Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD has put out another point release in the ROCm 5.2 series for their "Radeon Open eCosystem" GPU compute stack for Linux.

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks.

Tow-Boot 2021.10-005 is now available for this open-source project that describes itself as "an opinionated distribution of U-Boot."

Out this morning is version 12.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection.

For what used to be known as part of the KDE Software Compilation... Then most recently the straight-forward KDE Applications name to refer to the set of official KDE applications... Now KDE Gear is the current name for the official set of KDE applications. KDE Gear 22.08 is out today as the newest collection of KDE apps.

Following optional "__bf16" support being added to the x86-64 psABI as a special type for representing 16-bit Brain Floating Point Format for deep learning / machine learning applications, the GCC and LLVM compilers have now landed their __bf16 type support.

Made public back in June by Intel was the MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities. The disclosure noted affected Intel products range from Haswell up through Rocket Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake servers. However, pre-Haswell Intel CPUs might be impacted too while the Linux kernel to this point was incorrectly stating older CPUs are "not affected" by MMIO Stale Data.

While the Qt Group (most recently known as The Qt Company) is known for its Qt toolkit and related Qt Creator integrated development environment, Qt Design Studio, and related software centered around their cross-platform toolkit, they have acquired German software maker Axivion GmbH as they expand their product portfolio beyond just Qt.

LibreOffice 7.4 is out today as the latest major update to this open-source, cross-platform office suite. This leading free software office suite now supports WebP images as well as a variety of other improvements to its various components.

While Intel is normally fast at contributing improvements for new hardware to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, just today and ahead of the approaching Raptor Lake launch has a proper scheduler model finally been added for existing Alder Lake P processors.

AMD has published their latest routine snapshot of AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal cross-platform Vulkan driver sources and is an alternative to the unofficial but popular Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver.

Last year marked the release of Mold 1.0 as a modern, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold was started by Rui Ueyama who previously worked on the LLVM linker. Mold has continued seeing new features added and out today is version 1.4.1 where "alpha" support for macOS is added and also beginning to work on CMake build system integration.

Krita 5.1 is out today as the newest evolutionary update to this leading open-source, cross-platform digital painting program.

Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" is one of the most exciting low-level kernel innovations in recent time and is already used by Google's Chrome OS and Android as well as having proven itself in various other downstream kernel builds. MGLRU is planned for upstreaming in Linux 6.1 and in preparation for that, Andrew Morton has now queued those patches into his "mm-unstable" branch for further vetting.

NTFS3 as the modern Linux kernel read/write file-system driver for NTFS that was open-sourced by Paragon Software is seeing some late code refactoring and fixes for Linux 6.0.

Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer.

While Linux 6.0 won't be out for another month and a half, on deck already for Linux 6.1 is the AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver being queued into platform-drivers-x86.git.

Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller is intended for gamers with limited mobility and is intended as a control hub to making gaming more accessible. Linux support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller is being worked on.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has started seeing support land for VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library thanks to the work of one of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers.

NVIDIA this week published JetPack 5.0.2 as their updated development environment and SDK for their Arm-powered Jetson modules and developer kits.

Canonical kernel engineer Kai-Heng Feng posted a patch on Tuesday for capable laptops to switch their external monitor connections to be routed through a laptop's discrete GPU rather than the integrated GPU. With select laptops this can be done with an ACPI call but raises questions among upstream developers rather this change is indeed desirable.

VFX Reference Platform as a standards body that aims to help standardize software platforms in the realm of digital content creation (DCC) has published a detailed report for studios to consider in choosing their next Linux platform. Their new recommendations for visual effects and animation studios about moving to newer Linux distributions over the next year -- especially with many still relying on CentOS 7 -- is for moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 otherwise one of the downstreams like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Close behind in their recommendations and as a longer-term objective is also tossing some support behind Ubuntu Linux.

Valve has just released Proton 7.0-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying many Windows games on Linux with great success for the Linux desktop, the Steam Deck, and more.

The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers.

Up to this point loading updated CPU microcode on AMD processors under Linux has checked just to ensure every physical CPU core was loaded with the new microcode but not sibling threads for SMT processors. While logically that makes sense, it turns out some AMD microcode updates do carry out per-thread modifications that means the microcode updating needs to be carried out on every thread. A Linux fix is on its way to the kernel to adjust that behavior.

As part of today's "drm-misc-fixes" pull request, NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU support is set to be added to the Nouveau DRM driver with Linux 6.0.

Following Sunday's release of Linux 6.0-rc1, yesterday saw the release of 6.0-rc1-rt1 as the set of patches for providing real-time kernel support atop the upstream code-base. There is just roughly 50 patches to go until the PREEMPT_RT functionality is mainlined!

Ahead of the upcoming openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), whether to raise the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level required by the Linux OS continues to be evaluated and what options there are for making use of newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without necessarily forcing tightened CPU requirements / eliminating old hardware support.

When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements.

LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm.

After Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 Accelerator back in 2019, in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic they posted a Linux driver for this accelerator. That driver didn't get picked up for the mainline Linux kernel and two years later there still is little fanfare around the Qualcomm AI Cloud Accelerator hardware. However, now they have posted a new Linux driver that goes the DRM driver route.

Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android.

The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month.

Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away.

AMD today sent out revised patches for improving the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver that aims to provide better power efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been relied upon for AMD processors.

Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux.

While Linux 6.0 will bring a lot of shiny new features, Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) is one of the anticipated changes that isn't going to land now until Linux 6.1. But in the interim, MGLRU v14 was posted today that re-bases the code against 6.0-rc1 to help facilitate more testing of this kernel change that primarily helps Linux systems under memory pressure.

After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great.

Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window.

Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement.

Following yesterday's belated release of Wine 7.15, Wine-Staging 7.15 is now available that continues to carry hundreds of extra testing/experimental patches atop upstream Wine for bug fixes and other features to empower Windows games and applications on Linux.