Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 is now available with a few more fixes for this BSD operating system update. A FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 release is also inbound as an extra release candidate with one more bug fix, after which the stable release should happen.

In addition to the mainline Linux kernel seeing recent support for the Arm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and Lenovo Yoga C630, among others, another Lenovo model working toward mainline kernel support is the Lenovo Flex 5G.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution that they make public, CBL-Mariner, began with a very niche focus while over time has continued adding additional packages as it is worked into becoming a more robust Linux platform.

MidnightBSD as the desktop-focused OS forked from FreeBSD and relying on the Xfce desktop environment by default is out with its big MidnightBSD 3.0 update.

AMD on Friday sent out new patches for enabling some new graphics IP "blocks" as part of their block-by-block enablement strategy they've been using to introduce new GPU support to their Linux graphics stack by focusing on smaller patch series with versioned parts of the GPU rather than big monolithic patch series with colorful fishy codenames.

The Intel XeSS SDK 1.0 release happened last September while now has been succeeded by XeSS SDK 1.1. Though like the prior release, the XeSS SDK isn't fully open-source with just the bits around game integration being public.

AMD has been teasing FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) as the latest version of their game upscaling tech that will be released later in the year. AMD began showing off FSR 3 to game developers this week at GDC while also re-affirming their open-source commitment.

Not to be confused with Valve's downstream, VKD3D-Proton, that is used by Steam Play but Wine's VKD3D codebase itself is out today with a new version of this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation.

Intel's open-source engineers continue to be quite busy working on their Meteor Lake enablement ahead of those initial mobile processors shipping later this year.

Sent out today were the latest AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches having the latest work done by AMD internally on this display/monitor portion of their driver code. Notable with this round of 19 patches is preparation work for upcoming eDP 1.5 laptop displays.

While GCC 13 is working its way toward its official GCC 13.1 stable release in the next few weeks, with this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release updates it has already begun switching over to this major annual compiler update.

While not part of the upcoming Blender 3.5 release, AMD engineers are working to land their HIP ray-tracing (HIPRT) support within the Blender open-source 3D modeling software that will offer nice rendering speed-ups for AMD RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs.

The Framework Laptop as a modular and upgradeable laptop has garnered much interest from the open-source community and PC enthusiasts the past few years. Until today though the upgradeable laptops have just been Intel Core powered while today the company had some big announcements.

Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS is available today as the newest point release for those continuing to employ this older long-term support releases.

One month ago NVIDIA released the 530 series Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to stable with the NVIDIA 530.41.03 driver release.

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors.

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Out today is a new version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment as the hyper-converged infrastructure software with hosted hypervisor.

Chinese fabless semiconductor company Zhaoxin, which was started ten years ago as a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government to create domestic x86 CPUs, is now in the process of working on supporting their newest Yongfeng processors with the Linux kernel.

A new version of MoltenVK has been released, the open-source library that maps the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for making use of this industry standard graphics/compute API on modern iOS and macOS devices.

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election.

On top of today seeing the KDE XWaylandVideoBridge announcement, the debut of GNOME 44 with its many Wayland improvements, and XWayland 23.1 being released with multiple new features/improvements, there is more good news for Wayland fans. Google has merged to the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code support for Wayland fractional scaling via the fractional-scale-v1 protocol.

Following recent rumors and leaks, Valve today officially announced Counter-Strike 2 that they announce as the largest technical leap in Counter-Strike's history.

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

GNOME 44 is now officially out as the latest half-year update to this widely-used open-source desktop.

KDE developers David Edmundson and Alex Poi have begun working on XWaylandVideoBridge as a new project to help improve Linux desktop screen sharing for X11-based applications that may try to share the contents of Wayland screens, such as could be the case for some software like Discord, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and others.

Mozilla announced today they are investing $30 million USD to build Mozilla.ai as a new start-up focused on "building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem."

Canonical is preparing to ship an updated set of Ubuntu Font files for the Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release but is hoping to see more user testing ahead of the official release next month.

Canonical has been preparing to ship a Linux 6.2 based kernel for Ubuntu 23.04 and now it's in the process of rolling out over the coming days.

AMD has upstreamed a basic RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism for GPU use to LLVM's libc and wired it up for AMDGPU use.

Introduced last week with the Vulkan 1.3.244 spec update was a new extension, VK_KHR_map_memory2, which is seeing fast support from the open-source Intel "ANV" and Mesa Radeon "RADV" drivers as well as NVIDIA's newest Vulkan driver beta.

Earlier this month I wrote about Linux 6.4 planning to start removing old, unused, and unmaintained PCMCIA drivers. That began with the PCMCIA "char" drivers queued for removal in this upcoming kernel cycle and now joining them are removing two PCMCIA/CardBus to USB adapter drivers.

Prominent Intel leader Raja Koduri who currently serves as the company's Chief Architect is leaving to focus on a new software start-up.

After being in development for years, Intel's shadow stack support is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle. The shadow stack support is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) security functionality.

Promoted to general availability (GA) status today is the OpenJDK Java 20 update with a number of new features.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed another Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement today for Mesa 23.1-devel to further along its VKD3D-Proton capabilities for enjoying Windows Direct3D 12 games on Linux with Steam Play.

Red Hat developer David Airlie has shown off the progress being made on bringing up not only the open-source Mesa NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" but doing so while making use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware that ultimately is needed for being able to deliver better open-source driver support and performance.

Asahi Linux developer Asahi Lina has posted an update on the ongoing work bringing up their Rust-written DRM kernel driver along with the AGX Gallium3D Mesa OpenGL driver as well as progress towards the in-development Vulkan driver too.

Besides the ongoing work around the reverse-engineered Apple Silicon graphics driver being brought up in the Rust programming language, the other notable Rust effort within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel subsystem is a rewrite of the basic VGEM driver in this increasingly-used programming language. That Rust VGEM driver has now been sent out on the mailing list for review as part of a request for comments.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel the Habana Labs AI driver has moved to the new "accel" accelerator subsystem/framework while for the Linux 6.4 cycle this summer this Intel driver is continuing to speed ahead as it prepares support for the new Gaudi2 AI hardware and making other improvements for this open-source training/inference stack.

Trisquel 11 is now available as the latest major release for this one of a few Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved Linux distributions that is "100% libre" and meets all of the fully free software requirements. Trisquel 11 is re-based against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while making various other changes in the process.

Labwc 0.6.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox.