Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

While the Steam on Linux marketshare has been consistently increasing this year since the launch of the Arch Linux powered Steam Deck, the September 2022 numbers are in and surprisingly there is a slight pull-back in Linux use.

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit.

It's happening, folks! Linus Torvalds already indicated recently he intends to pull the initial Rust programming language support into the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle and today that pull request was submitted to him. Linux 6.0 isn't out yet but should be on Sunday unless any last minute problems, which in turn will mark the start of the two week v6.1 merge window.

In addition to Ubuntu 22.10 switching to PipeWire as the default audio server replacement to PulseAudio, upstream Debian has done the same ahead of their Debian GNU/Linux 12 release next year.

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers this week sent out their latest patch series working on workload hints that are used for dynamically tuning the power profile of AMD GPU SoCs based upon the specified workload indicator.

For those with an AMD APU system like the Steam Deck and using the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" and wanting to enjoy the popular game Red Dead Redemption 2, an important fix has been merged for Mesa 22.3.

Well known Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz, working for Valve on improving Mesa's OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, has kicked off October by removing a lot of old Mesa code.

It was a very exciting September with the launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, Intel revealing a lot more about Arc Graphics, Linux 6.0 getting buttoned up while feature work toward Linux 6.1 accelerated, ongoing exciting kernel work around MGLRU / IO_uring / RT / etc, and other software releases like GNOME 43 and LLVM 15 all made for an eventful month.

Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2.

While some Linux enthusiasts eagerly recommend users boot their systems with the "mitigations=off" kernel parameter for run-time disabling of various relevant CPU security mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, TAA, Retbleed, and friends, with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processors while still needing some software mitigations, it's surprisingly faster for the most part leaving the relevant mitigations enabled.

Currently Linux's Logitech HID++ driver "hid-logitech-hidpp" relies on a static list of device quirks for indicating which Logitech mice support high resolution scrolling. With the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel, the plan is to change that list of devices/quirks and to automatically determine if a device supports high resolution scrolling.

Linux 6.0 should be released as stable on Sunday unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. AMD has sent in a last minute set of patches for their AMDGPU kernel driver with Linux 6.0 for dealing with what appear to be the upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards.

This week was word of the Intel Arc Graphics A770 launching for $329+ on 12 October, yesterday was the embargo lift on the Arc Graphics A750 also shipping on 12 Ocrober for $289+, and now today is another embargo lift concerning Intel Arc Graphics...

The Ubuntu-based Linux Mint operating system has been working to enhance its Driver Manager utility for dealing with proprietary and other out-of-tree kernel hardware drivers.

Recently the open-source AMD OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" enabled OpenGL threading by default for the "glthread" option that has long been opt-in on a per-game/app basis. Along with that has been a number of glthread-related improvements to this code that punts executing OpenGL calls to a separate CPU thread. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has now unconditionally enabled OpenGL threading too.

Microsoft engineers continue working on improving their Direct3D 12 driver within Mesa for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) usage and similar.

On Thursday night Canonical released the beta of next month's Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" Linux distribution update.

Cloud-Hypervisor as what started as an open-source project by Intel and now run under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a Rust-based, modern-focused hypervisor for cloud workloads keeps on advancing. In addition to Intel, Microsoft and Arm continue investing significant resources into Cloud-Hypervisor for this security-focused VMM for running Windows and Linux guests.

Prior to ending out the third quarter, AMD's graphics driver team has released AMDVLK 2022.Q3.5 as their newest open-source Vulkan Linux driver update.

Earlier this week at the Intel Innovation event it was announced the Arc Graphics A770 would be launching 12 October and the base model costing $329 USD. Today the embargo lifts on more details around Intel's forthcoming higher-end Arc Graphics hardware.

Back in 2019 Google announced Stadia as their cloud gaming service using Linux, embracing Vulkan, and leveraging AMD graphics. While promising at first, it's been dwindling down and Google announced today they are in the process of shutting down this streaming service.

Just as a friendly reminder the Phoronix Premium sale is ending this weekend as our autumn "Oktoberfest" special for supporting the site and enjoying the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page, among other benefits.

It was just yesterday that reverse-engineering, open-source driver developer Asahi Lina got the display output working and running Wayland's Weston. After a long day hacking away on this first Rust-written Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, the GNOME desktop is even running off this Apple M1 graphics driver as well as applications like Firefox complete with YouTube.

The Qt Company this morning released Qt 6.4 as their newest half-year update to this popular open-source and cross-platform toolkit.

Following LLVM adding Zstd compressed ELF debug sections support, GCC 13 in conjunction with newer Binutils has also introduced support for Zstd-compressed debug sections.

This week's Vulkan spec update is on the larger side with six new extensions being introduced.

The proposal for accelerating GnuTLS with kernel TLS has been approved for Fedora 38 that will debut next spring.

A new feature being worked on for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is the ability to atomically replace files.

The second day of the Intel Innovation event in San Jose featured Intel CTO Greg Lavender talking up the greatness of open standards, open-source, and their wonderful oneAPI initiative. There were a few bits of oneAPI news as part of today's keynote.

One of the new drivers set to make its debut with Linux 6.1 is the AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" with an intent on "making AMD PCs smarter, quieter, power efficient by adapting to user behavior and environment" with next-generation hardware. Another part of AMD PMF, the Cool and Quiet Framework (CnQF) has also been queued up for introduction in Linux 6.1.

Last week the Rust-written Apple Direct Rendering manager (DRM) Linux driver for supporting Apple M1/M2 graphics managed to rendered its first cube. Asahi Linux contributor Asahi Lina today is back at it and working on getting more of this experimental kernel driver working for the Linux desktop.

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel's Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has finally exposed the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware.

The GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain infrastructure has long been hosted by Sourceware.org that has been sponsored by Red Hat the past two decades. But now the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure (GTI) project is being established as it works to leverage the Linux Foundation's IT services to provide more robust and secure infrastructure for these critical open-source projects.

For Fedora Linux users currently making use of Mesa's VA-API support with the open-source AMD graphics driver or similar and using it to speed-up H.264, H.265, or VC1 decoding, you may soon be out of luck and will have to fall-back to either using CPU-based decoding or be relying on an unofficial/third-party Mesa build.

Aligned with Intel's Innovation event happening this week in San Jose, Intel on Tuesday released oneDNN 2.7 as the newest version of their deep neural network library. In addition to optimizing support for new Intel hardware, oneDNN 2.7 also has AMD GPU support.