Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.

The pid_max tunable for the maximum number of process IDs allowed simultaneously was increased by default back in 2019 with systemd. But that increase breaks a long held assumption by some user-space software that pid_max or the process ID would not be greater than 65,535. To now better workaround such outdated user-space software, a set of patches for the Linux 6.14 kernel will allow adjusting the pid_max limit on a per PID namespace basis to help cope with such software hitting such artificial limits and without having to lower the overall system limit.

Ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable kernel expected to be released later today, there is a last minute fix for the EEVDF CPU scheduler.

Following the release a few days ago of GNU Coreutils 9.6, the Rust Coreutils "uutils" project as a re-implementation of these core utilities within the Rust programming language is out with a fresh update.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been sent out in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening.

The VFS mount pull request was sent out today in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening. One of the changes here is adding a new mountinfo program to the Linux kernel source tree.

Thanks to Valve, another Xbox 360-compatible game controller will see support with the upstream XPad input driver with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.

Christian Brauner of Microsoft began sending out his various pull requests today of new material for the Linux 6.14 kernel in advance of the merge window expected to open next week. One of the interesting pull requests is carrying the work of Omar Sandoval for faster /proc/kcore reads that can help with debugger performance.

GDB 16.1 was tagged today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for helping debug a variety of programming languages on numerous different CPU architectures and platforms.

An interesting open-source announcement out of Intel this week is that they have open-sourced their P4 software for their line of Tofino programmable Ethernet switches.

It was a busy week in the GNOME space with many packages checking in their "48.alpha" releases for the GNOME 48 Alpha milestone. Plus there has been some additional exciting GNOME developments for the week.

Technical BSD conferences aren't quite as common as the many Linux conferences these days. For the BSD conferences that do happen they tend to be more general in nature than carrying a desktop focus. But being announced this week was GhostBSDCon 2025 as a forthcoming developer conference largely focused on desktop use of this FreeBSD-derived distribution.

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta, there's been a lot of bug fixing happening ahead of the stable release due out next month for this open-source desktop.

Wine 10.0 is working its way to a stable release within the next week or two while for today there is the sixth weekly release candidate.

GNU Coreutils 9.6 released today as the updated version of these core utilities common to Linux systems and elsewhere.

Linux 6.13 is bringing many exciting features for its stable debut expected this Sunday. But following that it's onward to the Linux 6.14 kernel merge window for which it will be yet another very exciting round from completing the NTSYNC driver to adding new hardware support and much more. Here is a preview of some of the changes expected to be submitted for the Linux 6.14 cycle.

Vulkan 1.4.305 has been published as the newest version of the Vulkan API specification for high performance graphics and compute.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is poised to introduce initial support for SpacemiT platforms, the Chinese computing chip company developing "next-generation RISC-V high-performance CPUs." For this next Linux kernel release the SpaceMiT Key Stone K1 octa-core RISC-V AI CPU with SpacemiT X60 cores will see support.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 is out today with the official release of this updated open-source office suite coming in just about two weeks.

Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers.

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems.

At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week.

Back in 2022 the PCI Express 7.0 specification was announced with hitting 128 GT/s and planned availability in 2025. Since then they have been iterating on the spec with PCI-SIG members and today they announced the PCI Express 7.0 v0.7 specification.

With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here's a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025.

An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light.

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors.

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues.

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64.

A change proposal filed today for the in-development Fedora 42 is looking at making use of the EROFS file-system for all of the live media images.

George Hotz' Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a "completely sovereign" software stack for GPU compute on AMD.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is poised to introduce support for Intel THC... The Touch Host Controller IP block found in the PCH of modern Intel laptops for dealing with touchscreen, touchpads, and similar functionality.

An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital.

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code.

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling.

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests.

Libvirt 11.0 was christened today as the newest version of this open-source Virtualization API for managing VMs on Linux and other platforms while supporting KVM, QEMU, Xen, VMware ESX, LXC, Bhyve, and other hypervisors.

In development for several years has been LACT as a Linux GPU Control Application to allow adjusting various GPU/driver settings via a convenient graphical application. AMD and NVIDIA graphics have been supported to date while now Intel graphics are also supported with the brand new LACT 0.7.