Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.

Armbian 22.11 is now available as the Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distribution popular with ARM development boards and supporting a wide range of hardware from different vendors.

Released this morning is Intel IGC 1.0.12504.5 for Linux and Windows systems as the newest version of the open-source Intel Graphics Compiler. As the first tagged update in nearly two months, IGC 1.0.12504.5 is a big one.

PoCL 3.1 is out today as the newest feature update to the "Portable Computing Language" that is effectively a portable OpenCL implementation that originally began focused on being a CPU-based implementation of OpenCL and has grown to support additional back-end drivers via LLVM for targeting NVIDIA CUDA, an experimental Vulkan driver, and other accelerator targets.

Last month I wrote about Intel having worked on USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect handling for the Linux kernel and those patches are indeed primed to be introduced next week with the Linux 6.2 merge window.

As we get ready to enter 2023, the Linux kernel's floppy disk driver is still being maintained.

While X.Org Katamari releases are no longer being organized to bundle up all of the different X11 software components behind one version number and some X.Org software pieces are seeing very seldom updates every number of years, this past week has seen twenty new X.Org software releases.

There isn't too much interest in Solaris these days and the once vibrant open-source (Open)Solaris community is a small fraction of its past, but OpenIndiana Hipster continues pushing forward as the operating system forked from OpenSolaris and now serves as a distribution derived from the Illumos code-base.

As was expected following an uptick in kernel patches mid-to-late in the cycle, Linus Torvalds today opted to issue Linux 6.1-rc8 rather than going straight to the stable release for Linux 6.1, which is also expected to serve as this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel.

Ahead of the Linux 6.1-rc8 kernel that Linus Torvalds is expected to issue shortly rather than going straight to Linux 6.1 stable, a revert for a small change leading to "huge performance regressions" in select areas has fortunately been caught and reverted.

A new release of Polychromatic is now available, the open-source GUI front-end for managing Razer devices on Linux by way of the community-managed OpenRazer drivers.

Thanks to the ongoing work led by Intel's Linux engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel will feature more feature work around enabling Compute Express Link (CXL) functionality.

The newest Apache software project hitting the version 1.0 milestone is the Apache IoTDB as a time-series database focused on serving as a database to the Internet of Things (IoT).

With SDL 3.0 in development and it taking a more modern focus and doing away with various pieces of old code, one of the latest chunks of code being retired is the OpenGL ES 1.0 2D render path.

CUPS print server lead developer Michael Sweet has announced the release of PAPPL 1.3, his printer application framework to help in developing CUPS Printer Applications as replacements to conventional printer drivers.

Intel's oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" is preparing to embark on its v3.0 release that improves performance not only for current and upcoming Intel hardware but also furthers along the NVIDIA and AMD support too.

It's been an exciting start to December in the KDE world.

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.