Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Valve just published their Steam Survey results for March 2023 and these initial numbers show a 0.54% drop to the Linux gaming marketshare, putting the overall Linux gaming population at around 0.84% of the Steam customer base. However, once again these numbers appear skewed/inaccurate.

Introduced with Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" processors was the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) for hardware accelerating data compression/decompression combined with primitive analytics functions for helping to accelerate the likes of RocksDB and ClickHouse. Intel IAA with Sapphire Rapids has already been supported for some time on an open-source stack as laid out in the Intel Sapphire Rapids accelerator setup guide while now Intel engineers are preparing Linux for IAA 2.0.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software as well as the GTK toolkit are the latest open-source projects this week ironing out support for Wayland's fractional scaling protocol.

Following yesterday's Wine 8.5 bi-weekly development release, Wine-Staging 8.5 is out for this experimental/testing version where some 500+ extra patches are applied atop the upstream Wine code-base.

The KDE developers ended March on a high note with more fixes, continued porting around Qt 6, and also taking care of more Plasma Wayland issues.

During the first quarter of 2023 on Phoronix I wrote 708 original news articles pertaining to Linux, open-source, and hardware. That was complemented by another 45 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured articles for the quarter. Here is a look back at what excited Linux/open-source enthusiasts for the quarter.

Wine 8.5 is out to end out the month as the newest bi-weekly development release for enjoying the ability to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Intel's oneAPI software engineers are closing out the quarter by releasing oneDNN 3.1 as the newest version of this neural network library that is used by the likes of PyTorch, Tensorflow, PaddlePaddle, ONNX, OpenVINO, MATLAB's Deep Learning Toolbox, Apache MXNet, and many other applications.

The Panfrost DRM driver providing open-source kernel graphics driver support for modern Arm Mali graphics in various SoCs is seeing some new hardware support for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle as well as now supporting speed binning functionality.

Vulkan 1.3.246 has been published with one prominent new extension introduced that was started by Nintendo and worked on by several other hardware/software vendors.

Google engineers on Thursday posted initial "request for comments" patches on their KVM-CPUFreq driver that is part of their effort to improve the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling behavior and task placement within KVM-based virtual machines. This effort is leading to big improvements in raw performance and performance-per-Watt for tasks running within Linux VMs.

Sound Open Firmware "SOF" 2.5 has been released as this open-source sound/DSP firmware initiative that was originally started by Intel but now is a Linux Foundation project and seeing hardware support from multiple vendors.

The Bloomberg financial, software, and media company has announced their FOSS Fund as a small step for helping open-source projects they rely on and of interest to their employees.

With the Fedora 39 release later this year the developers are planning on moving to RPM 4.19 as the newest version of their packaging format.

The beta of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and its various spins/flavors were released overnight for testing.

Since last year AMD-Xilinx has been posting Linux patches for enabling CDX as a new bus between application processors (APUs) and FPGAs. The AMD CDX bus is now poised for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

While last week NVIDIA promoted their 530 Linux driver series to stable, for those using the prior NVIDIA 525 series production branch a new point release was issued today that backports several fixes.

Modern MSI laptops will see improved feature support with the upstream Linux 6.4 kernel this summer thanks to a new driver set to be merged.

VP8 and H.264 have long been supported as part of WebRTC simulcast in the Chrome web browser while with the upcoming Chrome 113 release, VP9 and AV1 simulcast support is being enabled.

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has sent out updated patches on the kernel patch series he's been working on the past several months around the "EEVDF" CPU scheduler for improving upon the current CFS scheduler code.

For those that happen to have a Gigabyte A320M-S2H V2 micro-ATX motherboard or you have been looking out for a low-end, budget motherboard for an AMD Ryzen AM4 build, the A320M-S2H V2 is the latest seeing working sensor support with the mainline Linux kernel.

Toward the end of last year Arm detailed Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) for adding more capabilities to Armv9-A around speedy matrix processing. Merged this morning is initial support for SME2 within Binutils as part of the GNU compiler toolchain for the GNU Assembler.

The AMDGPU kernel driver patch flow has ticked up in recent days with working on new hardware support/features.

AMD today published HIP Ray-Tracing 2.0 "HIP RT" as the newest version of their open-source ray-tracing library built for use with their latest-generation GPUs for leveraging hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Intel hosted an investor call this morning around their Data Center and AI business, including a Xeon roadmap update and more. Here are some of those highlights from this morning's call.

Blender 3.5 has been released as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source 3D modeling software. Blender 3.5 is another exciting update for this free software that has garnered significant industry interest and support.

In time for the new month to begin and in turn a new Arch Linux installer ISO, Archinstall 2.5.4 was just released as the newest version of this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux OS installer.

For over a decade now the X.Org Server has been seeing routine security disclosures in its massive codebase with some security researchers saying it's even worse than it looks and security researchers frequently finding multiple vulnerabilities at a time in the large and aging code-base that these days rarely sees new feature work. Today another disclosure was made by the folks with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

Qt Creator 10 has been released as the newest version of this open-source C++ and Qt focused integrated development environment provided by The Qt Company.

Merged to Mesa 23.1-devel yesterday was UMD metadata v2 support for the RADV and RadeonSI drivers to provide extra metadata that can be optionally enabled to help with Radeon GPU debugging.

The upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for a number of Kye drawing tablets, which are also marketed as Genius tablets.

Days after landing AV1 and HEVC streaming support over RTMP to allow game streamers and other livecasting with OBS Studio to YouTube to happen via AV1/HEVC as an alternative to H.264, OBS Studio 29.1 Beta 1 has been tagged.

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat released Fwupd 1.8.13 as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware/BIOS updating solution for Linux and other platforms.

Since 2019 there has been Ubuntu Cinnamon as an unofficial remix of Ubuntu paired with Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. After the three years of progress, Ubuntu Cinnamon has now been granted an official status with next month's Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release.

AMD-Xilinx recently open-sourced their LLVM-based Nanotube compiler that can be used for some nifty networking purposes on FPGAs.

Version 2.18 of the VA-API library, libva, has been released today for this Linux Video Acceleration API library that is used by the various driver implementations.

Turtle Beach gaming controllers will see support by the widely-used XPad driver with the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel.

When SDL3 development kicked off last November for this open-source library that is widely used by cross-platform games and other software, QNX support was removed alongside other old targets. Just months later, the QNX platform support is being revived.

The Vulkan 1.3.245 extension is a small update to this industry-standard graphics/compute API with just a handful of issues resolved but it does introduce one new extension, which is a NVIDIA vendor extension aiming to further enhance Vulkan ray-tracing.

Intel has published v0.1 of its GPGMM software, the open-source General-Purpose GPU Memory Management Library. This library is intended to be used by modern software employing the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs for helping application developers deal with low-level video memory management.

A new release of OpenBLAS is now available, the open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its wide variety of processor optimizations.

Over the weekend I wrote about AMD beginning to post new graphics driver patches for a new GPU. As pointed out in that earlier article, it looks to be a new AMD Instinct MI300 / "Aldebaran" GPU model and today more patches were posted that further confirm this target.

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver.

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table.

Thanks to forthcoming work out of Red Hat, the Linux 6.4 Device Mapper (DM) code is expected to see some optimization work that can significantly benefit concurrent I/O performance... In one case at least acquiring buffers now about 25 times faster.

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title.

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system.