Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

PHP 8.3 is out today as the latest major annual update to the PHP programming language.

It's been well over a decade since many were wanting open-source Imagination PowerVR graphics when their graphics IP was more common among SoCs, but with the Linux 6.8 kernel in early 2024 there will finally be an upstream, open-source PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver! But before getting your hopes too high, this is the effort that's only around the newer PowerVR graphics and not the prior generation hardware from many years ago.

OpenSSL 3.2 was released this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used cryptography and SSL/TLS project.

LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 was just tagged in Git as the first development snapshot toward this next major release of this open-source office software.

The Qt Company today released Qt Creator 12 as the latest major update to this C++ and Qt focused integrated development environment. Most significant with Qt Creator 12 is integrating the Compiler Explorer while there are also many smaller changes for this Qt/C++ optimized IDE.

The very convenient Archinstall for quickly deploying new Arch Linux installations with some level of defaults and making it effortless to setup an Arch Linux desktop is out with a new release.

The crew at System76 published a US Thanksgiving themed status update to their work on the open-source, Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment that will soon be powering their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

As a nice US Thanksgiving surprise, AMD engineers on Wednesday posted their initial patches for adding the GFX1200 and GFX1201 targets to the LLVM compiler.

If you enjoy the original content on Phoronix each and every day covering Linux hardware, performance, open-source news, and more, you can show your support this holiday season. Phoronix depends upon advertisements to operate and thus those using ad-blockers only hurts and limits the ability to continue this nearly 20 year journey of covering Linux hardware. By joining Phoronix Premium you can show your support while enjoying the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other benefits.

Those using OpenZFS 2.2 will want to update to OpenZFS 2.2.1 right away. A block cloning bug was uncovered that is causing data corruption issues for users.

The Linux Foundation today announced the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.18 for this open-source hypervisor that serves as an alternative to Linux KVM use.

Back during the Linux 6.3 kernel support for a number of legacy DRM drivers was removed and now patches have been volleyed for taking things one step further by now eliminating the infrastructure for supporting these older user-space mode-setting graphics/display drivers.

While micro-architecture specific optimizations are rather common place within the Linux x86_64 kernel for various Intel and AMD CPU families with various performance tricks, the ARM64 Linux kernel maintainers are against introducing new micro-architecture specific optimizations as it affects new ARM processors.

Ahead of the US Thanksgiving holiday extended weekend, NVIDIA Linux engineers published their 545.29.06 Linux driver as the latest bug-fix release in the R545 series.

Thanks to AMD's Linux graphics drivers being open-source, they can be easily ported/adapted for new CPU architectures. For years older AMD Radeon GPUs have been working great on RISC-V such as shown in my HiFive Unmatched review back in 2021 with a Radeon graphics card in the PCI Express x16 slot. But newer AMD Radeon GPUs hadn't worked out-of-the-box due to AMDGPU's "DC" display code but that is changing with new patches from SiFive they are allowing the latest AMD GPUs to work on RISC-V.

Released on Tuesday was a new version of wlroots, the Wayland compositor support library that was born out of the i3-inspired Sway compositor project. With this new release are new Wayland protocols, continued work on their Vulkan renderer, and the ability for the Wayland back-end to embed a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client.

A recently posted Linux kernel driver patch by Lenovo is for a new "ultra-performance capability" with their latest ThinkPad laptops for ensuring their hardware achieves the best Linux performance when in the "performance" ACPI Platform Profile while conserving the most power in the balanced and power-saving mode.

Ahead of AMD's Advancing AI event coming up quickly in early December, AMD today announced ROCm and PyTorch support has been extended to supporting the Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card.

Back in Linux 6.2 the in-kernel Zstd compression/decompression code was updated against the Zstd 1.5 upstream state. Now for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year the plan is for updating to Zstd 1.5.5 that should provide better compression performance.

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base.

Intel has announced their 2024 updates to oneAPI that they are promoting as the Intel Software Developer Toolkits 2024 release.

One of the features that was merged yesterday into the GCC compiler just before shifting to its "bug fixing" phase of development was Intel's AVX10.1 support.

FreeBSD 14 has been released as stable today as the newest major release of this leading open-source BSD operating system.

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver atop the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite cases. Though don't get your hopes too high for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as the performance is still overall slow and the driver stack remains a work-in-progress, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available.

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the "general bugfixing mode" and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release.

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously.

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it easy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year.

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release.

Narrowly missing the Linux 6.7 merge window that closed last week is the AMD 1-Wire "AXI" driver but it's now on tap for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year.

Luc Verhaegen has announced the return of the Graphics DevRoom for FOSDEM 2024 taking place in early February in Brussels.

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12.

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster.

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there's been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February.

In addition to the many OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver improvements building up for Mesa 24.0, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has also been preparing some video acceleration improvements for this next quarterly release.

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations.

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration.