Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Thanks to Valve, another Xbox 360-compatible game controller will see support with the upstream XPad input driver with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.

Christian Brauner of Microsoft began sending out his various pull requests today of new material for the Linux 6.14 kernel in advance of the merge window expected to open next week. One of the interesting pull requests is carrying the work of Omar Sandoval for faster /proc/kcore reads that can help with debugger performance.

GDB 16.1 was tagged today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for helping debug a variety of programming languages on numerous different CPU architectures and platforms.

An interesting open-source announcement out of Intel this week is that they have open-sourced their P4 software for their line of Tofino programmable Ethernet switches.

It was a busy week in the GNOME space with many packages checking in their "48.alpha" releases for the GNOME 48 Alpha milestone. Plus there has been some additional exciting GNOME developments for the week.

Technical BSD conferences aren't quite as common as the many Linux conferences these days. For the BSD conferences that do happen they tend to be more general in nature than carrying a desktop focus. But being announced this week was GhostBSDCon 2025 as a forthcoming developer conference largely focused on desktop use of this FreeBSD-derived distribution.

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta, there's been a lot of bug fixing happening ahead of the stable release due out next month for this open-source desktop.

Wine 10.0 is working its way to a stable release within the next week or two while for today there is the sixth weekly release candidate.

GNU Coreutils 9.6 released today as the updated version of these core utilities common to Linux systems and elsewhere.

Linux 6.13 is bringing many exciting features for its stable debut expected this Sunday. But following that it's onward to the Linux 6.14 kernel merge window for which it will be yet another very exciting round from completing the NTSYNC driver to adding new hardware support and much more. Here is a preview of some of the changes expected to be submitted for the Linux 6.14 cycle.

Vulkan 1.4.305 has been published as the newest version of the Vulkan API specification for high performance graphics and compute.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is poised to introduce initial support for SpacemiT platforms, the Chinese computing chip company developing "next-generation RISC-V high-performance CPUs." For this next Linux kernel release the SpaceMiT Key Stone K1 octa-core RISC-V AI CPU with SpacemiT X60 cores will see support.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 is out today with the official release of this updated open-source office suite coming in just about two weeks.

Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers.

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems.

At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week.

Back in 2022 the PCI Express 7.0 specification was announced with hitting 128 GT/s and planned availability in 2025. Since then they have been iterating on the spec with PCI-SIG members and today they announced the PCI Express 7.0 v0.7 specification.

With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here's a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025.

An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light.

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors.

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues.

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64.

A change proposal filed today for the in-development Fedora 42 is looking at making use of the EROFS file-system for all of the live media images.

George Hotz' Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a "completely sovereign" software stack for GPU compute on AMD.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is poised to introduce support for Intel THC... The Touch Host Controller IP block found in the PCH of modern Intel laptops for dealing with touchscreen, touchpads, and similar functionality.

An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital.

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code.

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling.

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests.

Libvirt 11.0 was christened today as the newest version of this open-source Virtualization API for managing VMs on Linux and other platforms while supporting KVM, QEMU, Xen, VMware ESX, LXC, Bhyve, and other hypervisors.

In development for several years has been LACT as a Linux GPU Control Application to allow adjusting various GPU/driver settings via a convenient graphical application. AMD and NVIDIA graphics have been supported to date while now Intel graphics are also supported with the brand new LACT 0.7.

Added today to the Mesa documentation for the open-source Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems is a set of "performance tips" for ensuring an optimal Intel Linux graphics 3D accelerated experience.

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news.

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running.

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing.

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update.

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment.

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.