Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.

Following 107k lines of old driver code within the staging area of the kernel removed for Linux 6.13, over in the crypto space they are looking at some cleaning as well with plans raised to remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) driver for the old Sun Niagara 2, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 and this SPU was also found in the UltraSPARC T3 as well.

A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.

One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.

While the winter holidays are quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy working on new feature code for the Plasma 6.3 desktop. A number of new features were merged this week for the KDE desktop.

OBS Studio 31.0 was released this evening as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform software for live streaming and desktop screen recording purposes. OBS Studio remains a leading choice across operating systems for screen recording, game livestreaming, and similar purposes while the new v31.0 release tacks on even more features.

The first release candidate of Wine 10.0 is out today that also now marks the feature freeze ahead of this stable release expected to be out around mid-January.

Box64 v0.3.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this Linux user-space emulator for allowing x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Box64 is one of the leading ways for allowing x86_64 games and Steam to be able to run on ARM 64-bit Linux devices.

New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.

openSUSE Leap Micro 6.1 is now available as the newest version of this lightweight Linux operating system built for containerized environments and virtualized workloads.

Fwupd 2.0 debuted back in October while out today is Fwupd 2.0.3 as the newest incremental update to this open-source solution for updating system and device firmware under Linux.

The SDL2 library is widely used by cross-platform games and other software. Fedora 42 is eyeing the possibility of replacing SDL2 with the sdl2-compat code so that by way of this compatibility layer the newer SDL3 version will ultimately be used instead.

While the Linux v6.13 merge window has been over for less than one week, already the first pull requests of new feature code are being submitted to DRM-Next for queuing the display/graphics driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window in two months.

While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.

It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.

Canonical's Matthieu Clemenceau as the Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Foundations Team has provided a public roadmap around some of the plans for Ubuntu 25.04. This next Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release that is due out in April is set to enjoy more performance optimizations and other exciting bits.

Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman officially designated Linux 6.12 as this year's long-term support (LTS) kernel version.

The Rust-based Redox OS original open-source operating system project is out with a new status report to detail the enhancements they have made over the past several weeks.

System76 today released the newest development/testing version of their Rust-based desktop environment designed for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.

Alpine Linux 3.21 is out today as the newest version of this simple, lightweight, and security-minded Linux distribution that is popular for use within containerized environments, embedded systems, and more.

With the new Linux kernel patches posted yesterday for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernels on x86_64 CPUs as part of that patch series was introducing new Kconfig build options around the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. It turns out though that Torvalds is completely against how the x86_64 feature levels are handled by the compiler toolchain folks and doesn't want to see it invading the kernel.

The Linux 6.8 kernel merged the Imagination PowerVR driver as a new open-source driver for supporting the PowerVR "Rogue" graphics architecture and being developed in tandem by Imagination Tech with their upstream Mesa Vulkan driver. Initially this PowerVR driver was catering to ARM SoCs with the Rogue graphics while now the open-source driver is being extended to work on RISC-V too.

The "AMDXDNA" accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU is set to be introduced in the Linux 6.14 kernel next year. Ahead of that debut, a new set of patches from AMD surfaced on Wednesday to provide fixes and code improvements as well as introducing support for newer Ryzen AI "NPU6" IP.

Patches from a Bytedance engineer for the Linux kernel allow for overcoming the current 4K page size limitation of RISC-V and introduce a new 64K page size option.

Building off the Mesa 24.3 release from two weeks ago is now Mesa 24.3.1 as the first stable point release following their usual bi-weekly release regiment.

The DRM Panic infrastructure has been in the Linux kernel for several releases now and allows for a kernel-based experience similar to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death as well as more recently allowing QR code kernel error messages and other features. The Intel kernel DRM driver has seen some patches for enabling DRM Panic support.

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

As a follow-up to last month's article around the Debian 13 release processes continuing and desktop artwork voting underway for Debian 13 "Trixie", the winning desktop theme/artwork was announced today.

AMDVLK 2024.Q4.2 is out today as the newest official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release for Linux systems.

Fedora stakeholders are evaluating supporting an Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) software stack with next year's Fedora 42 release.

As we approach 2025, hopefully none of you are still running x86 32-bit kernels / 32-bit OS software on x86_64 processors, but should you still be into that, there are improvements on the way.

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is out as the newest monthly-ish update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Linux and Windows for the OpenCL and Level Zero support. This Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is also the last update ahead of next week's Battlemage availability with the Arc B580 graphics card.

VTE-based terminals on Linux like Ptyxis are now seeing support introduced to better display progress state for long-running processes with a more visually pleasing progress bar. Microsoft's Windows Terminal has already supported this feature while now with systemd beginning to support using these Operating System Command escape sequences, Linux terminal support is on the rise.

Longtime Linux game porter Ryan Gordon has introduced initial asynchronous I/O APIs for the in-development SDL3 library. On Linux these async I/O APIs allow making use of the modern kernel IO_uring functionality.

Merged for Mesa 25.0 yesterday to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is enabling more storage compression on Tigerlake graphics hardware and newer.

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.

A new feature proposal seeks to improve the Fedora Linux experience when running under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 11.

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 era games is out with the newest version of the RTX-Remix runtime that is powered in part by DXVK for Direct3D to Vulkan mapping.

While long overdue, the PostgreSQL database server has finally deprecated MD5 password support with its latest code.