Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

This Friday is the planned Git packaging migration for the Arch Linux distribution that will see some repository splits as well as discontinuing SVN access.

The PXP project has been an interesting language effort in recent times that aims to become a superset of PHP with additional syntax options and greater run-time capabilities. PXP 0.0.1 was released yesterday as the first very early, pre-production release for this open-source project.

Libproxy as the open-source library providing automatic proxy configuration management on Linux, Windows, and macOS systems has seen a big update thanks to an unlikely contributor.

One of the great longtime features of Ubuntu Linux has been Launchpad's Personal Package Archives (PPAs) for easily augmenting the official Ubuntu repositories with additional packages either to supply updated versions of select software or for software not yet found in the official Ubuntu archives. With Ubuntu 23.10 a change is being made in how PPAs are managed to enhance the security and reliability.

Ahead of Debian 12.0 releasing in June, a third release candidate of the Debian 12 "Bookworm" installer has been released.

With LLVM Clang's C++23 support coming together and the -std=c++23 option now exposed, LLVM Clang 17 Git has already added its initial options for specifying what will be C++26 / C++2C support.

Following the SFC vote last year for accepting Sourceware.org into the conservancy, everything is all set now and Sourceware.org is now officially part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Red Hat was traditionally the long-time sponsor of Sourceware.org that hosts many open-source projects like GCC and Cygwin.

A new release of TornadoVM is now available, the open-source plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM to allow for Java code to run on heterogeneous hardware with ease -- including various GPU models as well as FPGAs.

The AMD EDAC Linux driver for Error Detection And Correction of AMD x86_64 CPU/memory errors is now being extended for handling AMD data center GPUs like the Instinct MI200 series and newer where any error reporting/correction information can now be propagated to this existing driver.

Coreboot 4.20 has been released as the newest feature release for this project continuing to provide open-source system firmware/BIOS for Chromebooks, servers, and a range of laptops and desktops.

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the small but useful VK_EXT_tooling_info extension.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.8 is the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend that carries hundreds of extra patches atop this open-source software for leveraging Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.4 cycle.

In addition to Microsoft having a significant present at last week's Linux Security Summit, there were also multiple Microsoft engineers at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit that was also taking place in Vancouver. Among the Microsoft Linux talks this week was a presentation on the Linux kernel usage by WSL2 -- including how it's moving closer to a mainline/upstream status and also mentions of Linux kernel features loved by Microsoft's engineering team.

Sent out this morning were the x86/urgent patches for the Linux 6.4-rc2 kernel due for release later today. With the x86/urgent changes this week are just two AMD patches in preparing the kernel for Family 19h Model 78h processors.

As part of the Red Hat layoffs announced in April with around a 4% reduction in headcount for the IBM-owneed company, one of the surprising casualties from that round of cost-cutting is the Fedora Program Manager.

Tellusim as the company known so far for its GravityMark benchmark and being started by Alexander Zapryagaev who was a Unigine Corp co-founder has now launched the Tellusim Core SDK as a new cross-platform, commercial engine.

A status update was posted this week around xfwm4-wayland with the Xfce Wayland compositor code.

GNU Shepherd 0.10 is out today as the latest release for this GNU-backed service manager and init system that is written in Guile.

This week alongside several other Linux Foundation events in Vancouver was the Linux Security Summit. Commanding a significant presence at the Linux Security Summit was Microsoft.

Following yesterday's release of Fwupd 1.8.15, Fwupd 1.9.1 is now available as the latest release of this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.

Well, this is a bit strange... Intel just published Friday afternoon CPU microcode updates for all supported processor families back to Coffee Lake "Gen 8" for undisclosed security updates.

Wine 8.8 is out as another bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, Chrome OS, and other platforms.

Back in February was a patch series proposed retiring the Intel Itanium (IA-64) architecture support from the Linux kernel. That removal has yet to take place in Linux Git but it's still being talked about and user-space developers are also eager as it would mean being able to clear out Itanium user-space code too.

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 1.8.15 with fixes and allowing some additional devices to now enjoy firmware updating under Linux.

One of the fascinating elements of Intel's oneAPI software effort is how open they have been not to just supporting GPUs from multiple vendors or AMD CPUs too, but cross-CPU architecture support. Many Intel oneAPI components end up working on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and even IBM POWER. The latest Intel software package seeing 64-bit ARM Linux support is their Embree ray-tracing kernels.

While the past week saw many KDE developers get together for a Plasma 6.0 development sprint in Bavaria, the development pace for code changes during this time period didn't lighten up. There still was a lot of code being committed for continuing to advance this open-source desktop environment.

DXVK 2.2 is now available as a big update to this open-source software for mapping the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs to Vulkan and the first major release since DXVK 2.1 shipped back in January.

Last month NVIDIA published RTX-Remix v0.1 for bringing path tracing to classic games. Out today is RTX-Remix v0.2 with more improvements to this tech plus they have now open-sourced the RTX Runtime Bridge as well.

The LibreOffice 7.6 Alpha build is now available for testing this next major feature release for this open-source, cross-platform free software office suite.

With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the SLOB allocator is removed while next the plan is for the deprecation and eventual removal of the SLAB allocator.

Today was the big reveal of ASUS' ROG Ally with the specifications and pricing in full for this new gaming handheld that will be shipping on 13 June.

The folks at System76 have published a new blog post that summarizes their software progress over the course of April on further advancing their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment.

The ISC DHCP software was marked end-of-life at the end of 2022 and thus Ubuntu Linux developers have been deciding on a new isc-dhcp-client package replacement to use by default.

Since Linux 5.18 there has been Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) in the mainline kernel that was contributed by Intel as part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). For Linux 6.4 Intel engineers tried to get the Shadow Stack support mainlined as the other part of CET, but issues were uncovered at the last minute. Hopefully Shadow Stack support will be merged for the v6.5 cycle but beyond that host support, Intel engineers have also been working on CET virtualization for enabling these security features for use within virtual machines.

An initial batch of DRM-Misc-Next patches targeting the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer were sent today to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of that next merge window.

Following the recent Plasma 6 developer sprint in Bavaria is an update on the achievements from that KDE developer event. KDE developer Nate Graham published a blog post today that focuses on some of the default changes intended for Plasma 6.0, including hopes of being able to use the Wayland session by default.

AlmaLinux 9.2 is now available for this community-driven, freely-available alternative to upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2. The AlmaLinux crew managed to deliver this release just hours after Red Hat reached general availability on RHEL 9.2 and RHEL 8.8.