Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Arm ended out January by publishing an early request for comments (RFC) version of its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) support for the Linux kernel so there can be KVM virtualization integration around Arm CCA, a KVM user-space ABI for managing Realms, and Linux guest support for Arm Realms.

While the Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers were aiming for release this week, due to outstanding blocker bugs it has instead resulted in a fourth weekly release candidate.

Valve has just published their Steam Survey results for the month of January. Apple macOS has eaten a tiny bit of marketshare from Windows while on a percentage basis there is no change for Linux.

Google has released a new version of the Go programming language that with today's v1.20 release come a number of notable additions as well as gutting out support for older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Two features alone have me excited about Go 1.20: initial work on CPU architecture feature build flags like for x86_64 micro-architecture feature level handling and initial support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) builds.

Last week I wrote about Linux developers evaluating a new "DOITM" security mitigation for the latest Intel CPUs. While the cost for now of engaging the Data Operand Independent Timing Mode (DOITM) functionality is minimal, following internal Intel engineering discussions it looks like the Linux kernel patches will need to be re-worked with this functionality not intended to always be enabled.

Now that we are into February with AMD previously announced the month for learning more about their new Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache, this morning they revealed the firm availability dates and pricing.

As scheduled, version 2.37 of the GNU C Library "glibc" was released this morning.

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they've made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards.

The last batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.3 merge window. Notable with this week's changes are more low-level code improvements in preparation for future Intel graphics hardware platforms.

Now that Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" shipped and the initial Linux support is all aligned, recently there has been an uptick in activity around Emerald Rapids and even Granite Rapids as its successor along with the Sierra Forest support. On the EMR front, the latest Linux driver activity is extending the In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for additional testing capabilities.

An optimization to Mesa's shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam's shader pre-caching.

During the course of this month on Phoronix were 224 original news articles pertaining to Linux / open-source / hardware and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews.

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development.

While JPEG-XL image support has been available opt-in within Firefox Nightly builds for testing, Mozilla has finally weighed in on the JPEG-XL debate and has come out "neutral" on the matter for this modern raster image file format.

A new patch series published this week by AMD engineers is preparing Linux kernel support for Secure TSC, a feature found with SEV-SNP enabled processors since the EPYC 7003 "Milan" series.

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that was started originally as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics continues flourishing. A number of MSM driver additions -- including new Qualcomm platform support -- is ready to go with the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel.

AMDVLK 2023.Q1.1 is out today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver for 2023. Given the month and a half since the prior update, this AMDVLK update is rather significant with all of its changes.

As a new hardware feature for Intel IoT and server platforms not previously announced at large, Intel Timed I/O is being worked on in a new open-source Linux kernel driver.

A set of 24 Linux kernel patches today wire up the basic ACPI infrastructure support for the RISC-V processor architecture.

The Khronos Group with LunarG has now published the Vulkan SDK 1.3.239 release that is the first version of the software development kit with the Vulkan Video extensions now present.

Code merged last week to Mesa 23.1 by AMD ensures that a linear copy buffer is made on the display/scanout GPU when dealing with EGL contexts under Wayland or X11. This follows an optimization made last year to Mesa's GLX code within X.Org environments for enhancing the PRIME/multi-GPU support.

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging Linux 6.2-rc6 is a late "fix" for the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) code to avoid possible situations of undefined behavior with difficult to debug issues where a modern Linux host with SEV-SNP may try booting a Linux virtual machine with an outdated kernel.

Last week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on Fedora 38 shipping with its planned bleeding-edge compiler toolchain, most notably including the upcoming GCC 13 compiler.

Labwc that has been in development for a few years as a window-stacking Wayland compositor issued its latest release this weekend.

Unvanquished 0.54 was released overnight as the latest update across the array of many releases going back a decade for this open-source first person shooter game. With Unvanquished 0.54 there continues to be enhancements to its renderer, the project is now providing ARM binaries on Linux to complement their x86/x86_64 builds, user-interface improvements, and gameplay enhancements.

The long elusive GIMP 3.0 release that overhauls the UI and ports from GTK2 to GTK3 along with a wealth of other changes after being talked about for a decade could finally see its stable release this year.

Linus Torvalds just released the sixth weekly RC of Linux 6.2 and it's coming in unusually light.

Budgie 10.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source desktop environment that was originally developed as part of the Solus Linux distribution.

The Cairo graphics library that provides a vector graphics based API and in turn having a number of different back-ends for software/hardware acceleration, which in turn is used by a variety of different desktop applications, has removed its OpenGL support.

Coreboot 4.19 is now available as the latest tagged release for this prominent open-source project allowing various motherboards with their proprietary firmware/BIOS to be replaced by this free software solution.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver's implementation of the graphics pipeline library (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library) is becoming much faster thanks to fast-linking and various pending fixes. In turn this will get games making use of the extension the ability to ideally have no shader pre-caching while still enjoying no in-game stuttering. Valve's Linux graphics driver developers working on RADV have been working through some issues with the RADV graphics pipeline library and for Mesa 23.1 looks like it could be in good shape.

Building off the release of the Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software that released earlier this month, LibreELEC 11 Beta 1 is now available as a Linux distribution built around Kodi 20.

For fans of the RAGE 2 first person shooter game as the sequel to id Software's Rage game from nearly a decade ago, the latest Mesa Git code has landed a fix courtesy of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers to correct the rendering.

MPV 0.35.1 is out this weekend as the latest update to this open-source media player developed as a fork originally from MPlayer/mplayer2.

Published back in November were a set of patches for allowing (e)BPF to extend the Linux kernel's scheduler. That interesting work is continuing with Friday having brought a second revision to the patches.

Along with Intel's DRM-Next material shifting to more bug fixing, AMD's AMDGPU/AMDKFD Direct Rendering Manager driver changes this week have shifted over to delivering more graphics driver fixes.

With LibreOffice 7.5 due out next week and that code already having been branched, in the LibreOffice mainline code this week they have dropped support for some old targets.

With Plasma 5.27 set to be the last Plasma 5 feature release in the series, KDE developers have been very busy trying to ensure that this desktop update will ship with minimal issues. There's been a ton of bug fixing to land this past week for Plasma 5.27, especially when it comes to the Plasma Wayland support.

Following the LLVM 16.0 feature freeze and code branching earlier this week, LLVM 16.0.0-rc1 is now available as the first of at least three planned release candidates.