Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news.

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running.

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing.

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update.

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment.

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs.

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts.

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages.

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

GNOME 48 is moving along with the GNOME 48 Alpha packages due this weekend followed by the beta in early February. GNOME 48 is still making good progress in its goal to release on 19 March.

Sony engineers are proposing that the LLVM Clang compiler changes its default C++ mode from C++17 to C++20. This coincides with Sony planning to soon upgrade their PlayStation 5 compiler downstream to C++20 by default.

This week brought the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta as well as a number of last minute feature changes for this desktop update due for release in February.

Merged this Friday night for Mesa 25.0 is initial Vulkan Video AV1 decode support for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.

Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes.

Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit.

Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system.

Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors.

A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution.

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.

Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.

Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations.

Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.

After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.