Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

A new drm-misc-next pull request was sent today to DRM-Next bringing a few notable changes for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window.

KDE's KWin compositor has added DMA-Fence deadline support to its DRM back-end that can help ensure rendering is completed on-time and otherwise helping to boost the GPU clock speeds.

Alpine Linux 3.19 has been released as the newest feature update to this lightweight Linux distribution employing Busybox and libc.

As an early Christmas present for Linux kernel developers and others keeping track of kernel development, the git.kernel.org Cgit web interface has rolled out native dark mode support.

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October.

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.

The Red Hat engineers responsible for creating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) are celebrating tonight with LVFS paired with the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility now having served more than 100 million firmware updates!

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community.

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks.

Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot.

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors.

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new "GFX12" hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed.

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives.

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to "several times faster" than the existing JSON functions.

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There's been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey.

Following the SLOB allocator removal earlier this year, the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is now positioned to remove the SLAB allocator. Additionally, the lone good-for-everything SLUB allocator is set to receive further optimizations.

GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility.

Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop.

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI.

TornadoVM 1.0 has been released as the open-source software providing an OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in for allowing Java on heterogeneous hardware from multi-core CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs. TornadoVM allows targeting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V devices for a rather robust array of hardware support.

Published originally back in October were a set of patches for allowing different compression algorithms for the Linux hibernation image to yield faster restore times. That work -- focused on LZ4 compression support -- has been revised as it works toward the mainline kernel.

Intel's CPU temperature driver "coretemp" within the Linux kernel is being adapted so it can report CPU core temperatures in excess of 128 cores.

If the likes of the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally are out of your budget or you just prefer enjoying more classic, less demanding games, there are Linux kernel patches being floated to allow mainline support for a sub-$200 ARM-powered handheld gaming console.

Being worked on recently by Boris Brezillon at Collabora is Panthor, a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali graphics processors.

Flowblade 2.12 is now available as this multi-track, non-linear video editor for Linux systems. Shotcut as another open-source video editor also recently put out a new version too.

One of the latest Linux kernel patch series posted by AMD Linux engineers is for enabling an AMD QoS RMID pinning feature found within their latest generation processors.

As part of AWS Nitro Enclaves, coming for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is a Nitro Secure Module driver.

A number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring whether using the newer Linux 6.6 stable kernel or Linux 6.7 development kernel deliver any additional gains when running on the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series hardware. Here are some benchmarks looking at that while using a Threadripper 7980X workstation.

TuxClocker continues on its quest as being one of the leading open-source GUI control panels for overclockers and enthusiasts on Linux. Out this morning is TuxClocker 1.4 that brings more features for making this Qt-based open-source app more useful for those overclocking or just wanting to keep a better eye on their hardware's performance and thermals/power from the Linux desktop.

The newest monthly release of FEX is now available for this open-source project that allows running x86_64 games and applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux environments.

Red Hat's Richard Hughes just released Fwupd 1.9.10 as the newest version of this open-source utility for facilitating device and system firmware/BIOS updates under Linux in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the easy distribution of such firmware updates.

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.