Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

There have been some notable merges this week for Mesa 22.3, particularly as it concerns the open-source Radeon graphics driver code.

Pyston as what was born at Dropbox as a speedy open-source Python implementation is out with a new update as it continues to focus on maximizing performance. Dropbox ceased work on Pyston years ago while the developers continued and since last year joined Anaconda to continue their performant Python quest.

VKD3D 1.5 was recently tagged as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation used by Wine and originally an upstream to Valve's VKD3D-Proton. VKD3D 1.5 has been integrated into Wine Git ahead of next week's Wine 7.19 release.

Mold 1.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

This morning I called attention to some pending work around a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel had been hurting modern AMD systems by erroneously still applying the change to modern hardware. Fortunately, that patch has now been picked up by Linus Torvalds in time for the Linux 6.0 kernel expected for its stable debut next weekend.

Earlier this year it was shared that SUSE/openSUSE is developing the Adaptable Linux Platform "ALP" for next-generation SUSE Linux Enterprise. Coming out later this week is the first public preview of openSUSE ALP.

Nick Desaulniers with Google who has been known for his contributions around compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang has recently taken to the challenge of being able to compile the Linux kernel under macOS.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a ~20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems.

Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D as a newer and modern-focused CL alternative to the existing "Clover" code may soon see mainline support for working with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting modern AMD graphics processors.

Last week Linux 6.0-rc6 came in tiny due to many of the upstream kernel developers having been in Dublin for LPC 2022 and other events. Linus Torvalds had been fearing an uptick in activity this week as a result, but he's been pleasantly surprised that Linux 6.0-rc7 remains on the lighter side.

Queued up in the Btrfs for-next Git repository ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window is support for async buffered writes that can offer a more than two times throughput improvement.

Over the past year and a half of being on the Arch Linux install media, archinstall has made it dramatically quicker and easier to get this popular Linux distribution installed. Out today is Archinstall 2.5.1 with a number of fixes and other changes for this easy-to-use Arch Linux installer.

Two new HID drivers are set to premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window for car and flight simulators.

Earlier this year AMD-Xilinx announced a Linux-powered robotics starter kit making use of Xilinx's Kria KR26 SOM featuring a Zynq Ultrascale+ with four Cortex-A53 cores and Mali graphics. While robotics focused, there is a DisplayPort output and over the summer Canonical has been working to get this board playing nicely with a Wayland-powered GNOME desktop.

Linux kernel developer Ard Biesheuvel has been working on a patch series implementing EFI generic compressed boot support that can be easily used by architectures like AArch64, LoongArch, and RISC-V.

This week saw the Intel Habana Labs AI accelerator driver updates submitted to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window.

OpenJDK/Java has been making progress on implementing native "pure" Wayland toolkit integration not dependent upon X.Org/X11 or XWayland for rendering of Java GUI applications.

The very early stage Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver being written in the Rust programming language to support the Apple M1/M2 graphics processor achieved the milestone of being able to render a cube.

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support for Phoronix this autumn season and help in allowing me to continue Linux hardware testing and the like, the annual Phoronix Premium sale is currently taking place.

On Friday AMD submitted a feature pull request to DRM-Next of some last minute changes they would like to see as part of the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel.

Following last week's release of KDE Plasma 5.26 beta, KDE developers have turned their focus to bug-fixing ahead of next month's stable release.

A code commit that was merged to LLVM's AMDGPU shader compiler back-end on Friday afternoon confirms that GFX11/RDNA3 GPUs can have a lot more vector registers than prior GFX10 (RDNA / RDNA2) GPUs.

Wine 7.18 has been popped this Friday afternoon as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source program to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Upstream LLVM has added the compiler CPU targets for the Apple M2, A15, and A16 SoCs.

The NTFS3 kernel driver providing read/write Microsoft NTFS file-system support on Linux, thanks to the code being open-sourced by Paragon Software, continues to see new improvements.

After the persistent work by developer Gert Wollny with a desire to improve the aging "R600g" driver that provides open-source OpenGL support for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards, this Gallium3D driver in Mesa 22.3 will now use the NIR back-end by default.

Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" has been one of the nice additions to the Linux kernel in recent years and can allow for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel. RSEQ has been in the process of being extended to provide even more performance benefits.

A final batch of drm-misc-next feature changes intended for the Linux 6.1 Linux kernel has been submitted to DRM-Next. This pull consists of some core DRM code improvements as well as updates to the smaller DRM/KMS drivers.

As part of getting their Vulkan ray-tracing support into good shape, a handful of patches were merged today for Mesa 22.3 in fixing up the ANV driver's ray query code.

From two weeks back you may recall the small patches that led to increasing Intel's Vulkan driver draw throughput by ~60%+. Well, as of yesterday the refined version of that work has landed within Mesa 22.3.

Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases.

Fwupd 1.8.5 is out today for continuing to improve the firmware updating experience on Linux systems in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

While Intel's Compute-Runtime stack is fully open-source and already provides OpenCL 3.0 support for recent generations of Intel graphics under Linux, it looks like the recently-merged "Rusticl" Rust OpenCL implementation in Mesa will soon be working too on Intel graphics hardware as an alternative OpenCL 3.0 implementation.

A Microsoft engineer has landed an improvement to the Mesa Gallium3D Video Acceleration "VA" state tracker that can allow for faster video processing times and greater GPU utilization.

Google engineers on Wednesday released AOM-AV1 3.5 as the newest version of their open-source AV1 video encoder. With AOM-AV1 3.5 comes yet more performance improvements as well as memory optimizations.

The first alpha release of the Debian Installer to be used by Debian 12 "Bookworm" is now available for early testing.

Turnip as the Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to support Vulkan 1.3.