance optimizations that can benefit all hardware there has also been some Intel-specific kernel improvements being worked on like the Sapphire Rapids C0.2 idle state support that was published for review on Monday. Also coming out from the covers on Monday was a new patch series for the "iaa_crypto" driver to improve the Linux support for Intel's In-Memory

The GNOME Shell and Mutter release candidates ahead of this month's GNOME 44 desktop update are now available for testing.

With the Linux 6.3-rc1 kernel now out and that closing the Linux 6.3 merge window, the open-source Linux graphics driver developers are turning their attention to feature work they want to accomplish for Linux 6.4 this summer. Already the first drm-misc-next pull request has been submitted to DRM-Next with some of those early changes that will target the v6.4 kernel.

For those that happen to have an ASRock B75M-ITX in their collection or have just been looking for an old Intel Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge era system that can run the open-source Coreboot firmware, this mini-ITX desktop motherboard can run upstream Coreboot with the latest changes made this week.

Posted today were a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling Sapphire Rapids C0.x idle states support, which can provide a nice bump to the energy efficiency of the latest-generation Xeon Scalable servers while also helping out with possible turbo boost benefits for the busy CPU cores to enhance overall system performance.

FEX-Emu 2303 was published today as the newest version of this open-source software for enjoying x86 64-bit Linux software to run gracefully on 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) including the likes of Linux games and Valve's Steam client with Steam Play (Proton).

Debian developers today released APT 2.6 as the newest version of this package manager that will ship as part of the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release.

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed recently began rolling out optional x86-64-v3 optimized packages for those on roughly Intel Haswell or newer systems and wanting to squeeze out maximum performance from their hardware. The selection of x86-64-v3 packages built by openSUSE Tumbleweed is currently rather limited, but hopefully this major Linux distribution joining the HWCAPS party will lead other Linux distributions to follow suit.

I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel.

The Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 graphics hardware has seen preliminary work merged into Mesa 23.1 for supporting compute shaders/kernels.

Last year AMD acquired Pensando in part for adding DPUs to their portfolio from this young company that only exited its stealth mode in 2019. While sadly it's missed out on the Linux 6.3 cycle, AMD-Pensando engineers continue work on upstreaming support for their "Elba" SoC into the mainline Linux kernel.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76.

LibreELEC 11 is out today as the newest version of this Linux distribution that is purpose-built for an HTPC-oriented experience powered by the recent Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software.

The merge window for Linux 6.3 is now over and Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc1.

On this last day of the Linux 6.3 kernel merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the patch dropping support for Intel (ICC) compiler support. Specifically this is Intel's long-standing ICC compiler now known as the "Intel C++ Compiler Classic" prior to its transition to being LLVM/Clang-based with the modern Intel DPC++ compiler.

Ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc1 release later today, a set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out Sunday morning that include the change to allow Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) to be used in the presence of legacy Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for security reasons.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.3 is a new release of Wine-Staging, the experimental/testing blend of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine-Staging 8.3 carries more than 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

While GNOME 3.32 saw initial work on fractional scaling support for the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor, the upcoming GNOME 44 release is bringing support for Wayland's fractional_scale_v1 protocol.

AMD in February quietly released version 1.1 of their in-development Unified Inference Front-end "UIF" that aims to be their catch-all solution for AI inference from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and other IP from their recent Xilinx acquisition.

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a set of patches to fix a glaring performance issue affecting Skylake/Gen9 era graphics with the cross-platform GravityMark benchmark.

Yesterday saw GNOME Shell and Mutter drop the last of their GTK3 dependence while today there is another interesting change to mention on the Mutter compositor side... An experimental option for enabling some HDR modes with supported high dynamic range displays.

This week KDE Plasma's development branched to Qt6-only and a lot of other development happenings around Plasma 6.0 occurred.

Wine 8.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Intel announced today it has cancelled Rialto Bridge and Lancaster Sound development while shifting its Max Series focus to their Falcon Shores XPU that is now set to ship in 2025.

The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3.

If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support.

There should be "slight improvements for I/O performance" coming to Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids servers on a future kernel release with a patch having surfaced to remove a check that led to these newer processors not seeing HWP I/O boosting enabled.

Merged last cycle was a big Zstd update for Linux 6.2 that took the kernel's Zstandard compression/decompression implementation to match that of upstream v1.5 after being stuck in the v1.4 series for more than a year. Following that, Zstd 1.5.4 was released last month. The hope was Zstd 1.5.4 would quickly follow into the mainline kernel while that is now delayed to Linux 6.4 and for the 6.3 kernel cycle seeing just a few fixes.

A set of patches sent out this morning lay out the initial foundation for RISC-V auto-vectorization support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).