Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The FreeBSD Foundation has begun receiving funding to work on zero-trust builds / reproducible builds. The work will hopefully be wrapped up in time for the major FreeBSD 15.0 release.

In addition to the Wine 10.0 stable release today, making the day very exciting as well for Linux gamers is the first official SDL 3.0 release!

In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel.

On the first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window there were a number of new AMD CPU features submitted. That's continued today with so far having the new "amd_node" driver to talk about for splitting up the modern Zen-era code and more of the legacy AMD Northbridge code from the pre-Zen days.

As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver software.

Serpent OS as the modern, from-scratch Linux distribution being led by well known open-source developer Ikey Doherty has started on a new project: disks-rs. The disks-rs project is intended to deal with file-systems, installation / partitioning, and block device management in a safe and effective manner from the Rust programming language.

Adding to the plethora of new hardware support coming with the Linux 6.14 kernel is enabling upstream support for the FPGAs found on the Intel-powered AAEON UP single board computers that are targeted for makers, hobbyists, and various industrial uses.

The big networking subsystem feature pull was sent out this morning for the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Over the past week there has been an uptick in patches pertaining to RDNA4's GFX12 graphics engine within the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for Mesa 25.0 to benefit Linux systems.

Intel's upstreaming work around the next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors continues for the Linux kernel. Among other code being prepped for submitting during the Linux 6.14 merge window, on Monday the thermal driver updates were focused on enabling support for Intel Panther Lake processors.

In addition to merging a number of the pull requests yesterday for the start of the Linux 6.14 cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds did merge some of his own new code as well. While his time these days working on new kernel code itself is more limited with managing the ever-growing upstream kernel community, he has managed some notable items in recent times like addressing ARM64 kernel annoyances and some performance optimizations.

The x86/cache updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel are extending the Resource Control "resctrl" code for Intel Resource Director Technology / AMD Platform Quality of Service to have the capability of total memory bandwidth monitoring.

As a follow-up to yesterday's article around the on-disk format changes and other feature work on Bcachefs for Linux 6.14, the changes ended up being merged without issue for this next kernel version. That came after the Bcachefs changes were rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle due to a Code of Conduct (CoC) committee decision.

On this first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window to kick off the new kernel development cycle there are a few pull requests around new AMD CPU features worth noting.

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 6.13 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.13 is out today as this downstream kernel from FSF LA that strips out code pertaining to the ability to load non-free drivers/microcode and other elements not deemed within the standards of the Free Software Foundation, even when it means removing/disabling hardware support and features.

An engineer from AMD by way of their Nod.ai acquisition is seeking feedback from the community around what other Radeon graphics cards you would like to see supported by the ROCm support on Linux. This community wishlist extends to ROCm Windows support as well but at least there the HIP Rutime/SDK on Windows already supports more consumer GPUs than Linux.

After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here's a look at what's ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Following the Bcachefs pull requests being rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle by the kernel's Code of Conduct committee, the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is kicking off with a big pull request so that the upstream kernel can get back into sync with the latest development code for this cycle. This pull also contains the last anticipated major on-disk format upgrade prior to the removal of the "experimental" flag for this copy-on-write file-system.

Open-source developers are working on allowing the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to support the "Cyan Skillfish" graphics processor IP found within the Sony PlayStation 5 APU as well as the AMD BC-250 mining cards.

The Linux 6.14 kernel will enable the VirtualBox guest drivers to be built for ARM64 Linux virtual machines (VMs).

For the Linux 6.13 cycle the Rust code was hitting a "tipping point" with more Rust kernel drivers expected soon. For Linux 6.14 there is indeed a lot more Rust code being primed for this next kernel version.

Intel software engineers overnight published their new quarterly release of the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel, the collection of the company's patches against this open-source multimedia library for enhancing the Intel GPU acceleration support while the patches work their way for upstream FFmpeg.

Ingo Molnar sent out the big batch of scheduler enhancements bright and early today for helping kick off the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window.

The "TURNIP" open-source Vulkan API driver within Mesa for supporting Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to expose accelerated ray query support for ray-tracing with newer Adreno GPUs.

Among the VFS pull requests sent out this weekend in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window formally opening were the VFS direct I/O (DIO) updates that introduce a new STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN field for addressing a possible performance pitfall.

As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.

The pid_max tunable for the maximum number of process IDs allowed simultaneously was increased by default back in 2019 with systemd. But that increase breaks a long held assumption by some user-space software that pid_max or the process ID would not be greater than 65,535. To now better workaround such outdated user-space software, a set of patches for the Linux 6.14 kernel will allow adjusting the pid_max limit on a per PID namespace basis to help cope with such software hitting such artificial limits and without having to lower the overall system limit.

Ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable kernel expected to be released later today, there is a last minute fix for the EEVDF CPU scheduler.

Following the release a few days ago of GNU Coreutils 9.6, the Rust Coreutils "uutils" project as a re-implementation of these core utilities within the Rust programming language is out with a fresh update.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been sent out in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening.

The VFS mount pull request was sent out today in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening. One of the changes here is adding a new mountinfo program to the Linux kernel source tree.

Thanks to Valve, another Xbox 360-compatible game controller will see support with the upstream XPad input driver with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.

Christian Brauner of Microsoft began sending out his various pull requests today of new material for the Linux 6.14 kernel in advance of the merge window expected to open next week. One of the interesting pull requests is carrying the work of Omar Sandoval for faster /proc/kcore reads that can help with debugger performance.

GDB 16.1 was tagged today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for helping debug a variety of programming languages on numerous different CPU architectures and platforms.

An interesting open-source announcement out of Intel this week is that they have open-sourced their P4 software for their line of Tofino programmable Ethernet switches.

It was a busy week in the GNOME space with many packages checking in their "48.alpha" releases for the GNOME 48 Alpha milestone. Plus there has been some additional exciting GNOME developments for the week.

Technical BSD conferences aren't quite as common as the many Linux conferences these days. For the BSD conferences that do happen they tend to be more general in nature than carrying a desktop focus. But being announced this week was GhostBSDCon 2025 as a forthcoming developer conference largely focused on desktop use of this FreeBSD-derived distribution.

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta, there's been a lot of bug fixing happening ahead of the stable release due out next month for this open-source desktop.

Wine 10.0 is working its way to a stable release within the next week or two while for today there is the sixth weekly release candidate.

GNU Coreutils 9.6 released today as the updated version of these core utilities common to Linux systems and elsewhere.

Linux 6.13 is bringing many exciting features for its stable debut expected this Sunday. But following that it's onward to the Linux 6.14 kernel merge window for which it will be yet another very exciting round from completing the NTSYNC driver to adding new hardware support and much more. Here is a preview of some of the changes expected to be submitted for the Linux 6.14 cycle.

Vulkan 1.4.305 has been published as the newest version of the Vulkan API specification for high performance graphics and compute.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is poised to introduce initial support for SpacemiT platforms, the Chinese computing chip company developing "next-generation RISC-V high-performance CPUs." For this next Linux kernel release the SpaceMiT Key Stone K1 octa-core RISC-V AI CPU with SpacemiT X60 cores will see support.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 is out today with the official release of this updated open-source office suite coming in just about two weeks.

Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers.

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems.

At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week.

Back in 2022 the PCI Express 7.0 specification was announced with hitting 128 GT/s and planned availability in 2025. Since then they have been iterating on the spec with PCI-SIG members and today they announced the PCI Express 7.0 v0.7 specification.

With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here's a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025.

An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light.

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors.

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues.

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64.