Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While there's been a multi-year effort for Wayland high resolution scrolling, support by the desktop environments for this functionality, and all the other infrastructure work, high resolution scrolling is proving to still be a challenge for Linux in 2023. The latest is now the Linux kernel dropping Logitech high resolution scrolling for mice connected via USB until further improvements can be made.

A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop.

Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.

The open-source Godot 4.0 game engine will finally be released soon while being christened today is the initial release candidate.

The very promising work around parallel CPU bring-up to speed-up Linux kernel boot times with today's high core count servers and HEDT systems has been revised once more. Notable with the v7 patches is re-enabling support for this time-savings boot feature for AMD processors.

Following yesterday seeing RADV Vulkan Video decoding land in Mesa 23.1, the initial Vulkan Video support for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver has also been merged to Mesa 23.1.

Google engineers on Tuesday released AOM AV1 v3.6 as the newest version of their open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder.

GROMACS as the widely-used molecular dynamics software issued its stable v2023 release this week with improved GPU support via SYCL.

Intel today introduced Embree 4.0 as a major update to this high performance ray-tracing library.

With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle there is finally support for the Steam Deck being added to the Steam HID driver.

Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel.

AMD ROCm 5.4 was released back in November while since then it has continue to be refined with new point releases to address various issues with this open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

For those wanting to run Linux bare metal on modern Apple Silicon M1/M2 systems, the easiest way to do so is by using the Asahi Linux distribution with its downstream kernel carrying the latest Apple driver enablement patches for the ARM hardware, the specialized installer for safely setting up the Linux distribution on the Apple, and modern package base provided by Arch Linux. For fans of Fedora Workstation, the Fedora Asahi remix has been working to provide a great Fedora Workstation experience for modern Macs.

GNU Compiler Collection compiler expert Jan Hubicka at SUSE continues working on last-minute tweaks to the GCC 13 for benefiting AMD's latest Zen 4 processors.

The work led by Red Hat's David Airlie on supporting Vulkan Video with the Mesa RADV driver has seen the work mainlined today for Mesa 23.1!

In addition to the in-development Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda web UI based installer that has been in the works, Fedora IoT is rolling out a new installer of its own to ease deployments around edge computing and Internet of Things devices.

Among the many interesting talks this past weekend at the 2023 edition of FOSDEM was Intel engineer Jiewen Yao presenting TD-Shim as the company's work on a lightweight virtual firmware for containers that complies with their approach to confidential computing.

The X.Org Server keeps on giving when it comes to security vulnerabilities with its massive, aging, and ill-maintained code-base. Disclosed on Monday night was CVE-2023-0494 as the latest security advisory and another discovery by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 inference accelerator that features up to sixteen cores and focused on AI needs at the edge of data centers continues on a trek toward having mainline Linux kernel support.

While initial Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support for the Linux kernel only was mainlined last year to the kernel tree, Arm already has SME 2 and SME 2.1 support on the way to mainline.

Well known multimedia developer and VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend on the upcoming FFmpeg 6.0 release as well as dav1d v1.1.

Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend in Brussels. The focus of Żygowski's presentation for the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting was on the current client and server hardware state for AMD platforms with Coreboot / open-source firmware.

After the prior kernel patches had stalled in their review process, last week work was revived on x86_64 parallel CPU bring-up for the Linux kernel to help in booting the kernel faster on larger core count desktops and servers. The results have been promising and over the past few days more test results have flowed in along with other positive commentary that will hopefully this time lead to the work ultimately getting upstreamed.

In development now for nearly two years is Chimera Linux as a "non-GNU" Linux distribution built with the LLVM Clang compiler, leveraging musl libc, and commonly relying on BSD user-space software components. After a lot of work on bringing up Chimera Linux as well as getting a Wayland-based deskttop going, the project is aiming for its alpha release within the next month.

The Linux 6.3 kernel's IT87 driver is preparing support for the IT87952E super I/O controller that is used by some newer desktop motherboards and will now be able to enjoy hardware monitoring "HWMON" support.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee recently signed off on the proposed "Unfiltered Flathub" feature that makes it easier to enjoy the full collection of software offered by Flatpak's Flathub service.

Even with local digital video recording from your antenna or cable being far less common these days than a decade prior, in the era of Internet streaming the open-source MythTV software continues making progress for this dominant Linux solution for HTPC/PVR needs.

Linus Torvalds just issued the seventh weekly RC release of Linux 6.2 while the stable kernel debut is expected two weeks from today.

Showcased today at the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels was RustyHermit, a Rust-written modular unikernel intended for handling micro virtual machines.

AMD sent in another batch of AMDGPU features and fixes to DRM-Next this week ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window. With being late in the cycle the material is mostly of different fixes -- including some Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" (GFX11) fixes -- but also a new feature in that AMD Radeon GPU power savings with S0ix even when the system BIOS support is lacking.

For those that may have tried the recent macOS-inspired helloSystem 0.8 release for that desktop-focused FreeBSD-based operating system, if that didn't satisfy your desktop BSD desires, MidnightBSD 3.0 is working its way to release as another alternative.

Thanks to Intel another batch of Compute Express Link (CXL) feature code is working its way into shape for the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

In marking ten years since the prior release, Xvidtune 1.0.4 was released on Saturday with all the patches that have buult up over the past decade.

Cairo 1.17.8 was released this week as a new development snapshot of this 2D vector graphics library that over the years has seen widespread use by a multitude of desktop software.

Following last week's article about Linux developers eyeing a new "DOITM" security mitigation for latest Intel CPUs based on guidance from Intel around Data Operand Independent Timing (DOIT) instructions and then it coming to light that the DOIT mode shouldn't always be on, a lengthier statement from one of Intel's Linux engineers has been published summing up the current beliefs and Linux kernel possibilities around DOIT(M).

A number of patches were merged this week to Mesa 23.1 around the Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver that continues progressing on open-source OpenGL support for Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics.

Just prior to Christmas there was a "request for comments" (RFC) patch series sent out working on RDNA3 user-mode queue support for their AMDGPU kernel driver. That work has now advanced post-RFC with an updated patch series having been sent out on Friday.

NVIDIA on Friday released the v525.47.07 Linux driver beta with their latest Vulkan driver enhancements along with the NVIDIA 528.50 driver on the Windows side.

Back in 2020 Mozilla moved Servo to the Linux Foundation for the Rust-written web engine after it laid off the Servo developers. Servo development is now community/volunteer-driven and a road-map was published yesterday outlining some of their hopes for this calendar year.

KDE Plasma 5.27 is due for release on Valentine's Day (14 February) as what will also be the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series. With the imminent 5.27 release, more feature work on Plasma 6.0 has been getting underway.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as the first major update to this bootable, open-source RAM testing software in nearly a decade. The memtest86+ 6.0 release marked a rewrite of the software while out today is the first update to that widely-used RAM testing software.

Valve has just published Proton 7.0-6 as the newest version of this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Proton 7.0-6 had been available in testing and release candidate form since the end of last year while now has been promoted to stable.

Intel engineers this week published new Linux open-source driver code for TPMI, the Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface. Intel TPMI for seemingly future processors will allow for more streamlined power management handling and other enhancements over the way the Intel power management drivers currently function.

A proposed Linux kernel patch would provide a new Kconfig build time option of "CONFIG_DEFAULT_CPU_MITIGATIONS_OFF" to build an insecure kernel if wanting to avoid the growing list of CPU security mitigations within the kernel and their associated performance overhead.

For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support.

The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release.

As mentioned a few weeks back, Red Hat has been working to arrange a developer "hackfest" to further work out plans and development around HDR display support on the Linux desktop. They are aiming to bring together graphics driver developers, desktop developers, and other Linux stakeholders -- including possibly the likes of Valve -- to work out planning of high dynamic range monitor support over the next year or two for the Linux desktop. That Red Hat HDR hackfest has now been organized to happen in late April.

A half-year has passed already since Dbus-Broker 32 was released for this drop-in replacement to the reference D-Bus implementation that is focused on providing better performance and reliability. Today that's been succeeded by Dbus-Broker 33 as a relatively minor update to this software from the BUS1 project.