Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

More than one week ago was the main Bcachefs feature pull for Linux 6.8 that included further enhancing the performance and other features of this new file-system merged back in Linux 6.7. Yesterday, just prior to the Linux 6.8-rc1 release, a secondary set of Bcachefs updates were merged for this next kernel version.

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost Internet and electricity amid winter storms last weekend and was without them for most of this week, he's still managed to deliver an on-time Linux 6.8-rc1 release following the two week merge window.

When it comes to the Linux kernel's "crypto" subsystem for various cryptographic and compression algorithms and various hardware drivers, the new additions for Linux 6.8 are particularly interesting on the Intel side.

Sent in last week were all of the media driver updates for Linux 6.8. Arguably most notable is the introduction of the StarFive Camera Subsystem driver as a new image sensor processor driver initially being treated as a staging driver.

Following the work on enhancing the scalability of the MQ-Deadline I/O scheduler, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has applied similar scalability improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler.

Along with the USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman also submitted the char/misc changes during the back-half of the week for this new kernel version.

Merged this week were the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes for the nearly-closed Linux 6.8 merge window.

For those on a new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series system at least, the recently released Linux 6.7 stable kernel is looking mighty good at least for the Threadripper 7980X when testing on the newly-launched System76 Thelio Major.

Serpent OS as the latest Linux distribution project of well known developer Ikey Doherty is off to a great start for 2024. Following all their Rust infrastructure work last year, that infrastructure work has continued while also taking on new challenges for the new year.

While the new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs may feel fast with pushing 11~12k MB/s sequential reads and writes, a Ceph storage cluster has just broken the 1 TiB/s threshold.

Submitted and merged on Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window were the LoongArch processor changes for this new kernel version. Most singificant for these Chinese processors is now supporting the Rust Linux kernel integration.

There's just over one month to go until the release of the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6. This week KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Gear applications have been branched.

Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window paused due to Linus Torvalds losing Internet connectivity and electricity. It lasted for the better part of the week but then managed to get back to work and now thankfully has been back online albeit with intermittent electrical issues following a brutal winter storm.

While SDL 3.0 remains under development as the next major release for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by games and other software for cross-platform handling, SDL 2.30 RC1 was released today as the newest of the SDL2 series.

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime.

Days after delivering a nice boost to Linux I/O performance, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has tackled another storage-related bottleneck within the kernel.

Merged as part of an initial batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is support for enabling the GFXOFF feature when ROCm compute applications are active on GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware.

For those wanting to build/mod their own Linux gaming handheld or craft a controller for other uses, the Adafruit Seesaw gamepad has a driver premiering with Linux 6.8.

Wayland Protocols 1.33 was released today by Daniel Stone for this de facto collection of Wayland protocols for implementing by the various Wayland compositors.

The Servo open-source browser engine originally started by Mozilla has seen renewed development in recent time by Linux Foundation Europe and via developers at firms like Igalia. Last year they drafted plans for focusing on making Servo embed-friendly so that this Rust-written code could be easily leveraged by desktop apps and frameworks. Today more light was shed on this embed initiative and their focus on integrating with Tauri.

For those making use of the AppArmor Linux kernel security module, there is a notable change coming with the Linux 6.8 kernel.

The developers behind the Genode open-source operating system framework have shared their 2024 road-map of new features they hope to accomplish this calendar year.

Following last month's FreeRDP 3.0 release with many improvements for this Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, FreeRDP 3.2 is out today with a number of fixes -- especially as it pertains to Wayland support.

A second batch of s390 architecture changes were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window.

Last week Linux creator Linus Torvalds spotted a bad performance regression with the early Linux 6.8 kernel state that was leading to his kernel build times doubling. Since then kernel developers were working on analyzing the issue and devising a fix. A few minutes ago the fix has worked its way into the mainline kernel.

Building off this week's release of Wine 9.0 for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms is now Hangover 9.0. Hangover as a reminder is the project based on Wine initially focused on running x86 32-bit Windows apps on AArch64 Linux. Hangover works by running Wine atop various emulators such as QEMU, FEX, or Box64 for handling the processor/ISA translation.

ReiserFS file-system creator Hans Reiser who is currently remains imprisoned in California for murdering his wife in 2006 has commented on the Linux kernel mailing list by way of a letter exchange from prison.

Being developed the past several years by the SYRMIA embedded software firm is Autocheck, an LLVM/Clang-based project to check C and C++ code to evaluate if it's suitable for running inside automobiles and other safety critical environments. Autocheck is now free and open-source for those wanting to help evaluate the safety of your C/C++ code.

The third alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for testing as the developers continue work on removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and enhancing the overall performance of this scripting language.

With Linus Torvalds back to work, merged to mainline on Wednesday were the RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Mesa 24.0 is shaping up to be a great release for this quarter's set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux and other platforms. Mesa 24.0-rc2 is out today to facilitate the latest weekly test release.

Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window was thrown into a mess with Linus Torvalds losing Internet access and electricity during some significant winter storms battling the Portland, Oregon area. After nearly five days without being able to manage the Git merges for the Linux 6.8 merge window, a few minutes ago activity was restarted.

After being in development since 2019, the NetBSD 10.0 stable release looks like it will happen soon. Those wanting to help in last minute testing can find NetBSD 10.0 RC3 now available.

This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April.

For those interested in Linux on IBM Z / s390, there's a small change yielding measurable benefits to the s390 system call entry performance with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel.

Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away.

Linux 6.7 introduced the "ia32_emulation=" boot option for enabling/disabling support for x86 32-bit programs and the ability to execute 32-bit system calls. This is part of the effort of some Linux distributions working to restrict x86 32-bit user-space support where not needed in order to reduce the software attack surface while still having a boot-time option for those wanting to enable 32-bit support or to otherwise disable it if your kernel build keeps it enabled.

Jiri Kyjovsky of Red Hat has shared news today of Log Detective, a new tool being developed that will leverage an AI model to help in analyzing build failures for RPM packages.

Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project.

While the Linux v6.8 kernel merge window isn't even over yet and that kernel not debuting until March, a few days ago the first drm-misc-next pull request was submitted to DRM-Next to begin queuing the open-source graphics/display driver changes that will ultimately be targeting the Linux 6.9 kernel.