Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

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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.

Intel is kicking off their Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose with many exciting announcements. Freed from embargo this morning is news around their upcoming mobile and server processors, lots of AI talk, Intel's continued software advancements to complement their hardware, and more.

Java 21 and the JDK 21 release under a general availability (GA) status occurred a short time ago as the newest major update to the Java programming language.

The beta release of Fedora 39 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release prior to the end of October.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support.

The LLVM 17 compiler stack has been released as stable as LLVM 17.0.1 -- a slight mistake leaving the 17.0.0-rc tag meant the original v17.0.0 tag was skipped. This LLVM 17.0.1 stable release along with sub-projects like the Clang 17 C/C++ compiler bring many new features and improvements.

Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.

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Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11.

The long-awaited patches for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" upstream Linux kernel driver to leverage NVIDIA's GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware for handling GPU re-clocking and other hardware tasks with RTX 20 GPUs and newer have been posted. With this set of 44 patches also comes the initial GPU hardware accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs that is built upon this new GSP driver code path.

Since March of 2022 the ReiserFS file-system has been deprecated and with Linux 6.6 ReiserFS is marked outright as "obsolete" with plans to remove the file-system from the mainline kernel code-base in 2025. In stepping toward that eventual milestone, a new kernel patch series begins removing ReiserFS from the default kernel configurations.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech. Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 adds yet more features for this cross-distribution solution for software deployment and package management.

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too.

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel.

Given the recent discussions stemming from Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6 and drop the KDE Plasma X11 session to focus solely on Wayland for the next-gen KDE desktop, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has written a lengthy blog post to outline the current state and his thoughts on KDE Wayland support.

Intel's OpenVINO 2023.1 was just published to GitHub as the newest version of this open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI workloads across their CPUs, GPUs, and now also having official support for the new VPU being found with Meteor Lake SoCs.