Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Armbian 23.11 was released this week as the decade-old Linux distribution project focused on providing good Arm single board computer support.

It's the season for hardware and software upgrades as Phoronix.com rolls out to new infrastructure. Pardon any downtime or interruptions over the next few hours.

GDB 14.1 has been released today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for source-level debugging of C/C++, Rust, Fortran, Go, Ada, and other languages.

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.7-rc4 kernel around twelve hours early today due to his end-of-year travels.

AMD has begun submitting "new stuff" to DRM-Next for preparations ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle in the new year.

For those that happen to own an ASRock Rack X570D4U micro-ATX motherboard or are in the market for a server-grade AMD Ryzen 5000 series motherboard, patches are pending as this motherboard works on OpenBMC support as an alternative to the proprietary BMC software stack that ships with this AMD Ryzen 5000 series + ECC DDR4 supported motherboard.

The drm-misc-next changes sent out this week to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle include a few interesting additions worth mentioning for Linux desktop users.

Joining the likes of the Aquacomputer and NZXT water/liquid cooling hardware monitoring/control "HWMON" kernel drivers, a Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO Coolers Linux driver is being developed.

The PVR Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa for modern PowerVR graphics hardware has now landed support for using the upcoming PowerVR DRM kernel driver that is being upstreamed in Linux 6.8.

On Friday another round of fixes were merged for the Bcachefs file-system for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Vulkan 1.3.272 was published on Friday as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API.

Two years ago Cloudflare rolled out their "Gen 11" server fleet built around AMD EPYC Milan processors and on Friday the company began talking about their forthcoming "Gen 12" server designs that will soon be rolling out across their data centers for powering this widely-used web infrastructure.

With this week's release of the Plasma 6.0 beta and beta milestones for KDE Frameworks 6 and the latest Gear apps, KDE has now entered the bug-fixing phase ahead of the stable releases coming up in February. But prior to that bug-fixing shift, a few more features were merged.

Steam on Linux enjoyed a various nice boost in popularity during the course of November at least as it concerns Valve's Steam Survey.

Miriway is an effort for bringing Wayland to desktops not currently having native Wayland support and is made possible via the Canonical-developed Mir. Miriway has been a side-project of Alan Griffiths as the lead Mir developer and today he published a blog post with more details for users interested in making use of it.

November was very busy on Phoronix with all of the benchmarking around the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series, the much anticipated Framework 13 laptop review, a lot of Wayland accomplishments being made this week, excitement building around the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release, and the Linux 6.7 kernel getting underway with new features like the Bcachefs file-system.

Following good progress in October and this former-Mozilla browser engine project receiving funding recently for "table" support, Servo developers continued implementing more functionality over the course of November.

Following a rare but nasty data corruption issue, OpenZFS 2.2.2 and OpenZFS 2.1.14 were released this evening to address the problem.

For the past number of months AMD has been actively working on enabling AMD P-State Preferred Core functionality for Linux so that their modern processors can communicate "preferred" cores to the Linux kernel scheduler for making better decisions around task placement and ultimately ensuring best performance of Ryzen and EPYC processors running on Linux. This week they are up to their 11th take on these kernel patches.

It's been a number of years since many in the Linux/open-source space have been excited by the Jolla smartphone efforts with their failed smartphone/tablet devices and more recently focusing their Linux-based Sailfish OS devices for running on existing devices. The latest chapter in Jolla is the former management acquiring the Jolla business.

The third and final part of the Vulkan enablement code for allowing Vulkan API graphics use within the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git.

The LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 builds for Linux, Windows, and macOS are now available for testing of this leading open-source office suite.

The year began with Godot 4.0 making its much anticipated debut and now this open-source game engine project is ending out 2023 with Godot 4.2 as the second revision to the Godot 4.x engine.

The Free Software Foundation this week published their 2023 holiday shopping guide for services and products that comply with their pure free software standards, such as computer hardware devices that "respect your freedom" regardless of hardware age.

Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support.

The Linux Mint crew led by Clement Lefebvre released Cinnamon 6.0 today as the latest version of their customized desktop stack.

KDE today announced their first beta of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" as the Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6, and latest Gear applications.

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.

Ampere Computing has sent out its latest patch attempt at increasing the number of Arm CPU cores supported by the mainline Linux kernel. As it stands at the moment the 64-bit ARM mainline Linux kernel build supports 256 cores, which can be exceeded with Ampere's new AmpereOne processors in a multi-socket configuration.

Coming up for the Linux 6.8 kernel the Btrfs file-system is preparing to make use of the newer Linux file-system mounting API.

Generalized Memory Management "GMEM" has been proposed as a new solution to be developed for the Linux kernel to deal with memory management for external memory devices like the growing number of accelerators coming to market.

A new release of Coreboot is available today as the increasingly popular open-source system firmware solution that's used by Chromebooks, increasing hyperscaler / data center industry interest due to increased code transparency and security, System76 laptops, and more. Coreboot 4.22 is the new release and brings initial AMD OpenSIL code integration, 17 new motherboard ports, and more. Coreboot 4.22 will be succeeded next year by Coreboot 24.02.

Intel today published Compute-Runtime 23.35.27191.9 as their latest update to this open-source GPU compute stack enabling OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and Windows. With this being their first tagged release since September, it's coming in heavy on changes.

It was just last week NVK developers were celebrating Vulkan 1.0 conformance while now this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa is preparing to expose Vulkan 1.1 support.

Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.

Canonical this morning released Mir 2.16 as the latest version of this open-source software for helping to build out Wayland compositors.

With the Imagination PowerVR open-source kernel graphics driver expected for Linux 6.8, the necessary firmware binary blob has now been accepted into linux-firmware.git.