Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 inference accelerator that features up to sixteen cores and focused on AI needs at the edge of data centers continues on a trek toward having mainline Linux kernel support.

While initial Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support for the Linux kernel only was mainlined last year to the kernel tree, Arm already has SME 2 and SME 2.1 support on the way to mainline.

Well known multimedia developer and VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend on the upcoming FFmpeg 6.0 release as well as dav1d v1.1.

Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend in Brussels. The focus of Żygowski's presentation for the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting was on the current client and server hardware state for AMD platforms with Coreboot / open-source firmware.

After the prior kernel patches had stalled in their review process, last week work was revived on x86_64 parallel CPU bring-up for the Linux kernel to help in booting the kernel faster on larger core count desktops and servers. The results have been promising and over the past few days more test results have flowed in along with other positive commentary that will hopefully this time lead to the work ultimately getting upstreamed.

In development now for nearly two years is Chimera Linux as a "non-GNU" Linux distribution built with the LLVM Clang compiler, leveraging musl libc, and commonly relying on BSD user-space software components. After a lot of work on bringing up Chimera Linux as well as getting a Wayland-based deskttop going, the project is aiming for its alpha release within the next month.

The Linux 6.3 kernel's IT87 driver is preparing support for the IT87952E super I/O controller that is used by some newer desktop motherboards and will now be able to enjoy hardware monitoring "HWMON" support.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee recently signed off on the proposed "Unfiltered Flathub" feature that makes it easier to enjoy the full collection of software offered by Flatpak's Flathub service.

Even with local digital video recording from your antenna or cable being far less common these days than a decade prior, in the era of Internet streaming the open-source MythTV software continues making progress for this dominant Linux solution for HTPC/PVR needs.

Linus Torvalds just issued the seventh weekly RC release of Linux 6.2 while the stable kernel debut is expected two weeks from today.

Showcased today at the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels was RustyHermit, a Rust-written modular unikernel intended for handling micro virtual machines.

AMD sent in another batch of AMDGPU features and fixes to DRM-Next this week ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window. With being late in the cycle the material is mostly of different fixes -- including some Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" (GFX11) fixes -- but also a new feature in that AMD Radeon GPU power savings with S0ix even when the system BIOS support is lacking.

For those that may have tried the recent macOS-inspired helloSystem 0.8 release for that desktop-focused FreeBSD-based operating system, if that didn't satisfy your desktop BSD desires, MidnightBSD 3.0 is working its way to release as another alternative.

Thanks to Intel another batch of Compute Express Link (CXL) feature code is working its way into shape for the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

In marking ten years since the prior release, Xvidtune 1.0.4 was released on Saturday with all the patches that have buult up over the past decade.

Cairo 1.17.8 was released this week as a new development snapshot of this 2D vector graphics library that over the years has seen widespread use by a multitude of desktop software.

Following last week's article about Linux developers eyeing a new "DOITM" security mitigation for latest Intel CPUs based on guidance from Intel around Data Operand Independent Timing (DOIT) instructions and then it coming to light that the DOIT mode shouldn't always be on, a lengthier statement from one of Intel's Linux engineers has been published summing up the current beliefs and Linux kernel possibilities around DOIT(M).

A number of patches were merged this week to Mesa 23.1 around the Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver that continues progressing on open-source OpenGL support for Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics.

Just prior to Christmas there was a "request for comments" (RFC) patch series sent out working on RDNA3 user-mode queue support for their AMDGPU kernel driver. That work has now advanced post-RFC with an updated patch series having been sent out on Friday.

NVIDIA on Friday released the v525.47.07 Linux driver beta with their latest Vulkan driver enhancements along with the NVIDIA 528.50 driver on the Windows side.

Back in 2020 Mozilla moved Servo to the Linux Foundation for the Rust-written web engine after it laid off the Servo developers. Servo development is now community/volunteer-driven and a road-map was published yesterday outlining some of their hopes for this calendar year.

KDE Plasma 5.27 is due for release on Valentine's Day (14 February) as what will also be the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series. With the imminent 5.27 release, more feature work on Plasma 6.0 has been getting underway.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as the first major update to this bootable, open-source RAM testing software in nearly a decade. The memtest86+ 6.0 release marked a rewrite of the software while out today is the first update to that widely-used RAM testing software.

Valve has just published Proton 7.0-6 as the newest version of this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Proton 7.0-6 had been available in testing and release candidate form since the end of last year while now has been promoted to stable.

Intel engineers this week published new Linux open-source driver code for TPMI, the Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface. Intel TPMI for seemingly future processors will allow for more streamlined power management handling and other enhancements over the way the Intel power management drivers currently function.

A proposed Linux kernel patch would provide a new Kconfig build time option of "CONFIG_DEFAULT_CPU_MITIGATIONS_OFF" to build an insecure kernel if wanting to avoid the growing list of CPU security mitigations within the kernel and their associated performance overhead.

For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support.

The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release.

As mentioned a few weeks back, Red Hat has been working to arrange a developer "hackfest" to further work out plans and development around HDR display support on the Linux desktop. They are aiming to bring together graphics driver developers, desktop developers, and other Linux stakeholders -- including possibly the likes of Valve -- to work out planning of high dynamic range monitor support over the next year or two for the Linux desktop. That Red Hat HDR hackfest has now been organized to happen in late April.

A half-year has passed already since Dbus-Broker 32 was released for this drop-in replacement to the reference D-Bus implementation that is focused on providing better performance and reliability. Today that's been succeeded by Dbus-Broker 33 as a relatively minor update to this software from the BUS1 project.

Following the release of Wine 8.0 stable from a week and a half ago, Wine 8.1 is out today as the first bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. These Wine 8.x development snapshots will then culminate with the release of Wine 9.0 next year.

Originally posted two years ago were Linux kernel patches for bringing up of CPU cores in parallel to speed-up the Linux boot process. With the growing core counts of servers and even high-end desktops / HEDT platforms, this parallel bring-up can lead to significant time savings at boot. The work, unfortunately, stalled but has now been revised.

Following last month's release of systemd 253-rc1 with many new features and changes in tow, out today is a second release candidate and is piling yet more features into this Linux system and service manager.

While there is Rusticl as the first Rust language code within Mesa as a modern OpenCL implementation in Gallium3D, for possible future driver efforts there is some initial exploratory work being done around coming up with bindings to support writing of Vulkan drivers with Rust.

The GNU Debugger "GDB" has landed initial support for being able to debug AMDGPU/ROCm platform code with a preliminary focus on HIP programs.

The RPM package manager code has added support for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels that allow for newer baseline targets than conventional x86_64. This support in RPM allows for installing RPMs built for newer feature levels on capable hardware.

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress.

LibreOffice 7.5 released on-schedule this morning as the newest version of this cross-platform, free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office.

Microsoft on Wednesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230126-2.0 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of use-cases from within Azure infrastructure over to WSL purposes.

Arm ended out January by publishing an early request for comments (RFC) version of its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) support for the Linux kernel so there can be KVM virtualization integration around Arm CCA, a KVM user-space ABI for managing Realms, and Linux guest support for Arm Realms.

While the Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers were aiming for release this week, due to outstanding blocker bugs it has instead resulted in a fourth weekly release candidate.

Valve has just published their Steam Survey results for the month of January. Apple macOS has eaten a tiny bit of marketshare from Windows while on a percentage basis there is no change for Linux.

Google has released a new version of the Go programming language that with today's v1.20 release come a number of notable additions as well as gutting out support for older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Two features alone have me excited about Go 1.20: initial work on CPU architecture feature build flags like for x86_64 micro-architecture feature level handling and initial support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) builds.

Last week I wrote about Linux developers evaluating a new "DOITM" security mitigation for the latest Intel CPUs. While the cost for now of engaging the Data Operand Independent Timing Mode (DOITM) functionality is minimal, following internal Intel engineering discussions it looks like the Linux kernel patches will need to be re-worked with this functionality not intended to always be enabled.

Now that we are into February with AMD previously announced the month for learning more about their new Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache, this morning they revealed the firm availability dates and pricing.

As scheduled, version 2.37 of the GNU C Library "glibc" was released this morning.

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they've made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards.

The last batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.3 merge window. Notable with this week's changes are more low-level code improvements in preparation for future Intel graphics hardware platforms.

Now that Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" shipped and the initial Linux support is all aligned, recently there has been an uptick in activity around Emerald Rapids and even Granite Rapids as its successor along with the Sierra Forest support. On the EMR front, the latest Linux driver activity is extending the In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for additional testing capabilities.

An optimization to Mesa's shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam's shader pre-caching.