Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.

Andrea della Porta of SUSE has been working on upstreaming the Linux kernel support to boot the Raspberry Pi 5 on a mainline kernel. Over the past few months Andrea has posted a number of different patches derived in part from Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel code. The latest effort being pursued by the SUSE engineer is on upstreaming Raspberry Pi RP1 PCI device support using a DeviceTree overlay.

Queued yesterday into the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel are some important additions for Intel processors and also an important fix for AMD processors to enjoy package power monitoring.

While the Unigine SDK these days is more known for its simulation and engineering offerings rather than as a game engine, this engine remains visually impressive and continues advancing. Unigine 2.19 has been released that brings a number of improvements to the engine and leaves us clamoring to see a new/updated benchmark.

There are a few interesting bits of information as part of this week's updates from the Ubuntu Desktop Team Integration Squad.

LunarG engineer Aitor Camacho Larrondo has proposed VK_EXT_external_memory_metal, a new extension for the Vulkan API to allow for more easily sharing memory objects from Vulkan with Apple's Metal.

A new batch of HID subsystem fixes were merged today for the ongoing Linux 6.11 kernel development.

The FreeBSD open-source operating system project published their Q2'2024 status report that outlines some interesting work happening to this leading BSD project.

Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has provided an update today on PipeWire camera handling with the upcoming Fedora 41 release.

GameMode as the open-source daemon from Feral Interactive to optimize Linux system performance on-demand when running games is out with its first release of 2024.

If you are picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors soon for Linux use, you may be wondering whether it's worthwhile or even necessary moving to the latest Linux kernel code compared to the likes of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that are shipping a Linux 6.8 derived kernel. Here are some quick benchmarks in looking at that question.

To date the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer has been offered with either 4GB or 8GB of system memory. The Raspberry Pi 5 4GB has retailed for $60 USD while the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB at $80 USD. For those needing something a little cheaper and not needing as much system memory, the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB model launched today.

AMD just announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ZT Systems, a hyperscale solutions provider focused on AI.

The fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.11 is now available for testing.

Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is known for its performance optimizations and other enhancements is out with its "August 2024" rolling release update.

While Linus Torvalds was hoping to merge the sched_ext extensible scheduler for the Linux v6.11 kernel cycle, that didn't end up happening after some technical issues were raised on the kernel mailing list. Since then though the kernel developers have been collaborating and given the latest sched_ext patches with "for-next" and "for-6.12" markings, it's looking like the extensible scheduler will be attempted again for the Linux 6.12 merge window.

Ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc4 kernel release coming up later today, some more Bcachefs file-system patches were merged this weekend for this experimental copy-on-write file-system.

Faith Ekstrand has merged another two dozen patches for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 24.3.

Lab Wayland Compositor "labwc" v0.8 is now available as the newest release of this Wayland compositor that has been re-based against the wlroots 0.18 Wayland library.

Vulkan 1.3.293 released on Friday as the newest specification for this industry standard graphics and compute API. In addition to a handful of fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.3.293 introduces a new NVIDIA vendor extension.

Following the recent work to Mutter and GNOME Shell that was merged for allowing to build with X11 support disabled, the GDM display manager and GNOME-Session code have also seen the ability added to compile without X11 support.

Archinstall is the wonderful command-line driven installer that was introduced to the Arch Linux ISOs three years ago for making it quicker and easier to get a customized Arch Linux installation. Out today is Archinstall 2.8.2 to further refine that experience.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap that highlights all of the interesting KDE desktop changes to have landed over the past week.

AMD Linux engineers are preparing the kernel for Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) as a feature for AMD EPYC server processors. Smart Data Cache Injection is a nifty new feature that allows for direct insertion of data from I/O devices into the CPU's L2/L3 cache.

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu desktop provided an update around recent efforts on Ubuntu 24.10.

The Cloud Hypervisor open-source project that serves as a Rust-written VMM focused on security and started by Intel but now backed by a multitude of vendors is out with its newest feature release. Cloud Hypervisor 41 is the new feature release worked on by engineers at Intel, Google, Microsoft, Rivos, Tencent, Ant Group, and others for this cloud and security minded virtual machine monitor.

Ahead of the now in-place Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the Ubuntu GNOME X.Org session support was split off into its own separate binary Debian package from the main (default) Wayland session handling.

The Vulkan Video support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver continues to be improved upon. The newest addition now found in the code for Mesa 24.3 is enabling 12-bit AV1 content accelerated decoding.

Sent out today was the latest round of DRM-Misc-Next patches to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening up in mid-September. For those using ARM single board computers with a Rockchip SoC and have been struggling for 4K support over HDMI, the Rockchip updates in Linux 6.12 should excite you.

For improving the open-source graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno 700 series hardware such as what's found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and other SoCs, preemption support is finally being tackled.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Ramalama as a new open-source project that hopes to "make AI boring" by this inferencing tool striving for simplicity so users can quickly and easily deploy AI workloads without much fuss.

A set of patches posted today on the AMD graphics driver mailing list begin implementing support for process isolation within the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Intel engineers on Wednesday released the Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release for this for this MIT-licensed user-space mode driver support for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found since the Core Ultra Series 1 "Meteor Lake" SoCs and currently supporting the upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors as well. This Intel Linux NPU Driver in user-space interfaces with their iVPU kernel accelerator driver for making a nice open-source and upstream NPU software stack on Linux systems.