Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

With roughly just about one month to go until the stable release, Linux 6.6-rc3 was released today as the newest test release of Linux 6.6.

With the Linux 6.7 kernel this winter there is a new feature coming to Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) device driver that will allow more efficient use with QAT Gen4 hardware such as the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

The AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) Linux driver is preparing to support a new but potentially controversial feature that's seen little public information so far: the Smart PC Solutions Builder.

One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel.

While Intel divested its storage business and Intel Optane was sadly discontinued, one of the interesting open-source software projects from its storage efforts has been DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage engine. Version 2.4 of the DAOS software-defined object store designed for high-speed storage was released this past week.

Rui Ueyama published today a new version of Mold, the open-source high speed linker that has easily outpaced the common linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects. Mold 2.2 continues work on its performance quest, expanding its multiple CPU architectures supported, and other new work.

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Mike Blumenkrantz, who is part of Valve's stellar Linux graphics driver team, has managed another impressive feat of further optimizing the Mesa Vulkan driver code that benefits multiple drivers / hardware vendors.

Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo.

Archinstall 2.6.1 was released today as the newest version of this Arch Linux text-based OS installer, ahead of next month's October Arch Linux ISO refresh.

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

With Meteor Lake comes the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) that is now marketed by Intel as the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Recent versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver to support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU while now a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors.

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor.

With Plasma 6.0 aiming for an early February release, more of the KDE developer attention is turning to bug fixing.

While VKD3D-Proton continues to be the downstream used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and receiving a bulk of the Windows D3D12 gaming optimizations, Wine's upstream VKD3D project continues to evolve for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan. Released on Thursday was VKD3D 1.9 as the newest feature update.

AMD used to release new AMDVLK Vulkan driver updates on a near weekly basis for Linux users but that has slowed down for a while. We are approaching the end of Q3 and now AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2 has been published as their first new open-source driver release since early August.

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Intel engineers have published their Compoute Runtime 23.30.26918.9 that provides their open-source Level Zero and OpenCL support for use on Windows and Linux platforms with Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware.

The beta images of the Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" release are now available for testing ahead of the planned official release in October.

Cloud Hypervisor 35 was released on Thursday for this open-source, Rust-based VMM that was originally started by Intel software engineers before evolving into a multi-vendor initiative for secure and cloud focused workloads.

AMD's GPUOpen team today released a number of updated components for graphics application/engine developers.

Amid all the recent chatter around Bcachefs working its way toward mainline and all the ongoing improvements to existing Linux file-systems, you may have forgotten about Puzzlefs as the new file-system aiming to be an optimal solution for containers and with a kernel driver written in the Rust programming language.

Over the summer the AMDGPU compiler back-end in upstream LLVM began with new targets for GFX1150 and GFX1151 which given all things known are likely the "RDNA3 Refresh" APUs. That work started out light with not much in the way of different code paths from the existing GFX11 support but we're beginning to see some new instructions added for the RDNA3 refresh graphics processors.

The CentOS board has approved the creation of a CentOS Integration Special Interest Group (SIG) to assist those building products and services atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or in particular its upstream, CentOS Stream.

Mesa 23.1.8 was released on Wednesday as yet another bi-weekly stable release for the Mesa 23.1 release as that series drags on while waiting for Mesa 23.2 to materialize.

GNOME 45 is out as stable today as the latest six-month update to this open-source desktop environment that will be powering the likes of Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora Workstation 39.

The latest set of patches for the Wine Wayland driver have been posted for review that continue working on enabling native Wayland support for this open-source software that allows Windows applications and games to be enjoyed under Linux.

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions.

Last year Intel announced Project Amber as an effort to verify the trustworthiness of clouds. Project Amber was talked up as "an innovative service-based security implementation" for the remote verification of the trustworthiness of compute assets. Project Amber is now rolling out as the Intel Trust Authority.

There's just under one month to go now until the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) returns to A Coruña, Spain for the annual development conference focused on open-source graphics drivers (Mesa), Wayland, and related Linux display/graphics infrastructure although the X.Org Server itself hasn't received much attention in recent years. Here's a look at some of the planned talks for the exciting XDC 2023.

When it comes to Glibc HWCAPs for allowing the C library to load optimized libraries based upon the CPU features at run-time, it's mostly been focused on the x86_64 world for targeting higher x86-64 levels or being able to load optimized libraries for systems with AVX support. Loongson though has now contributed initial LoongArch HWCAPs support.

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) isn't as common on Arm SoCs as it is in the x86 and POWER worlds, there are some SMT-capable designs like with the HiSilicon Kupeng 930 for Arm servers. HiSilicon engineers are working now to extend Linux's SMT run-time controls to work on ARM64 (AArch64).

In addition to Oracle releasing OpenJDK 21 / Java 21 on Tuesday, their GraalVM team also carried out a same-day release of GraalVM with the new Java 21 features and more.

NVIDIA's latest patches intended for the upstream Linux kernel are over on the networking side of the house with their Mellanox wares as they prepare 800Gb/s (XDR) support within the RDMA/InfiniBand code.