Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Following last week's start of the i915 DRM-Next changes intended for Linux 6.2, an initial batch of drm-intel-gt-next feature patches have now also been mailed in to DRM-Next for staging ahead of that next Linux kernel cycle. Notable with today's pull request is a lot of DG2/Alchemist improvements.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been enjoying many performance optimizations and other improvements in recent months around its ray-tracing capabilities. Merged today is another significant optimization to better the Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support and coming days ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement.

As part of Intel's compiler enablement work for Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge CPUs, support for x86_64 AVX-NE-CONVERT is the latest feature being merged into GCC Git in time for GCC 13.

GNU Make 4.4 is now available as the first major release in more than two and a half years. GNU Make 4.4 has many improvements to this important build automation tool that is still widely used by countless free software projects.

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc3 as the third weekly test release of the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel.

While Intel contributed oneVPL support to FFmpeg this summer that can be used for video encoding/decoding to AV1 and other formats, this past week Intel engineers contributed an AV1 encode Quick Sync Video (QSV) encoder too for FFmpeg. This AV1 encode path using their Media SDK with QSV is ultimately building atop oneVPL.

Sigstore that is backed by Google, Red Hat, GitHub, and other prominent organizations with an aim to secure the open-source software supply chain has reached general availability and issued the "v1.0" releases for their key software components.

For those interested in the OneXPlayer handheld gaming consoles, a x86 platform driver for the Linux kernel has been posted for getting working sensor support on the AMD-powered OneXPlayer Mini.

Back in Linux 5.19 the initial code for Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) was merged while still an ongoing matter is getting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) integration merged that is now up to its tenth revision and spans 108 patches.

Back in late 2020 FreeBSD initially landed WireGuard support ahead of FreeBSD 13. But then during the FreeBSD 13 release candidate phase, the WireGuard driver was removed over concerns over the quality of the initial implementation.

JPEG-XL has been looked on rather favorably as a royalty-free, next-generation lossy/lossless image format with much better performance than JPEG. To much surprise, Google Chrome is already making preparations to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in their browser.

While Asahi Linux has been running on the higher-end Apple M1 SoC variants and those Macs utilizing them, with the mainline Linux 6.2 kernel will finally be the upstreaming of the Apple M1 Pro/Max/Ultra support with the various device trees set to be added.

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code. Bcachefs has been in development for years though it isn't quite yet in a position for landing in the mainline kernel. In any event a lot of feature work continues happening and Overstreet remains dedicated to the file-system's success.

Picked up this week in the "net-next" code ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window in December is support for TCP Protective Load Balancing (PLB).

In addition to this week having brought the announcement of GraalVM 22.3 as the newest quarterly feature release and also Oracle announcing that GraalVM CE code will be contributed to OpenJDK, the Eclipse Foundation is ending out their week by having shipped OpenJ9 v0.35.0.

KDE developers remain very busy planning for Plasma 6.0 as well as working various changes into Plasma 5.27 as the desktop's last Plasma 5 series release.

Intel today submitted their initial batch of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next of new driver material slated for the Linux 6.2 cycle.

Intel has published the Intel Extension for TensorFlow that makes use of TF's PluggableDevice mechanism to now provide an Intel GPU back-end for TensorFlow that works with the Data Center GPU Flex Series as well as Arc Graphics discrete GPUs.

In addition to the exFAT Linux kernel driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux, in user-space is "exfatprogs" providing the various utilities for interacting with this file-system popular on SD/SDCX storage and flash drives. The exfatprogs 1.2 release today brings fsck.exfat support for repairing corrupted exFAT file-systems on Linux.

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3.

While the Intel Core i9 13900K is running fast and well on Linux, a few Raptor Lake IDs have come to light that have been missing from various drivers and only now being addressed.

Just last week I wrote about Glibc preparing more optimizations for AVX-512 CPUs with implementing more C library functions in EVEX512 enhanced vector extension versions. This week there is more EVEX512 function work.

Btrfs' async discard functionality will likely be turned on by default with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle when running on an SSD.

With Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" having shipped last week, Canonical engineers are moving ahead and beginning to get things going for the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle now under the "Lunar Lobster" codename.

Fedora Linux 37 has been running behind schedule and today it was decided to push it back now to mid-November over a "critical" openSSL vulnerability yet to be made public.

Valve's new Steam client beta published today has rolled out an updated Big Picture mode for enjoying the Steam client on TVs and other large format displays while this Big Picture mode was designed and optimized for the Steam Deck.

Merged this morning into Mesa 22.3 for the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver is "protected content" support in conjunction with the EGL_EXT_protected_content extension.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 has finally been released as the first tagged release of this Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying an increasing number of D3D12 Windows games on Linux.

As a warning and call for testing, old and "weird" laptops may broken backlight controls when moving to the Linux 6.1 kernel currently under development. Thus if invested in using an old laptop with a modern kernel version, it may be useful trying out a Linux 6.1 release candidate to help spot any regressions early.

While the Intel Alder Lake and now Raptor Lake hybrid processor support on Linux is in good shape after various improvements to the kernel for dealing with the mix of P and E cores, there are occasional caveats. Posted this week were a set of Intel P-State driver fixes around hardware P-states (HWP) calibration to ensure it's working on all Intel hybrid platforms.

At the start of the year SUSE's YaST team announced D-Installer as their new web-based distribution installer. Now as we approach the end of the year, D-Installer is ready for more widespread user testing and they are looking for help from the community in testing. Additionally, they are looking for help coming up with a new name for the "D-Installer".

Earlier this month I wrote about AMD "Morgana" and "Glinda" SoCs appearing in Coreboot for this open-source system firmware implementation. These are codenames we haven't seen talked about previously by AMD and this week more of the AMD Glinda SoC code has been published and merged into Coreboot.

The Linux kernel's networking subsystem is beginning to make preparations for 800 Gbps Ethernet networking.

Ampere Computing is mainlining a Linux kernel driver for accessing the sensors of their SMpro co-processor found with their current line of Ampere Altra server processors.

Work carried out by Google engineers and others around the Linux kernel's read-copy update (RCU) synchronization mechanism to make it "lazier" is helping with 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems. This "Lazy RCU" work is likely to be merged for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window in December.

In recent months there has been a lot of RADV ray-tracing optimizations and improvements for maturing the ray-tracing support by this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa. The RADV ray-tracing performance is about to take another step forward with a pending merge request providing a PLOC BVH builder that can improve the Quake II RTX performance by around 33%.

With the recent Linux 6.1 merge window there sadly weren't any Nouveau Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver improvements for getting the RTX 30 "Ampere" OpenGL support working yet with the mainline kernel even with RTX 40 series having launched. Needless to say, there also wasn't any progress on the re-clocking front for getting the GTX 900 series and later running in a performant manner on this open-source driver. But the Nouveau developers at Red Hat haven't simply been idling but rather have been working on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support for improving the RTX 20 "Turing" support and newer.

An updated version of the Rust "gccrs" front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was sent out today for review. The GCC Rust "v3" patches address developer comments raised during earlier review as they try to get this new Rust programming language support merged in time for GCC 13.

A change proposal drafted for next year's Fedora 40 is looking at "porting Fedora to modern C" by ensuring the contained C source code of packages is compliant with strict C99 compilers.

Daniel Stenberg has announced the release of cURL 7.86 as the newest version of this command-line utility and library for various networking purposes.

A new version of Canonical's Mir open-source display server is now available for what serves as a Wayland compositor for various Ubuntu use-cases around IoT and other niche purposes.