Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs.

While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs.

GNUnet 0.21 has been released as a major update to this GNU project building a network stack for secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving distributed applications. GNUnet continues striving for a "GNU internet" and with the v0.21 release has rolled out a new transport layer and working to address prior design shortcomings.

The upcoming GTK 4.14 toolkit release with the new renderers should yield crisper font rendering.

The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing.

The Etnaviv DRM kernel driver providing reverse-engineered support for Vivante graphics and NPU IP has sent out their latest feature changes to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window.

Steven Rostedt this week posted some interesting albeit experimental patches for the Linux kernel to support persistent traces that work across a reboot or crash.

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default.

The merge request enabling basic OpenGL support for the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git this evening as another important step forward for native Wayland support for enjoying Windows games/apps on Linux.

Following the news from earlier around George Hotz' Tiny Corp raising new AMD GPU issues and calling for the MES firmware to be open-sourced followed by a positive message from AMD CEO Lisa Su, there's a new update on the matter following a meeting today between Tiny Corp and AMD.

Intel today released their open-source OpenVINO 2024.0 toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference across a range of hardware.

Queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle is an FRU Memory Poison Manager "FMPM" developed by AMD that may later be adapted for other non-AMD platforms. The FRU Memory Poison Manager is working to persist information around known bad/faulty memory across reboots.

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.

Out today is the big LLVM/Clang 18.1 release. Due to shifting to a new versioning scheme like GCC, today's LLVM 18.1 release is the first major stable release in the new series for what previously would have been called LLVM 18.0.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team recently wrapped up experimental support for the RADV Vulkan driver for EXT_shader_object support using Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) on RDNA3/GFX11 graphics processors.

UWSM is short for the Universal Wayland Session Manager and it incorporates systemd's help in managing the Wayland compositors.

It's been just six days since the release of KDE MegaRelease 6 with Plasma 6.0 and while it's popular with users and smoother than prior major KDE releases, out today is Plasma 6.0.1 for the first round of bug-fixes.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes had been known as CBL-Mariner for "Common Base Linux" while now it appears to be in the process of transitioning to Azure Linux.

While not as fast-moving as Valve's VKD3D-Proton downstream used by Proton / Steam Play, Wine's VKD3D is out today with a new feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API.

AMD's FreeSync adaptive synchronization technology for displays has come a long way since its 2015 debut and enjoying robust industry adoption. Given the increasing refresh rates of today's TVs and monitors, AMD has rolled out new tier requirements for FreeSync, FreeSync Premium, and FreeSync Premium Pro moving forward.

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11.

The Linux DeviceMapper code is preparing to introduce DM-VDO as the Virtual Data Optimizer that can provide inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, thin provisioning, and other features. DM-VDO has long existed out-of-tree and should be a very useful addition to mainline.

For those interested in FPGAs, AMD today unveiled the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA product family with hardware coming in 2025.

FEX as the open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems continues making good progress not for only enjoying Linux x86 binaries on ARM but also Windows games by way of Steam Play / Wine.

While still an experimental option, the rolling-release systemd Tumbleweed Linux distribution is finding great results in using systemd-boot rather than the GRUB bootloader.

For those still on the FreeBSD 13 series with not having migrated yet to FreeBSD 14, FreeBSD 13.3 was released overnight as the newest incremental update to this mature BSD platform.

GStreamer 1.24 is out today as a major enhancement to this open-source multimedia framework.

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand.

Xiph.Org's Opus open-source audio format for lossy audio coding has rolled out Opus 1.5 as a big update that is now making greater use of machine learning.

While there is a lot of frustration from the news last week of the HDMI Forum rejecting AMD's open-source HDMI 2.1 driver support plans, the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver won't hopefully have too challenging of an experience in enabling HDMI 2.1 functionality since much of the display handling there is left up to NVIDIA's (closed-source) firmware binaries.

When it comes to the AMD "RDNA3 Refresh" GFX11.5 open-source driver support, to date it's mostly been focused on the GFX 11.5.0 (GFX1150) IP while now being enabled within Mesa 24.1 for the open-source RadeonSI/RADV drivers is support for a GFX 11.5.1 (GFX1151) variant.

The VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension was made public in November 2022 with Vulkan 1.3.235 while finally this past week Intel's open-source Mesa "ANV" driver has merged support for this extension. This Vulkan extension is important for Linux gaming and other scenarios to lower CPU overhead.

It was two years since the release of Pacman 6.0 as Arch Linux's package manager software while overnight Pacman 6.1 was released with a tag line "it's been a while..." With Pacman 6.1 comes a few new features.

With the absence of any official AMD Radeon graphics control panel / settings GUI for Linux enthusiasts/gamers, there are several open-source projects striving to be a viable Radeon GUI control area for Linux gamers/enthusiasts. LACT 0.5.3 was released this weekend as the newest version of this option for AMD Radeon information reporting, GPU overclocking, fan control, power/thermal monitoring, and additional power state configurations.

For those that have experienced glitches while playing back VP9 video content using AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) for GPU acceleration, updated firmware should fix those VP9 decode problems.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.8-rc7 as we close in on the Linux 6.8 stable release in the next week or two.

In preparation for the GNOME 46 release candidate, the "46.rc" versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published this morning. The release candidate work is mostly about fixing outstanding issues but there are also some lingering fixes that made it into these releases.

OpenMediaVault 7.0 was released today as a major update to this open-source Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution built around Debian Linux. This plug-based NAS platform with web UI allows supporting a variety of services/protocols is now even more capable with the OpenMediaVault 7.0 availability.

The Rust-written Redox OS is out with a new monthly status report to outline the enhancements made to this open-source operating system during the month of February.

Merged this week ahead of the Wine 9.4 development release due out next Friday is support for using the new Vulkan VK_EXT_map_memory_placed extension to overcome a performance penalty with Windows on Windows 64-bit (WOW64) for games/apps.

GDB 14.2 has been released to provide a few fixes for the GNU Debugger over its state found in last year's GDB 14.1.

Better late than never, merged yesterday into the FFmpeg Git codebase is a DVD-Video demuxer.

Nate Graham is out with his belated weekend update to highlight all of the interesting KDE development activity for the week. This week, of course, saw the release of KDE MegaRelease 6 with Plasma 6.0, KDE Gear 24.02, and KDE Frameworks 6.0 in tow. Post-launch Graham characterizes Plasma 6.0 as being in good shape and the extra QA paying off. He commented, "Hopefully this should help banish those now 16-year-old painful memories of KDE 4. It’s a new KDE now. Harder, better, faster, stronger!"

It's happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March.

Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox.

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension.

Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired.

The WavPack open-source lossless wavefile compressor is up to version 5.7 after more than one year in development. Making this new release quite notable is adding multi-threaded encode and decode support to the WavPack library and its CLI tools.