Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Eric Engestrom has delivered another on-time release of a Mesa stable point release. Out today is Mesa 23.1.2 for delivering the latest stable bug fixes for this collection of open-source graphics driver components commonly used on Linux systems.

Since June of last year shortly after Intel announced the Gaudi 2 AI accelerator they began posting the open-source driver patches for Gaudi 2 with the mainline Habana Labs driver. That support landed in Linux 6.0 and since then they've continued refining that support for this new processor support for deep learning training and inference workloads.

Building off the huge Godot 4.0 release from March, the first beta of the Godot 4.1 game engine is now available for testing as another step forward for this open-source, cross-platform game engine.

In addition to Apple revealing this week support is coming for the JPEG-XL image format in their Safari web browser, another step forward for this royalty-free image codec is FFmpeg now able to decode animated JPEG-XL files.

Overnight another 25 patches were merged to Mesa 23.2 for improving RADV's ray-tracing code after the merge request had been in the works for the past two months.

The libei 1.0 project milestone has now been achieved for this open-source effort started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer for better emulated input support on Wayland.

Mesa 23.1's RADV driver added initial support for Vulkan Video with select video formats while now a set of patches have been merged to Mesa 23.2-devel for making the H.265 (HEVC) decoding more robust.

Back in March the AMD Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 finished transitioning to HIP for using AMD's HIP C++ interface rather than OpenCL for newer Radeon GPUs. Following that, the Radeon ProRender plug-ins have also now finished being converted over to using HIP on AMD Radeon Vega (GFX9) GPUs and newer.

For over two years Intel open-source engineers have been working on preparing the Linux kernel for UEFI unaccepted memory support and it looks like that will cross the finish line with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

Following yesterday's news of OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 working on the open-source driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics with Asahi Linux using their "edge" channel, those patches to the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver have now worked their way into the upstream Mesa 23.2 codebase.

SUSE engineer Nikolay Borisov sent out a set of patches today for "ia32_disabled" that would allow disabling of support for x86 32-bit processes from running on x86_64 Linux systems. As a first step this would be a boot-time option when "ia32_disabled" is set.

For those using openSUSE Leap as the rock-solid, time-tested alternative to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, today marks the availability of openSUSE Leap 15.5 as another incremental upgrade to the Leap 15 series.

Queued via drm-misc-next and now on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle is support in the VirtIO GPU DRM driver for the synchronization object user-space API. This is important for Vulkan and is working with the Venus/Virgl driver context as well as Intel/AMDGPU/Freedreno native contexts too.

Neural Magic's DeepSparse AI inference runtime continues to pursue "GPU-class performance on CPUs" and with the new DeepSparse 1.5 release is delivering even faster performance for CPU inference.

OpenZFS 2.1.12 is now available as the latest version of this out-of-tree ZFS file-system kernel driver that works on Linux now with the latest 6.3 kernel stable series all the way back to the v3.10 kernel. Plus OpenZFS 2.1.12 also works on FreeBSD 12.2 and newer.

Last month Steam on Linux aimed to enable NVIDIA GPU video hardware acceleration by default but ultimately ran into problems. With Tuesday's Steam beta update they hope to have that resolved and re-enabled the NVIDIA GPU video hardware acceleration by default.

A recent Intel open-source project that went under my radar until now (and seemingly many others) is Intel One Mono, a new font catering to developers.

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is set to add support for some new hardware to AMD's decade-old cryptographic co-processor (CCP) driver.

Intel today announced the Arc Pro A60 graphics card and the A60M as the mobile variant of this new faster class of Arc Pro Graphics.

Experimental driver code available via the Asahi Linux "edge" packages allow for OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 to be exposed for Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs under this Arch Linux based OS.

The soon-to-be-released openSUSE Leap 15.5 was going to be the last of the openSUSE Leap 15 series, but now openSUSE/SUSE has decided there will be an openSUSE Leap 15.6 release to allow additional time for their Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) to be developed.

Dav1d 1.2.1 was released and while the version number may not be significant, it does have some useful performance optimizations and other tuning for this CPU-based open-source AV1 video decoder.

A few new AMD heterogeneous system patches have been queued via TIP.git ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window. These newest AMD Linux patches are focused on proper heterogeneous system enumeration for AMD data center systems sporting the Instinct MI200 and newer accelerators.

David Airlie has managed to hack together task/mesh shader support inside Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation inside Mesa.

Given all the hype recently around generative AI, the Qt Group has begun exploring ways of incorporating generative AI into Qt.

Today marks nineteen years since I started Phoronix.com for covering the Linux hardware space. It's been a wild ride from the days of 56K modems, graphics driver pains, and having to use NDISWrapper for WiFi device driver support on Linux, among many other Linux hardware pains in the early days. These days the open-source GPU driver scene is far better off, Linux hardware support overall is great, companies continue investing massively into Linux/open-source thanks to the success in the server space over the past two decades, and the Steam Deck has proven to be one of the most interesting Linux-powered consumer devices in recent years.

In addition to announcing the Apple Vision Pro AR headset, a 15-inch MacBook Air, and other new hardware, Apple lifted the lid on the M2 Ultra SoC. The Apple M2 Ultra is impressive from the technical specs and hopefully won't be too long before it begins working under Linux.

As a win for AMD Ryzen Linux systems for greater performance and power efficiency, AMD is ready to set their P-State driver's default operation mode to be the recently merged "active" mode for Ryzen laptops and desktops.

Due to not having sent in any feature pull requests to DRM-Next in prior weeks due to a miscommunication, sent out today was a bit set of Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver changes targeting this next kernel cycle.

Following last week's release of Chrome 114, Mozilla developers today uploaded the release binaries for Firefox 114 ahead of tomorrow's official announcement.

Codeplay Software, which was acquired by Intel last June, has an exciting announcement to make today in the form of the oneAPI Construction Kit. This open-source project aims to help ease bringing up SYCL on new processor/accelerator architectures, particularly around HPC and AI. The oneAPI Construction Kit also has a reference implementation for RISC-V.

Last month Linux's sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai published a set of Linux driver patches for MIDI 2.0 support for the USB Audio and Raw MIDI drivers. That roughly six thousand lines of new code for the MIDI 2.0 driver coverage is now expected to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

For those running HP or HP-Compaq business-class systems whether they be desktops or laptops, improved hardware sensor reporting is expected for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel thanks to a new HP WMI Sensors driver set to be mainlined.

The open-source uutils project that is striving to be a drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils but written within the Rust programming language is out today with a new feature update.

For fans of the lightweight IceWM X11 window manager, released on Sunday was IceWM 3.4 as the newest feature release.

Debian 12 remains on track for releasing next week even with around 100 known RC bugs that likely won't be resolved pre-release. The Debian release team says overall things are on-track.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc5 as the latest weekly test candidate for Linux 6.4 and this kernel version is looking to be in good shape for a likely release in late June.

The LLVM Fortran compiler "Flang" has begun seeing NVIDIA CUDA support land in the upstream code-base.

The ACO "Amd COmpiler" started by Valve for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has shown it can do wonders for Linux gaming performance and reducing game load times compared to AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. Recently thanks to the work of Qiang Yu there has been much work hitting upstream Mesa for beginning to enable using the ACO compiler by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

With Chrome 114 is the start of Google beginning to roll-out Maglev as their new mid-tier compiler for further enhancing the JavaScript browser performance.

A new set of patches this weekend begin laying the groundwork for Rust abstractions for Linux network device drivers so that Rust code can be used for constructing new network device drivers. The patches also include a dummy Rust network driver.

One of the most interesting aspects of the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptop processors is the new "Ryzen AI" capabilities with the new XDNA AI engine capabilities built into the SoC, leveraging IP from their Xilinx acquisition. Linux support details remain scarce but at least one of their (Windows) demos for showcasing Ryzen AI is open-source.

On Friday a big set of patches affecting the AMDGPU/Radeon/AMDKFD kernel drivers were submitted for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window opens in the coming weeks. A lot of new feature code is part of this pull for benefiting new hardware, continuing to refine AMD GPU power management under Linux, and more.

With Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP for better securing virtual machines on the mainline Linux kernel, memory is accepted/initialized immediately at boot time by the VMs although the capability exists to have "unaccepted memory" where that memory is only dealt with by the VMs later on or on an as-needed basis. For two years now Intel engineers have been working on this unaccepted memory support and this week posted their thirteenth iteration of these fundamental Linux kernel patches.

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" began as an open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation that has become quite a comprehensive implementation over the years. But in leveraging the LLVM/Clang compiler stack, over time PoCL has grown beyond just a CPU implementation to also support OpenCL execution on NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA-capable GPUs, and more. The latest now coming with PoCL 4.0 is support for Intel Level Zero execution for running this OpenCL implementation over Intel Arc Graphics GPUs.

Serpent OS started out as a new Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty, the same developer that rose to fame for starting the Solus Linux distribution prior to a hiatus. Serpent OS was getting off the ground when the surprise full-circle announcement came in April that Solus Linux would build off Serpent OS.

KDE developer Nate Graham began his weekly development recap by noting that Plasma 6.0 development continues and its stability is improving daily as well as seeing new features.