Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While Mesa 23.0 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 22.3.4 was released today as the newest bi-weekly stable bug-fix release for the open-source Mesa 3D drivers.

Intel open-source engineers continue to be quite busy in bringing up the Linux support for Emerald Rapids as the successor to Sapphire Rapids and then as well for Granite Rapids as the Xeon Scalable processors following that. With the i10nm EDAC changes queued up ahead of Linux 6.3, there is support through Granite Rapids as well as confirming Granite Rapids supporting up to 12 channel DDR5 system memory.

Canonical announced this morning that their Ubuntu Pro subscription service has been promoted from beta to general availability (GA).

Following the month-long Christmas break, the Vulkan API working group is back to carrying out weekly(-ish) updates to the Vulkan specification. Out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.240 that brings one new extension in addition to a number of clarifications and corrections to the document.

Now that Wine 8.0 shipped earlier this week, the Wine Git tree is back to accepting new feature patches after it was under a feature freeze since early December. With nearly two months worth of feature work to land, it's been a busy week landing new code for what in turn will be found in the Wine 8.1 bi-weekly development release.

PipeWire 0.3.65 is out today as the newest feature update to this novel server for managing audio/video streams on Linux.

FreeBSD has published its 2022'Q4 quarterly status report that outlines all of the progress made by this open-source BSD operating system project.

Following the recent release of the Intel Media Driver 2022Q4, Intel's oneVPL GPU runtime has been updated for its quarterly feature release that builds atop the Media Driver / VA-API stack and is about oneAPI integration for the video processing layer.

AMD sent out a set of 32 kernel patches today for their AMDKFD/AMDGPU kernel driver code in providing upstream support for debugging of their GPU compute instruction set architecture (ISA).

Much of the Rust programming language support/infrastructure for the Linux kernel thus far has been with an x86_64 focus while obviously AArch64 is an important target as well. It's nice to see Arm Limited engineers working on the Rust Linux kernel support for AArch64/ARM64.

Google engineer Ilya Tocar has introduced the notion of "light" AVX support within the LLVM compiler infrastructure for utilizing some benefits of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) but trying to avoid the power/frequency impact that AVX-512 use has on older generations of Intel processors.

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree this morning were new AMDGPU firmware files for IP blocks found on upcoming hardware. It's likely these new firmware files are for the forthcoming Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors with RDNA3 graphics.

Among the numerous exciting aspects of Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) inference accelerator for Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) workloads.

After Microsoft engineers got Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests to nearly 100% for their Dozen "Dzn" Mesa driver, they have now enabled Vulkan 1.1 support as their next step for this Vulkan-atop-Direct3D 12 open-source implementation.

LLVM 16 feature development is now officially over with the code having been branched, LLVM 17.0 development now happening with the mainline code, and LLVM 16.0 stable hoping to officially release in early March.

Red Hat continues investing in Stratis Storage as their modern Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM with intentions of providing ZFS and Btrfs like functionality but atop a mature and proven base. Released on Tuesday was Stratis 3.5 as the latest version of their Rust-written daemon.

Barring any release-blocking issues from coming up in the next week, Mesa 23.0 aims for its official release while 23.0-rc3 is now available for last minute testing.

Systemd developers today released their first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 253 feature release, which introduces a new "ukify" tool and has many other changes for this dominant Linux init system.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board of Directors has adopted updated by-laws that go into place next month with an aim of further protecting copyleft licensing.

DXVK 2.1 has just been released as this Direct3D 9/10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for helping to run Windows games with great speed on Linux.

The openSUSE project in collaboration with Cisco is making it easier to deploy H.264 codec support on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed.

Wine 8.0 is now officially out as the annual stable feature update for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Sound Open Firmware 2.4.1 is out today as the first stable v2.4 release for this open-source audio / DSP firmware stack for not only modern Intel platforms but AMD, Mediatek, and other increasing industry use as well. With Sound Open Firmware 2.4 they have continued the transition in making use of Zephyr RTOS.

Going back to last August AMD Linux engineers began posting Linux kernel patches for new Quality of Service features coming with Zen 4. After a few rounds of review and updates to those patches, this work enabling the AMD SMBA and BMEC features for 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors appear positioned for introduction in the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

MoltenVK is out with a new release for implementing the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for enjoying this industry-standard graphics/compute API on macOS and iOS.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has released new versions of the xf86-video-qxl and xf86-video-vmware DDX drivers for those making use of these X.Org drivers in virtualized environments.

GStreamer 1.22 is out today as the first major release of 2023 for this open-source multimedia framework. With GStreamer 1.22 comes some exciting feature additions.

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's, IceWM 3.3.1 was released today as the first (minor) release of 2023.

It's easy to forget that Microsoft maintains a command-line package manager for Windows... The open-source WinGet package manager is approaching three years since its announcement while it continues to not be as rich and robust of what Linux users for many years have enjoyed, but in any case it's continuing to be improved.

There still is another month to go until the Linux 6.2 kernel is released as stable and in turn kicking off the Linux 6.3 merge window. But from my monitoring in recent weeks, here is an early preview of some of the material expected for the v6.3 kernel based on what's been queuing in the various subsystem "-next" branches or otherwise looking like it should align for the next cycle.

The Armv8.1-M based Cortex-M85 processor support has made it into the GCC 13 compiler for this highest performing Cortex-M processor use for MCUs and embedded applications.

Fwupd 1.8.10 is out this morning to kickoff a new week and continuing to enhance the open-source firmware updating support on Linux systems.

It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases.

A new feature with Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" that hasn't been talked about too much is the new User Interrupts (UNITR) functionality. The Linux kernel support for it still also hasn't been merged but has shown promising results in patch form.

Two quality of service features new with the Zen 4 processors are still seeing their software support squared away ahead of mainlining in the Linux kernel.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc5 a day early compared to his usual Sunday ritual as a result of traveling. Due to an uptick in activity this week and the downtime around Christmas / end-of-year holidays, Torvalds is planning on this cycle spanning through Linux 6.2-rc8 before going gold.

Following the demise of PC-BSD/TrueOS, the most compelling BSD-based desktop operating system with a pleasant out-of-the-box user experience is helloSystem. The helloSystem OS has been aiming to be the macOS of the BSDs and for the past few years has been building a macOS-inspired desktop atop FreeBSD. Out today is helloSystem 0.8 as their newest version built atop FreeBSD 13.1.

On Friday AMD sent out another round of feature patches for new kernel graphics driver material they have readied in advance of the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

NVIDIA engineer Austin Shafer has contributed linux_dmabuf v4 feedback protocol support for upstream XWayland. This is working towards allowing scan-out modifiers that a compositor advertises to be delivered to X11 applications under (X)Wayland.

Back in November IBM engineers sent out compiler patches for "future" CPUs and notably added new dense math instructions. At the time they noted the new target "may or may not be present" in future IBM Power processors but now they are hoping to get these "future" patches squeeze into the GCC 13 compiler.

With the Linux 6.2 kernel Sony DualShock 4 controller support was added to the "hid-playstation" driver as the newer open-source driver maintained by Sony and started out originally in supporting the PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers. The DualShock 4 controller was long supported by the "hid-sony" driver while now in the Linux 6.3 kernel that support will be removed.

KDE developers have had a busy start to 2023 with preparing Plasma 5.27 for release as the final feature version in the Plasma 5 series. Work on Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 continues heating up.