Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel on Thursday sent out the initial Linux kernel patches for supporting the LKGS instruction coming with future processors.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst has managed to get his Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" running atop the Zink Gallium3D driver that in turn runs atop Vulkan drivers.

For the past nearly two years the CentOS Hyperscale effort has been working on adapting CentOS Stream to make it more applicable for use within large scale deployments like those at Twitter, Facebook/Meta, and other large companies. This week the special interest group published their latest quarterly report outlining their activities.

This shouldn't be particularly surprising but the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel will likely be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

The media subsystem updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel have landed with new drivers and promotions for some of the existing image/video drivers.

A change now merged for Linux 6.1 will attempt to print the CPU core where a segmentation fault happens. The hope by printing the CPU/core where a segmentation fault happens is that over time trends may materialize with this information potentially being useful for helping to spot faulty CPUs.

Valve has worked their way through the pre-orders and ramped up the production of the Steam Deck to the point that the reservation queue is over. You can now order your Steam Deck today in-stock and Valve has also made available the much anticipated Steam Deck Dock docking station.

The networking feature pull for the Linux 6.1 kernel brings 127k lines of new code and 50k lines of code removed as a rather hearty set of wired/wireless networking driver updates and core improvements this round.

One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic.

Merged last month into Mesa 22.3 was Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D that is beginning to work with the open-source Radeon Linux driver, the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver, and others. This is also the first Rust-written component within the Mesa code-base. Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has led Rusticl development presented this week in Minnesota on this promising cross-vendor OpenCL implementation that may also support SYCL in the future.

The Arm SoC and platform enablement pull requests were sent out this morning that provide the Linux 6.1 kernel with support for several new SoCs, various platforms including some newer smartphones, and other hardware support improvements.

There are patches that provide support for ZRAM to be able to handle multiple compression streams on a per-CPU basis. This kernel module for creating compressed block devices could be made more versatile with this proposed patch series.

In addition to the excitement of the Arc Graphics A750 and A770, Intel has unveiled oneVPL 2022.2 as the newest version of this open-source video processing library that is their flagship video decode/encode library and related video processing toolkit as part of oneAPI.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai on Wednesday submitted all of the sound driver updates for Linux 6.1.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window. As usual, much of the interesting display/graphics driver work is happening within the open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers.

Taking place at the end of September in Mölndal, Sweden was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2022). While the event has now passed, the group has begun publishing the video recordings from the various sessions and many of the presentation slide decks are also available.

The real-time "RT" mainlining effort for the Linux kernel remains ongoing. While the finish line is coming near, PREEMPT_RT support for mainline still isn't over the last hurdle -- seemingly the main blocker it's still held up by are the printk changes with threaded console printing. But for the Linux 6.1 merge window there is at least more kernel code clean-ups.

Canonical announced today the launch of free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five systems.

The x86/core changes for Linux 6.1 have been merged and are headlined by making sure an INT3 instruction is inserted after every unconditional Retpoline jump (JMP) for the Retpolines handling on both Intel and AMD processors.

The Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) changes for Linux 6.1 but with a documentation update does provide a good reminder for a public service announcement: run-time disabling of SELinux is deprecated and will be removed in the future.

Yesterday on the first day of the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022), Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team presented on the Vulkan mesh shader support being worked on for RADV.

Ted Ts'o has submitted the EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel.

Wireshark 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source network protocol analyzer.

After SUSE/openSUSE engineers began talking up the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" as their next-gen enterprise Linux focus, last week they talked up the imminent release of "Les Droites" as their first public ALP prototype. Today that prototype is now live.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates have been submitted and merged for the Linux 6.1 merge window of which there are a few notable additions on the Intel side.

RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google presented at today's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022) on the state of this open-source Mesa Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance.

Officially released today is Radeon ROCm 5.3 as the newest version of AMD's open-source compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware.

As written about for several months on Phoronix, an open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has been in the works that by the end of the summer this "NVK" driver has been seeing a lot of activity by Jason Ekstrand of Collabora along with David Airlie and Karol Herbst of Red Hat. Jason today talked at XDC 2022 about this NVK driver effort.

Intel laptop users running Linux are being advised to avoid running the latest Linux 5.19.12 stable kernel point release as it can potentially damage your display.

Back in 2019 IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat while today is a "quasi-acquisition" of sorts being announced with Red Hat's Storage team being transferred to the IBM Storage team.

I always love pull requests that start off with "there's a bunch of performance improvements..." as is the case with the new Btrfs feature pull for Linux 6.1.

OpenZFS 2.1.6 was released on Monday as the newest stable update of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and BSD platforms.

Researchers out of Boston University have been working on "Unikernel Linux" to explore application-specific optimizations to the Linux kernel.

NVIDIA has released CUDA 11.8 that enables support for their latest Hopper and Ada Lovelace families of GPUs.

The random number generator "RNG" and crypto subsystem pull requests have already been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window.

As a follow-up to the Rust infrastructure pull request for Linux 6.1, Linus Torvalds pulled the initial Rust code into the mainline Linux kernel this evening.

The ACPI, power management, and thermal subsystem pull requests have been sent in for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel.

Git 2.38 was released on Sunday and most notable with this feature release is the inclusion of scalar as a Microsoft-developed repository management tool to make it easier dealing with very large Git reposotories.

A kernel hardening security improvement on the way for Linux 6.1 is the ability to provide warning of possible memcpy() based overflows. Right now this is only a warning but it's work towards being able to address "trivially detectable" buffer overflow conditions within the kernel and in the future may be able to block such overflows from happening.

IceWM 3.0 was released today as the latest major update to this X11 window manager that has been development since the late 90's with a particular focus on simplicity and speed.

OpenMandriva ROME is a rolling-release version of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the days of Mandriva and before that Mandrake Linux. This rolling release flavor of OpenMandriva is now up to a "gold" candidate status.

There's been a lot happening in Debian recently from improving their handling of non-free firmware to switching to PipeWire and WirePlumber with Debian 12. Another change on the way is picking up Ubuntu's work on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop.

Among the early pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 6.1 merge window was the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates.

Mainlined back in 2017 was the statx() call for reporting enhanced file information and stats like finally reporting a file's creation time, data version numbers, and other attributes. Statx has continued evolving since its introduction in Linux 4.11 and now for Linux 6.1 is being expected to support reporting direct I/O alignment information.

Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 6.0 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-libre 6.0 as their downstream that removes driver support for loading binary firmware/microcode and the ability to load non-free-software kernel modules.

Linus Torvalds just promoted Linux 6.0 to stable on-schedule and thereby now ushering in the Linux 6.1 merge window to officially get underway tomorrow.

Linux 6.0 is bringing many great features but looking ahead for Linux 6.1 there are even more changes to get excited about for that kernel which will release as stable around the end of 2022.

Improving the mainline Linux kernel support for the PinePhone is a keyboard driver expected to land for the imminent Linux 6.1 merge window.

Along with the Rust infrastructure for Linux 6.1 pull request, another early pull submitted by kernel maintainer Kees Cook for Linux 6.1 is the introduction of a new Control Flow Integrity "CFI" implementation for the Linux kernel to replace the former, less-than-ideal code.

Barring any last minute reservations today by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.0 stable kernel is expected to be christened before the day is through. Linux 6.0 comes with many notable hardware support additions and other improvements, here is a reminder of all what is great about this imminent kernel release.

Debian developers have been figuring out an updated stance to take on non-free firmware considering the increasing number of devices now having open-source Linux drivers but requiring closed-source firmware for any level of functionality. The voting on the non-free firmware matter has now concluded and the votes tallied...

AMD on Friday upstreamed new Family 19h CPU microcode to linux-firmware.git.