Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version.

The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too.

Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API.

Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer.

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel.

While there are many exciting new features in the GNOME 48 Alpha as well as a new app with Decibels becoming the official audio player, there isn't a new official video player for this desktop release.

In addition to the Bcachefs features and new Btrfs code for Linux 6.14, the XFS file-system changes were merged on Thursday for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch.

It's not only AI start-ups running into space and power capacity bottlenecks but the Fedora Project has been pushing the limits of its main data center and is preparing for a move to a new data center to allow for more physical space and power capacity. In turn one item mentioned is allowing space for possible RISC-V build systems for Fedora.

The GNOME 48 Alpha release was issued this morning for helping to test this updated desktop environment debuting as stable in March.

Building off last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta, Oracle today published the Oracle Linux 10 Developer Preview for a first glimpse at this next RHEL10-derived operating system.

The Linux x86 32-bit PAE kernel support for Physical Address Extensions allows addressing more than 4GB of memory for those still running 32-bit processors or otherwise opting to still run a 32-bit OS. While the Linux x86 32-bit specific code rarely sees new improvements in the past number of years, a set of patches were posted today in looking to enhance the x86 32-bit PAE mode.

Earlier this month was the release of the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta while today a second beta was issued.

All of the power management feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel were sent out earlier this week and subsequently merged. As we've been seeing with recent Linux kernel releases, AMD continues investing a lot into their AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for better power efficiency on Ryzen processors and since the prior kernel also now being used with the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors too.

For those making use of the source-available Redis in-memory key-value database, the upcoming Redis 8.0 will offer better performance on today's high core count systems and servers.

With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced.

Following the unboxing embargo earlier this week for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, today the review embargo lifts for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

The crypto subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.14 kernel. Notable this time are new x86_64-specific optimizations for the AES-GCM and AES-XTS algorithms. Benefiting the most from these new x86_64 optimizations are recent AMD processors.

Newer laptops pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows have begun adding a "Copilot" key for launching Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant or other "chatbot" software. With the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel, that key will be mapped out correctly so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop.

The Tuned software from Red Hat is a daemon for Linux monitoring and adaptive performance tuning as an alternative to the likes of power-profiles-daemon. Tuned ships with various profiles and allows different features for tuning the Linux system performance for HPC compute, enterprise storage, balanced battery for laptops, and dozens of other scenarios. Red Hat this week debuted the first release candidate of the upcoming Tuned 2.25.

Along with other VFS pull requests for Linux 6.14 to introduce STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN, adding a new mountinfo program, VirtualBox guest support for ARM64 VMs, and faster /proc/kcore reading, another VFS pull for this new kernel brings a minor performance optimization.

With the newest code merged for Mesa 25.0, the Panfrost PanVK driver is exposing Vulkan 1.1 support on Arm Valhall "v10" graphics processors.

The Landlock Linux security module that was added to the mainline Linux kernel four years ago for unprivileged application sandboxing and similar access controls has a rather weird update for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel: Land lock can now deal with "weird files".

With Debian 13 due out in the coming months, the Debian 13 artwork/theme was recently announced as well as the Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 release. The latest is the freeze dates for Debian 13.0 being announced today.

In an Intel blog post today they outlined their desire for a more modular PC design to enhance repairability and reduce e-waste. It's very much along similar lines of the Framework Computer upgradeable and easily serviceable laptops. With some luck hopefully we will be seeing more modular PC designs moving forward.

Archinstall 3.0.2 was just tagged as the newest version of this quick and easy, text-based installer for the Arch Linux operating system.

In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled.

An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.

Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results.

Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available.

Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online.

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released.

Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors.

Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors.

The second of three planned betas for the Qt 6.9 cross-platform UI toolkit is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in March.

The FreeBSD Foundation has begun receiving funding to work on zero-trust builds / reproducible builds. The work will hopefully be wrapped up in time for the major FreeBSD 15.0 release.

In addition to the Wine 10.0 stable release today, making the day very exciting as well for Linux gamers is the first official SDL 3.0 release!

In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel.

On the first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window there were a number of new AMD CPU features submitted. That's continued today with so far having the new "amd_node" driver to talk about for splitting up the modern Zen-era code and more of the legacy AMD Northbridge code from the pre-Zen days.

As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver software.

Serpent OS as the modern, from-scratch Linux distribution being led by well known open-source developer Ikey Doherty has started on a new project: disks-rs. The disks-rs project is intended to deal with file-systems, installation / partitioning, and block device management in a safe and effective manner from the Rust programming language.

Adding to the plethora of new hardware support coming with the Linux 6.14 kernel is enabling upstream support for the FPGAs found on the Intel-powered AAEON UP single board computers that are targeted for makers, hobbyists, and various industrial uses.

The big networking subsystem feature pull was sent out this morning for the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Over the past week there has been an uptick in patches pertaining to RDNA4's GFX12 graphics engine within the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for Mesa 25.0 to benefit Linux systems.

Intel's upstreaming work around the next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors continues for the Linux kernel. Among other code being prepped for submitting during the Linux 6.14 merge window, on Monday the thermal driver updates were focused on enabling support for Intel Panther Lake processors.

In addition to merging a number of the pull requests yesterday for the start of the Linux 6.14 cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds did merge some of his own new code as well. While his time these days working on new kernel code itself is more limited with managing the ever-growing upstream kernel community, he has managed some notable items in recent times like addressing ARM64 kernel annoyances and some performance optimizations.

The x86/cache updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel are extending the Resource Control "resctrl" code for Intel Resource Director Technology / AMD Platform Quality of Service to have the capability of total memory bandwidth monitoring.

As a follow-up to yesterday's article around the on-disk format changes and other feature work on Bcachefs for Linux 6.14, the changes ended up being merged without issue for this next kernel version. That came after the Bcachefs changes were rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle due to a Code of Conduct (CoC) committee decision.

On this first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window to kick off the new kernel development cycle there are a few pull requests around new AMD CPU features worth noting.

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 6.13 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.13 is out today as this downstream kernel from FSF LA that strips out code pertaining to the ability to load non-free drivers/microcode and other elements not deemed within the standards of the Free Software Foundation, even when it means removing/disabling hardware support and features.

An engineer from AMD by way of their Nod.ai acquisition is seeking feedback from the community around what other Radeon graphics cards you would like to see supported by the ROCm support on Linux. This community wishlist extends to ROCm Windows support as well but at least there the HIP Rutime/SDK on Windows already supports more consumer GPUs than Linux.

After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here's a look at what's ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Following the Bcachefs pull requests being rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle by the kernel's Code of Conduct committee, the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is kicking off with a big pull request so that the upstream kernel can get back into sync with the latest development code for this cycle. This pull also contains the last anticipated major on-disk format upgrade prior to the removal of the "experimental" flag for this copy-on-write file-system.

Open-source developers are working on allowing the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to support the "Cyan Skillfish" graphics processor IP found within the Sony PlayStation 5 APU as well as the AMD BC-250 mining cards.

The Linux 6.14 kernel will enable the VirtualBox guest drivers to be built for ARM64 Linux virtual machines (VMs).

For the Linux 6.13 cycle the Rust code was hitting a "tipping point" with more Rust kernel drivers expected soon. For Linux 6.14 there is indeed a lot more Rust code being primed for this next kernel version.

Intel software engineers overnight published their new quarterly release of the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel, the collection of the company's patches against this open-source multimedia library for enhancing the Intel GPU acceleration support while the patches work their way for upstream FFmpeg.

Ingo Molnar sent out the big batch of scheduler enhancements bright and early today for helping kick off the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window.

The "TURNIP" open-source Vulkan API driver within Mesa for supporting Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to expose accelerated ray query support for ray-tracing with newer Adreno GPUs.

Among the VFS pull requests sent out this weekend in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window formally opening were the VFS direct I/O (DIO) updates that introduce a new STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN field for addressing a possible performance pitfall.

As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.

The pid_max tunable for the maximum number of process IDs allowed simultaneously was increased by default back in 2019 with systemd. But that increase breaks a long held assumption by some user-space software that pid_max or the process ID would not be greater than 65,535. To now better workaround such outdated user-space software, a set of patches for the Linux 6.14 kernel will allow adjusting the pid_max limit on a per PID namespace basis to help cope with such software hitting such artificial limits and without having to lower the overall system limit.

Ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable kernel expected to be released later today, there is a last minute fix for the EEVDF CPU scheduler.

Following the release a few days ago of GNU Coreutils 9.6, the Rust Coreutils "uutils" project as a re-implementation of these core utilities within the Rust programming language is out with a fresh update.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been sent out in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening.