Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

With the much-delayed Mesa 23.2 finally having been released last week, Mesa 23.1.9 is out the door as the last planned maintenance release for that open-source driver series introduced back in Q2.

Motivated by a 25% performance degradation seen on an Intel Xeon Scalable dual socket server due to Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), Red Hat's Waiman Long has been working on a patch series to update the IBRS handling in different conditions for affected Intel processors on Linux.

Redox OS, the open-source Rust-written operating system led by developer Jeremy Soller, has been drafting some exciting plans for the rest of this year and moving into 2024.

Google formally unveiled Android 14 today in New York City at its Made By Google event. With that, Google has also published the Android 14 Open-Source Project (AOSP).

GNOME developer Christian Hergert recently demonstrated how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of running much faster. At the time it didn't sound like he would pursue the matter further but more recently he's begun working on folding some performance improvements into GNOME's VTE for a faster terminal experience.

The newest open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation is OpenPubkey, which is a collaboration with Docker and BastionZero and will be available for Docker container signing with zero-trust passwordless authentication.

Vulkan 1.3.266 was published a few days ago with a handful of fixes and two new extensions. One of those extensions, VK_NV_low_latency2 is quite interesting.

When it comes to the BSD operating systems, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 is one of the most interesting innovations. HAMMER2 supports online deduplication, clustering, multiple mountable file-system roots, snapshots, compression, encryption, extensive checksumming, and other features. Over the past decade it's evolved quite nicely and in recent days has seen further enhancements.

Currently when hibernating a Linux system LZO compression is used for preserving the memory contents while a new patch series posted today by Qualcomm allow for changing out the compression API used and makes LZ4 a new option during Linux hibernation.

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue.

The biggest hindrance for using Intel Arc Graphics for Linux gaming has been the lack of Vulkan sparse support as needed for running many newer Windows DirectX 12 games atop Valve's Steam Play with Proton using VKD3D-Proton. Intel recently did implement Vulkan sparse support for ANV in Mesa 23.3 but it only works with their yet-to-be-upstreamed and still-experimental Xe kernel driver. But now Intel Linux graphics driver engineers have managed to pull off a solution for getting the sparse resources supported while using the existing i915 kernel DRM driver.

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days.

GNU Binutils has added support for the ARCv3 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architecture.

Rust bindings are coming to the Linux kernel's workqueue (WQ) infrastructure that is used for deferring work to a kernel thread for asynchronous process execution.

As written about last month, AMD Linux engineers have been working on PMF Linux driver support for a "Smart PC Solutions Builder". The AMD Smart PC Solutions Builder feature is intended to provide OEMs with more control over system power/performance policies. It looks like systems making use of this feature are already to the marketplace or imminent with AMD having already landed the PMF firmware.

Adding to the list of notable features coming with Mesa 23.3 later this quarter is enabling delta color compression (DCC) for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) images on AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors.

Checking for the presence of Intel virtualization (VMX) support and it being enabled can be easily achieved by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. But to this point AMD virtualization (SVM) has always been shown to user-space via /proc/cpuinfo even when the BIOS/platform has disabled SVM functionality. Finally for Linux 6.7 this oversight is being corrected.

Similar to Embree 4.0 adding Intel graphics acceleration earlier this year via SYCL, Intel's OpenVKL library that is also part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit has now added SYCL graphics acceleration with OpenVKL 2.0.

Python 3.12 is out today as the latest major feature release for this extremely popular programming language. Python 3.12 continues the trend of recent releases of enhancing the performance while continuing to introduce exciting new functionality.

The Linux kernel's Fair Queue "FQ" network packet scheduling algorithm that is celebrating its 10th anniversary since being mainlined in the Linux 3.12 kernel cycle is celebrating by rolling out some performance optimizations with the next version of the Linux kernel.

The long ongoing saga of upstreaming AMD's Pensando Elba SoC support is now partially over with the initial enablement patches around the DeviceTree being queued as part of the SoC changes destined for the Linux 6.7 kernel cycle.

The Linux Mint project has released an "Edge" ISO of Linux Mint 21.2 that is intended for users of new PC hardware where it's unable to boot the current Linux Mint release due to its older kernel version.

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7.

A newly-opened merge request for GNOME's Mutter compositor adds hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA proprietary driver for secondary GPUs such as in the case of hybrid systems and other setups with multiple monitors whereby the NVIDIA GPU with proprietary driver is powering some of those outputs.

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc4 as the newest test release for this kernel that is looking to be released as stable around the end of October.

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

Prolific RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve's Linux graphics driver team has re-enabled Delta Color Compression (DCC) with mipmaps for AMD GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware for the Mesa 23.3 release.

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230924 this week as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution. The driving force behind this release is to get out rebuilt AArch64 packages following the recent GCC security vulnerability that affected Arm 64-bit built software.

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode.

Disclosed back in August was the Inception vulnerability affecting all Zen processors. It took until today though for the mainline Linux kernel to mitigate Hygon processors for this vulnerability for those Zen 1 CPUs formed from the AMD-Chinese joint venture.

The xf86-video-siliconmotion X.Org driver has seen its first new release in six years for supporting the Silicon Motion Lynx and Cougar chipsets found in vintage laptops.

During the third quarter on Phoronix were 689 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 50 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts this quarter.

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

Patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list in an effort to mainline support for the Milk-V Duo RISC-V development platform with the basic board retailing for $9.

Building off yesterday's Wine 8.17 release, Wine-Staging 8.17 is now available that consists of 494 extra patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

The wlroots Wayland compositor library used by Sway and other Wayland compositors to help with the heavy lifting has merged support for the tearing control protocol.

Plasma 6 development is ending September on a high note with a number of new features and enhancements to this desktop now merged.

Google on Friday released libvpx 1.13.1 as the newest update to this open-source reference encoder for the VP8 and VP9 video codecs. This release is coming due to CVE-2023-5217, which is a "high" severity vulnerability that's been exploited within at least the Google Chrome web browser.

Wine 8.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux as well as serving as the basis for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play.

With today's release of kmod 31, Linux's modprobe utility for loading kernel modules can finally allow arbitrary paths to allow loading new kernel modules from anywhere on the file-system.

Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers have begun submitting their feature changes to DRM-Next of new i915 kernel driver feature material they are preparing for the Linux 6.7 cycle this winter.

With the Intel Arrow Lake NPU being very similar to Meteor Lake for this neural processing unit, the patches enabling that NPU for next-gen Intel Core CPUs was submitted as a "fix" for the ongoing Linux 6.6 cycle.

AMD announced today that the Windows games Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken are available today with their FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling technology. More games making use of FSR 3 are on the way and the open-source code drop of FSR 3 is coming at a later date.

After a month and a half delay from AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 to AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2, the AMDVLK 2023.Q3.3 driver is out today after just one week. This AMD Vulkan driver update finally enables Radeon RX 7700 / RX 7800 series support and delivers on other improvements.

For those using the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution, there is now experimental support for booting it using systemd-boot.

Sound Open Firmware 2.7 released overnight and adds AMD Van Gogh platform support, presumably to be used by the Valve Steam Deck or some future refresh of the device or related platform like for VR hardware.