Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD today published HIP Ray-Tracing 2.0 "HIP RT" as the newest version of their open-source ray-tracing library built for use with their latest-generation GPUs for leveraging hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Intel hosted an investor call this morning around their Data Center and AI business, including a Xeon roadmap update and more. Here are some of those highlights from this morning's call.

Blender 3.5 has been released as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source 3D modeling software. Blender 3.5 is another exciting update for this free software that has garnered significant industry interest and support.

In time for the new month to begin and in turn a new Arch Linux installer ISO, Archinstall 2.5.4 was just released as the newest version of this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux OS installer.

For over a decade now the X.Org Server has been seeing routine security disclosures in its massive codebase with some security researchers saying it's even worse than it looks and security researchers frequently finding multiple vulnerabilities at a time in the large and aging code-base that these days rarely sees new feature work. Today another disclosure was made by the folks with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

Qt Creator 10 has been released as the newest version of this open-source C++ and Qt focused integrated development environment provided by The Qt Company.

Merged to Mesa 23.1-devel yesterday was UMD metadata v2 support for the RADV and RadeonSI drivers to provide extra metadata that can be optionally enabled to help with Radeon GPU debugging.

The upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for a number of Kye drawing tablets, which are also marketed as Genius tablets.

Days after landing AV1 and HEVC streaming support over RTMP to allow game streamers and other livecasting with OBS Studio to YouTube to happen via AV1/HEVC as an alternative to H.264, OBS Studio 29.1 Beta 1 has been tagged.

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat released Fwupd 1.8.13 as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware/BIOS updating solution for Linux and other platforms.

Since 2019 there has been Ubuntu Cinnamon as an unofficial remix of Ubuntu paired with Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. After the three years of progress, Ubuntu Cinnamon has now been granted an official status with next month's Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release.

AMD-Xilinx recently open-sourced their LLVM-based Nanotube compiler that can be used for some nifty networking purposes on FPGAs.

Version 2.18 of the VA-API library, libva, has been released today for this Linux Video Acceleration API library that is used by the various driver implementations.

Turtle Beach gaming controllers will see support by the widely-used XPad driver with the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel.

When SDL3 development kicked off last November for this open-source library that is widely used by cross-platform games and other software, QNX support was removed alongside other old targets. Just months later, the QNX platform support is being revived.

The Vulkan 1.3.245 extension is a small update to this industry-standard graphics/compute API with just a handful of issues resolved but it does introduce one new extension, which is a NVIDIA vendor extension aiming to further enhance Vulkan ray-tracing.

Intel has published v0.1 of its GPGMM software, the open-source General-Purpose GPU Memory Management Library. This library is intended to be used by modern software employing the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs for helping application developers deal with low-level video memory management.

A new release of OpenBLAS is now available, the open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its wide variety of processor optimizations.

Over the weekend I wrote about AMD beginning to post new graphics driver patches for a new GPU. As pointed out in that earlier article, it looks to be a new AMD Instinct MI300 / "Aldebaran" GPU model and today more patches were posted that further confirm this target.

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver.

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table.

Thanks to forthcoming work out of Red Hat, the Linux 6.4 Device Mapper (DM) code is expected to see some optimization work that can significantly benefit concurrent I/O performance... In one case at least acquiring buffers now about 25 times faster.

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title.

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.3-rc4 as we reach around the half-way point of the Linux 6.3 kernel's development cycle.

It's been one month since the release of Mesa 23.0 while it's finally been succeeded by Mesa 23.0.1 as the first point release containing a wide variety of bug fixes throughout this ecosystem of open-source 3D graphics drivers.

OpenMandriva ROME 23.03 has been released as the "rolling release" flavor of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the beautiful days of Mandrake Linux.

With the Linux 6.2 release kernel developers addressed "a tasty target for attackers" after it was realized that the per-CPU entry data was not being randomized, even in the presence of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The per-CPU entry area randomization has been present since Linux 6.3 but then was realized it's being activated even if KASLR was disabled, so now that is changing to avoid possible confusion.

Rob Clark on Saturday sent out a pull request adding the DMA-BUF/DMA-FENCE deadline awareness code to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Merged this weekend to the LLVM 17 development code-base is initial support for RISC-V's vector crypto extension ISA.

José Expósito announced the release this weekend of libinput 1.23, the input handling library used these days across the Linux desktop for both X.Org/X11 and Wayland based environments. With libinput 1.23 comes a few notable new features.

KDE developers remain quite busy working on Plasma 6.0 development along with preparing fixes for further Plasma 5.27 LTS point releases.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 is now available with a few more fixes for this BSD operating system update. A FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 release is also inbound as an extra release candidate with one more bug fix, after which the stable release should happen.

In addition to the mainline Linux kernel seeing recent support for the Arm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and Lenovo Yoga C630, among others, another Lenovo model working toward mainline kernel support is the Lenovo Flex 5G.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution that they make public, CBL-Mariner, began with a very niche focus while over time has continued adding additional packages as it is worked into becoming a more robust Linux platform.

MidnightBSD as the desktop-focused OS forked from FreeBSD and relying on the Xfce desktop environment by default is out with its big MidnightBSD 3.0 update.

AMD on Friday sent out new patches for enabling some new graphics IP "blocks" as part of their block-by-block enablement strategy they've been using to introduce new GPU support to their Linux graphics stack by focusing on smaller patch series with versioned parts of the GPU rather than big monolithic patch series with colorful fishy codenames.

The Intel XeSS SDK 1.0 release happened last September while now has been succeeded by XeSS SDK 1.1. Though like the prior release, the XeSS SDK isn't fully open-source with just the bits around game integration being public.

AMD has been teasing FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) as the latest version of their game upscaling tech that will be released later in the year. AMD began showing off FSR 3 to game developers this week at GDC while also re-affirming their open-source commitment.

Not to be confused with Valve's downstream, VKD3D-Proton, that is used by Steam Play but Wine's VKD3D codebase itself is out today with a new version of this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation.

Intel's open-source engineers continue to be quite busy working on their Meteor Lake enablement ahead of those initial mobile processors shipping later this year.

Sent out today were the latest AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches having the latest work done by AMD internally on this display/monitor portion of their driver code. Notable with this round of 19 patches is preparation work for upcoming eDP 1.5 laptop displays.