Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

FEX as the open-source project working on allowing x86_64 software to run atop Linux AArch64 (64-bit Arm) systems -- including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) -- is out with its newest monthly feature release.

A very nice feature pull request was merged to OpenZFS that can provide a nice performance improvement to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation to kick off the new year.

Following the recent discussions around Fedora planning to disable byte swapped clients support for the X.Org Server in order to close another "large attack surface" with the aging X11 server codebase, the upstream X.Org Server has now dropped this support by default.

Linspire as the Linux distribution whose roots go back two decades ago to when it originally started out as "Lindows" is preparing a new major release. The current incarnation of Linspire though started five years ago when PC/OpenSystems acquired the Linspire and Freespire rights from Xandros. Linspire claims to be "the easiest desktop Linux" and are looking to improve things further with their v12 release.

While MGLRU is a nice performance win for the Linux kernel now available when enabling it for v6.1+ kernel builds, during my testing I did encounter a regression around the SVT-AV1 video encode performance at least and a fix is working its way toward mainline.

Mold as the high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD is out with another feature release.

Over the past few years it's become possible to compile the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang compared to the long-standing dependence on using the GCC compiler. While it's been possible for 3+ years to use the mainline Linux kernel and mainline Clang for building a working x86_64 and AArch64 kernel, the process and support continues to mature.

Firewalld 1.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firewall daemon used on Linux systems.

NVIDIA this morning released the NVIDIA 525.78.01 Linux driver as a minor update to the R525 driver series with a few fixes and support for the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card.

Merged today for the LLVM 16 compiler stack is support for Intel's next-generation Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors with -march=emeraldrapids now being supported.

Following the recent Zen 4 tuning patches that were merged to GCC 13 (Git) just ahead of Christmas, today an AMD patch adding the Zen 4 automatons have been merged ahead of this next open-source compiler release.

After enjoying a two month holiday, Valve-funded Mike Blumenkrantz is back to working on Mesa's Zink code that implements OpenGL (and via Rusticl even OpenCL) atop the Vulkan API. Zink has shown it can be quite competitive in its OpenGL performance atop Vulkan compared to dedicated OpenGL drivers and in 2023 should be maturing into even better shape.

Those paying close attention to the Linux kernel development may have noticed a small change to how a key Linux developer is marking his kernel patches.

Sent out last year as "request for comments" were two rounds of patches by Google engineer James Houghton for introducing the concept of HugeTLB High Granularity Mapping (HGM) to the Linux kernel. In kicking off the new year, the set of 46 patches in their post-RFC state have been mailed out for review.

Tonight during Lisa Su's keynote for CES 2023, a number of exciting AMD announcements were made.

While not even midway through the Linux 6.2 cycle yet, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" sensor driver feature changes queuing in the "hwmon-next" branch is seeing more hardware support readied for Linux 6.3.

Red Hat has been among the key Linux stakeholders working for years toward the ultimate goal of ensuring the Linux desktop will have suitable High Dynamic Range (HDR) support in place. They are working to organize a hackfest this year to further the progress being made on HDR application support on the GNOME desktop as well as associated open-source graphics driver infrastructure.

Lighttpd 1.4.68 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this lightweight, high performance open-source web server.

In addition to Fedora 38 now allowing "no-omit-frame-pointer" to enhance profiling/debugging with possible performance costs, this next Fedora Linux release is also planning to use "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3" compiler defenses to further bolster security.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has landed a few patches into Mesa 23.0 for further reducing the CPU overhead of the Vulkan driver's draw path.

Since GCC 11 there has been support for AMX and the upcoming Sapphire Rapids CPU features, which has been further improved in the open-source compiler over the past two years. GCC 13 meanwhile as the next GNU Compiler Collection release is bringing Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest, Grand Ridge, and Granite Rapids. Basic enablement of Intel's Emerald Rapids meanwhile was merged yesterday for GCC 13 too.

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221222 on Tuesday as their first update of 2023 for their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes within the company from Azure to other behind-the-scenes Linux OS use.

GNOME's Mutter now allows disabling XWayland support at build-time if so desired. This is part of the broader GNOME effort for making X11 support optional and ultimately allowing for a modern Wayland-only environment if so desired and without carrying legacy X11 cruft.

While back in 2018 when the C-SKY architecture was merged to the Linux kernel it was talked about possibly being the last new CPU arch/port to be mainlined given the growing success of RISC-V even back then, it looks like that upstream kernel developer belief might not hold true. France-based Kalray that focuses on high-performance, data-centric computing from cloud to edge posted their initial Linux kernel patches today for their "KVX" kernel port to get the kernel running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture.

The past several months saw much discussion over a proposal to add "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" as a default compiler flag to Fedora Linux that would improve profiling/debugging but with possible performance implications that can vary based on the application/workload. While just over one month ago FESCo rejected that change, they re-voted today and decided after all to allow this change to happen but to ensure that packages can easily opt-out if they find performance regressions. By Fedora 40 they will also re-visit the matter to determine if the benefits and performance costs are justified.

DragonFlyBSD 6.4 is now available as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system forked long ago from FreeBSD.

It's been one year and a few days since BusyBox 1.35 was released while today it's been succeeded by BusyBox 1.36 for this software package that is common to embedded Linux environments with the lone executable providing a plethora of commands and functionality.

GIGABYTE announced this morning they have spun off their server business unit and formed Giga Computing for their enterprise products moving forward.

Fwupd 1.8.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

The Tellusim Engine that is focused on professional simulations, visualizations, urban planning, VR/AR, and other 3D tasks has added a comprehensive set of Rust programming language bindings.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of several more changes / new features planned for Fedora 38.

With the Linux 6.2 merge window behind us, feature work for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes targeting now the Linux 6.3 kernel have begun queuing with DRM-Next.

The newest CPU back-end added to the LLVM compiler stack is for Xtensa processor cores.

Thanks to Valve's incredible work on Steam Play and investing in low-level Linux graphics stack improvements, the latest milestone being achieved is HDR (High Dynamic Range) support beginning to work.

Yesterday Valve published their Steam Survey results for December and pointed to some really odd discrepancies. Valve this evening has revised the Steam Survey results that address some of the statistics oddities but still points to the Linux gaming marketshare as a percent regressing during the past month and also the Steam Deck usage declining relative to the overall Linux gaming base.

Merged today to the GNU Debugger (GDB) is initial support for the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that is a JSON-RPC interface for use by integrated development environments (IDEs) to better communicate with debuggers.

The open-source R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting up through the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards on Linux has an interesting new year addition... ARB_gl_spirv!

A new Ubuntu desktop installer has been talked about going back many years and over the past two years has been focused on providing a rewritten installer making use of Subiquity and Flutter. With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.

With the start of the new year also came the branching of GNU Binutils 2.40 ahead of its expected stable release around early February.

Dragonfly, the open-source project that advertises itself as "Probably, the fastest in-memory store in the universe!" as a high speed in-memory database that is compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has out a big release to kick off 2023.

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2022 that come in at a bit of a surprise.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate for Linux 6.2 following the merge window's closure last week on Christmas.

A change was merged this holiday weekend ahead of Linux 6.2-rc2 that adjusts the default behavior for AMD Ryzen 6000 series "Rembrandt" laptops and newer.

While there were various holidays in December, there continued to be daily and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During December there were 228 original news articles on Phoronix and 18 featured hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at all of the exciting Linux hardware content and software news for closing out 2022.

The D1 is Allwinner's first SoC based on a RISC-V core design. While the Allwinner D1 isn't powerful at all, it's appearance in low-cost boards, RISC-V based design, and the Allwinner development community has made this an attractive entry-level RISC-V target. While various Linux distributions are already supporting D1-based boards, the mainline support for the D1/D1s platform looks like it will finally be merged in 2023.

On New Year's Eve, Greg Kroah-Hartman released a new set of stable kernels with Linux 6.1.2, 6.0.16, and 5.15.86 LTS being the new set.