Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Valve just announced the Steam Deck OLED as an upgraded version of their Steam Deck handheld Linux gaming device.

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion.

Cloud Hypervisor 36 has been released as this Rust-written VMM that started out as an Intel open-source project that since was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella with support from Microsoft, Arm, and other vendors. More recently even the likes of AMD and Ampere Computing have been onboard with this cloud and security focused virtualization hypervisor.

Andrew Morton last week sent out all of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel for which there is a lot of code churn.

Since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 back in September, this open-source and independently-developed overclocking/performance utility for Linux systems has been quick to tack on new features and rolling out new versions. A release candidate for TuxClocker 1.3 was issued a few days ago with yet more AMD graphics card controls.

Mesa 23.3-rc3 was released on Wednesday night as the newest weekly release candidate ahead of the Mesa 23.3 release as this quarter's feature series for this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers.

With the MIPS CPU architecture at the end of the road in light of RISC-V and LoongArch, there isn't much going on when it comes to MIPS development for the Linux kernel. Most cycles these days just brings bug fixes and removing old/unmaintained platforms. The latest MIPS platform now being removed is AR7 with Linux 6.7.

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward.

NetBSD 10 has been in development since late 2019 and the beta release is already a year old while now it's up to the release candidate phase with the availability of NetBSD 10-RC1.

There's been a number of patches quietly landing for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by AMD engineers in making various clean-ups and appearing to prepare for future adjustments to the driver in eventually extending the support beyond the current RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics hardware.

The Multi-Function Device (MFD) updates were sent out last week for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel for these drivers catering to heterogeneous hardware blocks.

Today marks the on-time alpha release of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" -- this encompasses the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop, KDE Frameworks 6 libraries, and KDE Gear applications.

Microsoft engineers continue working on the Mesa drivers as part of their effort for implementing various industry standard APIs atop Direct3D 12. This support can be used in cases of Windows drivers lacking for these APIs as well as being used within WSL for the graphics support while relying on D3D12 with the host environment.

The staging changes for Linux 6.7 are on the heavier side in part due to many new contributors from Outreachy mailing in their first kernel patches with various minor fixes. But staging is also lightened up a bit by dropping a wired Ethernet and wireless driver as part of the ongoing kernel effort to remove unused and old WiFi drivers.

With Linux 6.7 the EROFS read-only file-system intended primarily for mobile devices and containers is considering their MicroLZMA compression support as stable.

Microsoft yesterday published CBL-Mariner 2.0.20231106 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of services from Azure to WSL.

FEX 2311 is out today as the newest version of this emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 systems.

Ankur Arora of Oracle on Tuesday sent out a set of 86 patches for making the Linux kernel preemptible. This is based on earlier work by prominent Linux kernel engineer Thomas Gleixner.

GIMP 2.10.36 was released on Tuesday for this long-running stable series of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative while GIMP 3.0 has been very slow to materialize.

Following last week's merging of the Bcachefs file-system into Linux 6.7, a secondary set of updates were merged today for adding a few new features as well as some fixes for this newly-merged Linux file-system.

A very enticing performance optimization was merged yesterday into the OpenZFS codebase to enhance the write performance scalability.

The Rust-written Servo browser engine that started at Mozilla but now developed by Linux Foundation Europe with contributors from Igalia and other organizations has been enjoying a fruitful 2023.

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it's becoming iteratively more useful.

While there is now the 4th Gen EPYC processors with the exciting and vast line-up from the very powerful general purpose Genoa(X) processors and Bergamo for CSPs and very dense servers to Siena for telco/edge, the 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan(X)" processors remain very viable. Especially for those seeking to minimize hardware costs, seeking very mature platforms, or looking to upgrade existing EPYC SP3 servers, the EPYC 7003 series remains quite competitive. Today AMD formally announced six new Milan processors.

While delayed by several weeks compared to their initial release goals, today marks the availability of Fedora 39 as a wonderful upgrade to this popular Linux distribution.

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle dubbed the "Noble Numbat", Canonical is making a technology preview of Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) available for Ubuntu 23.10.

Back at the OCP Summit in Prague earlier this year AMD detailed openSIL for advancing open-source system firmware by opening up the CPU silicon initialization process. An update was provided at the OCP San Jose event in October around the AMD OpenSIL effort.

The HID subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel don't bring any shiny new features or notable hardware support additions, but there is a clean-up to the Logitech HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver probing code as well as some notable quirks/fixes to different hardware.

In addition to the continued FUTEX2 improvements that landed in Linux 6.7, another pull request merged last week for the new kernel bring FUTEX support to IO_uring.

A set of 53 patches were upstreamed on Monday for syncing Mesa 24.0-devel against the latest Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver changes carried by Asahi Linux. This in turn is a big push for getting more of the open-source OpenGL functionality into Mesa for enjoying Linux on Apple M1 and M2 hardware.

Last week's locking set of changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel add new interfaces for the FUTEX2 system call ABI. This work is making FUTEX2 more extendable and addressing some of the prior limitations.

Going back to early last year saw AMD Linux engineers posting PerfMonV2 patches in preparation for Zen 4 processors. The PerfMonV2 updated performance monitoring capabilities with Zen 4 were merged last year and are supported with the latest EPYC 8004/9004 series processors. Coming only now though to Linux 6.7 is support for Unified Memory Controller (UMC) events as part of PerfMonV2.

While the next revision of the C standard won't see its formal publishing until the 2024 calendar year, the ISO C standards committee already decided on keeping "C23" as the informal name for this next major C update. As such, with today's GCC 14 Git the -std=c23 compiler option for targeting C23 is now honored along with -std=gnu23 for the GNU dialect of C23.

Systemd 255-rc1 is out this morning and it's packed with even more features for this dominant Linux init system and a growing list of other system utilities. Systemd 255 even is introducing systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" for displaying important error messages during boot failure, systemd-vmspawn as a new tool to spawn virtual machines, and other new features.

After more than two years of work, a patch series was posted this weekend for a "fully functional" ffmpeg multi-threaded command-line application with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines being wired up.

"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!

A wide variety of x86 platform driver changes were merged for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel from new hardware support to improving the state of Linux on various Intel/AMD laptops.

Released last week was the newest version of Hangover, the project from Wine developers for helping Wine run on non-x86 CPU architectures for ultimately helping to make it easier to run x86/x86_64 Windows games/applications more easily on Linux AArch64, POWER, and RISC-V environments. The main focus still so far though is about allowing these Windows apps/games on ARM Linux systems.

Since the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public in August there were kernel patches merged that day and since then there's been a few rounds of clean-ups and fixes for this mitigation code formally known as the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). With Linux 6.7, more SRSO mitigation clean-ups have been merged.

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is an open-source independently-developed project that implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface so that software like Mozilla Firefox can enjoy video hardware acceleration on Linux using NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software.

LXQt 1.4 debuted today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Qt desktop environment that was formed years ago as the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects.

The first week of the Linux 6.7 merge window began with the surprise of the Bcachefs file-system being merged and now capping off the first week is another surprise... Nouveau GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware integration that allows making use of NVIDIA's binary GSP firmware on RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs for having improved support. In turn this GSP route also provides initial support for GeForce RTX 40 series support.

The hardening updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel bring a new hardening configuration profile to help in building a security hardened kernel with some sane defaults.

The Linux kernel's subsystem for Compute Express Link that is playing a vital role in servers moving forward continues picking up new features and evolving the code-base as more CXL hardware enters the world.

As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues to be improved upon in the mainline Linux kernel and with the ongoing v6.7 merge window has received some additional enhancements.

Blosc (c-blosc2) is a high performance compressor focused on binary data for efficient storage of large binary data-sets in-memory or on-disk and helping to speed-up memory-bound computations.

Linux 6.6 saw EEVDF merged and Intel hybrid cluster scheduling re-introduced. The core scheduler improvements merged this past week for the in-development Linux 6.7 isn't quite as exciting but still there are some healthy scheduler improvements this round.

Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" has added initial support for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for working on OpenGL and OpenCL interoperability.

The Linux 6.7 sound subsystem changes submitted this week by maintainer Takashi Iwai include support for a number of new audio devices/platforms.

Recently there was some tuning in Mesa Git for helping with higher quality Radeon video encoding on Linux for GPUs using Video Core Next (VCN). Similar tuning has now been back-ported for older Radeon GPUs using the VCE encode engine and UVD video decoding.

The crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel includes the usual churn like various crypto acceleration updates for different SoCs and other routine changes plus is also limiting the role of some insecure and/or obsolete crypto hashing algorithms.

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time.