Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.

While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.

Last week I wrote about Linux patches cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel builds for x86_64 CPUs. The new iteration of those patches were sent out today, including the addition of a patch adding the CONFIG_X86_64_NATIVE Kconfig tunable for enabling "-march=native" kernel builds to cater your optimized kernel compilation for the CPU on which you are building the kernel.

Currently the Linux kernel's "perf" performance monitoring subsystem has a limit on 2,048 CPU cores for its CPU map that is set by the MAX_NR_CPUS value. But that's becoming not enough in today's high core count era that patches are looking to raise it to a 4,096 CPU core limit by default.

For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.

A promising patch for the Linux kernel is optimizing the locking contention and scattered address space for the MD bitmap code to improve both the storage throughput and latency.

IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.

The Servo browser engine project is out with their latest monthly status update to outline improvements made to this Rust-based open-source engine.

NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.

GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.

For those wishing to kick off the new week with some interesting technical videos and are into compiler tech, the video recordings from the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting are now online.

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.

The openSUSE project shared today that there is enhanced multi-GPU switching support to enjoy now with openSUSE Linux.

Launched four years ago was the Raspberry Pi 400 as the Raspberry Pi 4 adapted for a keyboard form factor. Launching today is the Raspberry Pi 500 for upgrading that keyboard computer using the Raspberry Pi 5 internals. An official Raspberry Pi Monitor was also released.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.13-rc2 with an initial serving of bug/regression fixes following last week's Linux 6.13-rc1 release that capped off the feature-packed Linux 6.13 merge window.

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.

Following 107k lines of old driver code within the staging area of the kernel removed for Linux 6.13, over in the crypto space they are looking at some cleaning as well with plans raised to remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) driver for the old Sun Niagara 2, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 and this SPU was also found in the UltraSPARC T3 as well.

A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.

One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.

While the winter holidays are quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy working on new feature code for the Plasma 6.3 desktop. A number of new features were merged this week for the KDE desktop.

OBS Studio 31.0 was released this evening as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform software for live streaming and desktop screen recording purposes. OBS Studio remains a leading choice across operating systems for screen recording, game livestreaming, and similar purposes while the new v31.0 release tacks on even more features.

The first release candidate of Wine 10.0 is out today that also now marks the feature freeze ahead of this stable release expected to be out around mid-January.

Box64 v0.3.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this Linux user-space emulator for allowing x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Box64 is one of the leading ways for allowing x86_64 games and Steam to be able to run on ARM 64-bit Linux devices.

New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.

openSUSE Leap Micro 6.1 is now available as the newest version of this lightweight Linux operating system built for containerized environments and virtualized workloads.

Fwupd 2.0 debuted back in October while out today is Fwupd 2.0.3 as the newest incremental update to this open-source solution for updating system and device firmware under Linux.

The SDL2 library is widely used by cross-platform games and other software. Fedora 42 is eyeing the possibility of replacing SDL2 with the sdl2-compat code so that by way of this compatibility layer the newer SDL3 version will ultimately be used instead.

While the Linux v6.13 merge window has been over for less than one week, already the first pull requests of new feature code are being submitted to DRM-Next for queuing the display/graphics driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window in two months.

While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.

It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.