Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While Intel with the rest of the tech industry continue investing immense resources in areas around AI and talking it up, one of the efforts that has been slow to materialize on the Linux side has been for enabling their Gaussian & Neural Accelerator (GNA) with the mainline Linux kernel. This week the latest Intel GNA driver patches were posted for this neural co-processor.

The very promising Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL implementation within Mesa has landed a set of patches today that make it easier to enable the OpenCL compute device support with the various Gallium3D drivers.

Linux's universal TUN driver that provides packet reception and transmission for user-space programs may soon see a 1000x speed-up with a proposed patch sent out today for this network driver.

AMD today published their latest open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1, as their first source update in three weeks.

Last Thursday AMD finally sent out the basic enablement patch for AMD Zen 4 "znver4" with the GCC compiler. Once again it was tardy with Ryzen 7000 series processors already shipping and sadly the cost tables (tuning) is still catering to Zen 3 rather than updated for Zen 4. While as of today this -march=znver4 support has been merged into GCC 13.

Red Hat's storage team responsible for the Stratis solution has released a new feature update.

Windows users are increasingly making use of Mesa with Microsoft investing in supporting a number of different open, industry standard APIs and then layering them atop the underlying Direct3D 12 driver for the likes of WSL2 usage. OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VA-API video acceleration have been the primary targets for Microsoft engineers working on Mesa with the Windows Subsystem for Linux in mind while also posing other possible use-cases where the host may lack native drivers for those APIs. For bettering Mesa on Windows, Microsoft has now added support for compiling against the DirectX 12 Agility SDK.

Thanks to a Google engineer in communication with Microsoft engineers, the "hid-microsoft" upstream Linux driver is seeing work to support the rumble mode on newer Xbox controllers.

As part of Intel's work starting to enable the compiler support for their Sierra Forest CPUs, AVX-VNNI-INT8 and AVX-IFMA support has been merged into the GCC 13 compiler for supporting these instructions being first introduced with Intel's Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge.

If as an Ubuntu Linux user you have been held off on purchasing one of the new Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards due to the prospects of having to upgrade your own kernel, Mesa, and linux-firmware packages, Intel has a solution for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS users in the form of a packaged driver.

Earlier this year Coreboot and the Dasharo downstream were ported to the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 motherboard. This was very exciting in that a current-generation Intel desktop motherboard could run Coreboot and readily available through various Internet retailers. But many inquired about whether the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR5 variant would see similar support and now that too is being worked on.

After last month launching the redesigned Thelio chassis, System76 today has rolled out their latest System76 Thelio desktop options with Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" and AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processor options now available.

Coming on the same day as Ubuntu 22.10, Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.2 as the latest version of this popular BSD operating system.

Canonical has formally released Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" as the latest six-month, non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux.

The widely depended upon GNU C Library "glibc" has seen another round of optimization work for benefiting those with AVX-512 processors from Intel or now on the AMD side too with Zen 4.

Back in August 2021 saw initial patches by Intel for "FineIBT" for the Linux kernel as aiming to combine the best of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity for upping the kernel security protections in an efficient manner.

A first batch of "drm-misc-next" patches have been sent in for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.2 merge window comes about in December. With this initial batch of new material for v6.2 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver: OFDRM.

The open-source SVT-AV1 encoder for AV1 content that is primarily developed by Intel software engineers continues getting faster and finding new ways to provide better tuned presets and yield better performance for AV1 encoding on CPUs.

Corsair this summer launched the HX1500i power supply as the latest in their HX series. The Corsair HX1500i provides three EPS12V connectors, a fully modular design, and as implied by the model is sized for providing 1500 Watts. This $399 USD power supply can now also interface with the Linux kernel for monitoring support.

While the Linux 6.1 merge window just passed and the "Call Depth Tracking" patches have been in development the past few months, it looks like that for the Linux 6.2 kernel is where that alternative mitigation technique will be introduced for helping offset some of the significant performance regressions incurred for Intel Skylake era processors as a result of recent CPU security vulnerability mitigations.

Two weeks ago was the release of systemd 252-rc1 with introducing the new systemd-measure command, a "support-ended" taint flag for OS images detected past their end-of-support date, and a wide variety of other changes and feature additions. Systemd 252-rc2 is now available for additional testing with various fixes plus a few more additions.

If you habitually ride Mesa Git for the latest and greatest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code and use the KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland, you may have noticed a glitchy cursor recently. Fortunately, that's now fixed up with today's Mesa Git code and ended up stemming from the recent global enabling of Mesa OpenGL threading.

Last week saw Intel sending out new GCC compiler patches for adding the "Sierra Forest" CPU target and the number of new x86_64 instructions it's adding. Those GCC patches follow Intel publishing an updated programming reference manual where they detailed these new instructions coming for Sierra Forest Xeon CPUs as well as Grand Ridge. Now on the LLVM compiler side, they too have begun landing new patches for these new Intel instructions.

Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 work on Linux if you are running the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa. The gaming experience is decent aside from occasional driver issues. One of the games that has been pesky with the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver has been the HITMAN 3 title running under Steam Play but with the newest Mesa 22.3 code should now be fixed up.

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a modern Rust-based OpenCL implementation for open-source Gallium3D drivers has shown it's capable of outperforming AMD's open-source ROCm compute stack for at least some GPUs and workloads.

Mold as the open-source high performance linker continues its ascent in working to prove itself as a viable alternative to LLVM's LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.6 is out today with the latest fixes and features.

The USB Implementers Forum on Tuesday announced the USB4 v2.0 specification that allows USB transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps over USB Type-C connections.

AMD under their GPUOpen umbrella has published a paper on their new technology dubbed "GI-1.0" that is a fast, scalable two-level radiance caching scheme for real-time global illumination. This means of real-time global illumination says it can deliver comparable quality to other GI implementations while said to be much faster. GI-1.0 will be open-source, AMD says, but the code isn't yet published.

As some interesting open-source news out of Microsoft today, their open-source Windows Terminal that has been in development the past few years and providing many modern features is now the default beginning with Windows 11 22H2.

MoltenVK as the portability layer for Vulkan that exposes this industry standard graphics API on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS platforms is now able to expose Vulkan 1.2 compatibility.

Git 2.38.1 was just released along with updates to older versions, including the new point releases of v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, and v2.37.4. The big set of Git updates today is due to two more security issues coming to light.

Last year the OpenPOWER Foundation announced LibreBMC as a POWER-based open-source BMC and now they have progressed to the point of actually demoing this BMC backed by a fully open-source software stack.

Coreboot 4.18 had been planned for release in August but after that slipped, this newest Coreboot feature release is now shipping and comes with many hardware support improvements and other changes for this open-source system firmware implementation.

Back in August I wrote about a patch to change AMD's CPU microcode loading on Linux to now patch every logical CPU thread rather than just per physical core. It turned out that at least some CPU microcode updates do make per-thread modifications while the Linux kernel microcode handling for AMD was just applying microcode updates at run-time on a per-core basis. That patch was seemingly forgotten about but has now been queued up as part of x86 "urgent" changes for the mainline kernel.

Microsoft has released its monthly update to CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution serving a variety of purposes from WSL to Azure.

Two weeks ago a bunch of old Mesa code got removed including the XvMC front-end, Rbug as a remote debugging interface, and some of Graw that was to serve as a raw Gallium3D interface without a traditional Gallium front-end. Some of Graw was accidentally left in the source tree while now that has been caught and eliminated in further lightening the size of Mesa.

Valve is preparing to roll-out Proton 7.0-5 as the newest version of this Wine-derived software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. For facilitating some testing prior to the formal Proton 7.0-5, a release candidate was published today.

Libcamera has been in development for several years now as an open-source camera support library that works across Linux, Android, and Chrome OS platforms. Due to interest from seeing tagged releases, the libcamera crew has published their first official release of this open-source camera stack.

Ahead of O3DCON kicking off tomorrow in Austin, Texas as a developer event around the Open 3D Engine game engine backed by the Linux Foundation and numerous organizations, O3DE 22.10 has been released.

VESA today announced the publishing of the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. As a pleasant change, VESA has been working behind the scenes to see that all DisplayPort 2.0 certified products are actually forward-compatible with this more strict DisplayPort 2.1 specification.

Firefox 106.0 web browser release builds are now available ahead of the official Firefox 106 announcement on Tuesday. Firefox 106 does have improvements to its PDF viewer as well as the WebRTC communication support.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham who the past several years has focused on fixing many bugs and nuisances with the KDE desktop as well as being well known for his weekly "This Week In KDE" development summaries has been elected to the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. As part of the board, his platform is on fundraising more for KDE and hoping to hire more developers to further accelerate this open-source desktop environment.

After Intel posted a set of patches last week for the GNU Compiler Collection around Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake, and Sierra Forest, the two more basic patches have already been merged into the GCC 13 code-base while the Sierra Forest Xeon E-core patches and the various new instructions presented there are still undergoing review.

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative.

This should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's tendency to ship with bleeding-edge package versions, but Fedora Linux 38 next spring will offer PHP 8.2 for those wanting to run a LAMP stack on this modern, Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

Linus Torvalds just issued the first release candidate of Linux 6.1 and in turn marking the end of the merge window for this feature-packaged kernel release. Linux 6.1 stable in turn should be out in December and will likely serve as this year's Linux LTS kernel release.

Following last month's introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, AMD has finally posted the code providing initial enablement for the Zen 4 CPUs with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Google this week has announced the release of KataOS as their newest operating system effort focused on embedded devices running ambient machine learning workloads. KataOS is security-minded, exclusively uses the Rust programming language, and is built atop the seL4 microkernel as its foundation.

The IBM POWER/PowerPC changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.1 kernel with this cycle's merge window closing later today.

For the Linux 6.1 kernel Btrfs is bringing some significant performance optimizations and with EXT4 there is also some performance tuning. But when it comes to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) and the XFS file-systems this cycle is on the lighter side.

The Xen hypervisor changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.1 kernel merge window that is wrapping up this weekend.