Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

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.

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.

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.

NVIDIA on Tuesday released the 515.49.18 Linux beta driver and the 517.55 beta driver for Windows. Most notable with the Vulkan beta driver updates are revising the support for the latest Vulkan Video provisional extensions.

Yet more news from Intel's Innovation event taking place in San Jose is the initial SDK source code availability of the much anticipated Xe Super Sampling. XeSS is Intel's alternative to AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and NVIDIA DLSS.

Google this afternoon promoted Chrome 106 to their stable channel for Linux, ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows users of this web browser.

In addition to announcing 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, Intel also announced their Arc Graphics A770 flagship graphics card will be launching in just two weeks.

Monday saw the AMD Ryzen 7000 series review embargo lift and retail availability beginning today for those Zen 4 desktop CPUs. Intel meanwhile is using today -- the first day of their second annual Innovation event in San Jose -- to announce 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors for aiming to take AMD's Zen 4 head-on.

Intel at their Innovation conference confirmed that 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors will feature an optional "on demand" activation model.

Intel at their Innovation event this week in California is talking up the new Intel Developer Cloud. The Intel Developer Cloud aims to make it easier for customers/partners/developers to test new and future hardware platforms.

Miguel Ojeda who has led the work on the Rust programming language infrastructure support for the Linux kernel today posted the tenth version of these patches. It is these Rust v10 patches that are expected to be mainlined as soon as next week for the Linux 6.1 kernel merge window.

As further indication of MGLRU hopefully being mainlined for Linux 6.1 as planned, the Multi-Gen LRU patches have now been moved to Andrew Morton's mm-stable branch.

Last week I wrote about how Microsoft landed a VA-API improvement in Mesa to support faster Video Acceleration API encoding with FFmpeg. That code was initially only wired up for the Microsoft D3D12 driver within Mesa for WSL use-cases, but now AMD has taken advantage of the new capability for RadeonSI Gallium3D usage with their Radeon GPUs.

There have been some notable merges this week for Mesa 22.3, particularly as it concerns the open-source Radeon graphics driver code.

Pyston as what was born at Dropbox as a speedy open-source Python implementation is out with a new update as it continues to focus on maximizing performance. Dropbox ceased work on Pyston years ago while the developers continued and since last year joined Anaconda to continue their performant Python quest.

VKD3D 1.5 was recently tagged as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation used by Wine and originally an upstream to Valve's VKD3D-Proton. VKD3D 1.5 has been integrated into Wine Git ahead of next week's Wine 7.19 release.

Mold 1.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

This morning I called attention to some pending work around a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel had been hurting modern AMD systems by erroneously still applying the change to modern hardware. Fortunately, that patch has now been picked up by Linus Torvalds in time for the Linux 6.0 kernel expected for its stable debut next weekend.

Earlier this year it was shared that SUSE/openSUSE is developing the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" for next-generation SUSE Linux Enterprise. Coming out later this week is the first public preview of openSUSE ALP.

Nick Desaulniers with Google who has been known for his contributions around compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang has recently taken to the challenge of being able to compile the Linux kernel under macOS.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a ~20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems.

Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D as a newer and modern-focused CL alternative to the existing "Clover" code may soon see mainline support for working with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting modern AMD graphics processors.

Last week Linux 6.0-rc6 came in tiny due to many of the upstream kernel developers having been in Dublin for LPC 2022 and other events. Linus Torvalds had been fearing an uptick in activity this week as a result, but he's been pleasantly surprised that Linux 6.0-rc7 remains on the lighter side.

Queued up in the Btrfs for-next Git repository ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window is support for async buffered writes that can offer a more than two times throughput improvement.

Over the past year and a half of being on the Arch Linux install media, archinstall has made it dramatically quicker and easier to get this popular Linux distribution installed. Out today is Archinstall 2.5.1 with a number of fixes and other changes for this easy-to-use Arch Linux installer.

Two new HID drivers are set to premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window for car and flight simulators.

Earlier this year AMD-Xilinx announced a Linux-powered robotics starter kit making use of Xilinx's Kria KR26 SOM featuring a Zynq Ultrascale+ with four Cortex-A53 cores and Mali graphics. While robotics focused, there is a DisplayPort output and over the summer Canonical has been working to get this board playing nicely with a Wayland-powered GNOME desktop.

Linux kernel developer Ard Biesheuvel has been working on a patch series implementing EFI generic compressed boot support that can be easily used by architectures like AArch64, LoongArch, and RISC-V.

This week saw the Intel Habana Labs AI accelerator driver updates submitted to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window.

OpenJDK/Java has been making progress on implementing native "pure" Wayland toolkit integration not dependent upon X.Org/X11 or XWayland for rendering of Java GUI applications.

The very early stage Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver being written in the Rust programming language to support the Apple M1/M2 graphics processor achieved the milestone of being able to render a cube.

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support for Phoronix this autumn season and help in allowing me to continue Linux hardware testing and the like, the annual Phoronix Premium sale is currently taking place.

On Friday AMD submitted a feature pull request to DRM-Next of some last minute changes they would like to see as part of the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel.

Following last week's release of KDE Plasma 5.26 beta, KDE developers have turned their focus to bug-fixing ahead of next month's stable release.