Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

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.

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.

A code commit that was merged to LLVM's AMDGPU shader compiler back-end on Friday afternoon confirms that GFX11/RDNA3 GPUs can have a lot more vector registers than prior GFX10 (RDNA / RDNA2) GPUs.

Wine 7.18 has been popped this Friday afternoon as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source program to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Upstream LLVM has added the compiler CPU targets for the Apple M2, A15, and A16 SoCs.

The NTFS3 kernel driver providing read/write Microsoft NTFS file-system support on Linux, thanks to the code being open-sourced by Paragon Software, continues to see new improvements.

After the persistent work by developer Gert Wollny with a desire to improve the aging "R600g" driver that provides open-source OpenGL support for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards, this Gallium3D driver in Mesa 22.3 will now use the NIR back-end by default.

Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" has been one of the nice additions to the Linux kernel in recent years and can allow for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel. RSEQ has been in the process of being extended to provide even more performance benefits.

A final batch of drm-misc-next feature changes intended for the Linux 6.1 Linux kernel has been submitted to DRM-Next. This pull consists of some core DRM code improvements as well as updates to the smaller DRM/KMS drivers.

As part of getting their Vulkan ray-tracing support into good shape, a handful of patches were merged today for Mesa 22.3 in fixing up the ANV driver's ray query code.

From two weeks back you may recall the small patches that led to increasing Intel's Vulkan driver draw throughput by ~60%+. Well, as of yesterday the refined version of that work has landed within Mesa 22.3.

Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases.

Fwupd 1.8.5 is out today for continuing to improve the firmware updating experience on Linux systems in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

While Intel's Compute-Runtime stack is fully open-source and already provides OpenCL 3.0 support for recent generations of Intel graphics under Linux, it looks like the recently-merged "Rusticl" Rust OpenCL implementation in Mesa will soon be working too on Intel graphics hardware as an alternative OpenCL 3.0 implementation.

A Microsoft engineer has landed an improvement to the Mesa Gallium3D Video Acceleration "VA" state tracker that can allow for faster video processing times and greater GPU utilization.

Google engineers on Wednesday released AOM-AV1 3.5 as the newest version of their open-source AV1 video encoder. With AOM-AV1 3.5 comes yet more performance improvements as well as memory optimizations.

The first alpha release of the Debian Installer to be used by Debian 12 "Bookworm" is now available for early testing.

Turnip as the Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to support Vulkan 1.3.

Back in August I wrote about AMD developers looking at OpenGL threading by default for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. One month later that change has now landed for next quarter's Mesa 22.3 -- barring any issues coming up that would lead to it being reverted.

Microsoft and Canonical jointly announced today that systemd now works within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2).

GNOME 43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment used by Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distributions.

The Framework Laptop has proven to be very popular with enthusiasts thanks to its focus on the ability for users to make repairs and upgrades to their laptop. Google has even taken notice and they in cooperation with Framework Computer Inc have launched a Chromebook Edition laptop.

In addition to a ~10% performance boost seen yesterday for RADV ray-tracing performance with Quake II RTX, another merge request also made it to Mesa 22.3 for much more significantly bolstering the RADV ray-tracing performance. With all of the recent RADV ray-tracing work, we are finally reaching a point where it's becoming viable for Linux gamers on this open-source driver.

This past weekend was the GNU Tools Cauldron where Siemens presented a status update on the work around GPU accelerator offloading for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the work being done around OpenMP and OpenACC support.

Sound Open Firmware is what started as an open-source Intel effort to push towards more open sound/DSP firmware and has grown since that point into a Linux Foundation project also supported by other vendors like Mediatek, AMD, Realtek, and others. Sound Open Firmware 2.3 was released on Tuesday as the latest advancement for this open-source audio DSP firmware stack.

While Blender 3.2 introduced AMD HIP on Linux support for GPU acceleration and the recent Blender 3.3 extended the AMD GPU Cycles acceleration back to GFX9/Vega GPUs, for those wanting AMD ray-tracing support within Blender it's not expected to come until Blender 3.5.

The belated Mesa 22.2 was unexpectedly released today for providing the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver support not only for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics hardware but also the reverse-engineered Nouveau (NVIDIA) driver and the many smaller drivers like Etnaviv, Mali, Panfrost, the new PowerVR Vulkan driver, and the software drivers like LLVMpipe and Zink.

While not as exciting as this morning's GTC 2022 keynote and the introduction of the GeForce RTX 40 series, NVIDIA today released 515.76 as their latest production series Linux driver build.

Way back in 2019 Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat started the Bytecode Alliance as an initiative to promote running WebAssembly "everywhere" and expand the scope of WASM outside of the web browser. After being in development now for three years, Wasmtime 1.0 was released for this production-ready WebAssembly runtime.

Alongside the GeForce RTX 40 series debut and many other announcements today during the NVIDIA GTC 2022 keynote by Jensen Huang, CV-CUDA was announced as NVIDIA's newest open-source project.

Jensen Huang's GTC keynote is exciting as always and he just announced the GeForce RTX 40 series along with a host of other announcements for marking this week's NVIDIA event.

Four years ago System76 launched their Thelio line of Linux desktop computers that are built from scratch and wonderfully by them in their Colorado facility. Today the Linux-focused vendor is announcing their most significant overhaul of the Thelio desktop chassis design to date.

AMD is expected to announce their Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA 3" graphics cards on 3 November.

Out today is OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has landed a set of micro-optimizations to the open-source driver for benefiting Vulkan ray-tracing performance.

While a number of recent Firefox releases have been rather "boring" on the Linux front with not many notable changes, Firefox 105.0 is out this morning and this time around is a bit more significant.

Ampere Computing has provided a 160-core Ampere Altra server with 128GB of RAM to the OpenMandriva project to help in speeding up their AArch64 Linux packaging and development efforts.

AMD engineers today released AOMP 16.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler where they stage their latest development patches focused on Radeon GPU OpenMP offloading.

It's been two weeks since the release of LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 15.0 so per their rapid release rhythm, out today is LLVM 15.0.1 with the initial batch of fixes.