Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

With security concerns at all-time highs in the industry, Linux 6.9 is seeing yet more work to beef up its security hardening with various additional safety checks and other compile-time defenses for ensuring security best practices.

The IO_uring changes were merged early during the nearly-over Linux 6.9 merge window. This round brought yet a few more features to this wonderful and innovative kernel feature.

Workqueues are commonly used within the Linux kernel for asynchronous process execution contexts. With Linux 6.9 the workqueue (WQ) code has seen "significant and invasive" changes.

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes.

The DIRT 5 racing game was one of the titles that hadn't worked on Intel graphics under Linux due to the sparse memory support for the ANV Vulkan driver. But with sparse support now enabled, the game was crashing at launch. But now a workaround is in place to allow Intel's Mesa 24.1 Vulkan driver to work with DIRT 5.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls.

So far when it comes to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) display drivers for Linux, there are Rust efforts underway for the Apple Silicon kernel graphics driver with the Asahi Linux project as well as the new Nova effort for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver from Red Hat. Also now out from Red Hat is posting the Rust bindings for KMS to review plus porting the existing Virtual KMS driver over to Rust as the "RVKMS" driver.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy fixing a variety of regressions -- including some crashes -- with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop stack. Plasma 6.0.3 will ship next week with yet more fixes while some feature work toward Plasma 6.1 is also underway.

Wine 9.5 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux.

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements.

The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel ahead of the v6.9-rc1 release this Sunday.

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics.

Loongson continues enabling more kernel functionality for their LoongArch processor port for the upstream Linux kernel. With Linux 6.9 they sent out today a set of patches enabling more features for this Chinese CPU architecture.

The latest LibreOffice drawing code has enabled support for making use of multi-threaded 3D rendering.

Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use.

BOLT that was upstreamed into LLVM in 2022 by Facebook/Meta allows for optimizing the layout of binaries as a post-linking step to yield increased performance. BOLT like Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) first requires the profiling step to generate perf recordings to feedback in for the optimization process, but the gains can be significant.

AMD on Thursday published AOMP 19.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler focused on delivering the latest OpenMP device offloading support for their Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators.

With the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem changes sent out today for the Linux 6.9 kernel, there is support for larger console fonts to better handle today's ~4K displays.

After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week.

For those that have been interested in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors for the great integrated Arc Graphics capabilities and/or the new integrated NPU with open-source Intel iVPU kernel driver upstream, System76 today announced the new Lemur Pro laptops with Core Ultra processors.

Merged this week into Mesa 24.1 for the Broadcom VideoCore V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi boards is support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering.

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is introducing a new USB_DEFAULT_AUTHORIZATION_MODE Kconfig build-time switch to change the default authorization mode for how Linux should deal with attached USB devices.

The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is gaining support for durable file handles in the Linux 6.9 kernel.

The latest file-system driver with notable mentions for Linux 6.9 is that for Microsoft's exFAT file-system.

Microsoft has submitted their various Hyper-V updates to the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.

Wayland Protocols 1.34 was released on Wednesday with three new staging protocols for further enhancing Wayland's capabilities.

AMD used the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) this week to announce FSR 3.1, the latest iteration of their FidelityFX Super Resolution tech for game upscaling.

Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed.

The x86/entry pull request last week for the Linux 6.9 kernel contained just a single patch but it was a significant one at that in that it helps lower the overhead for CR3 writes and the benefits can be visible for workloads like Linux's perf functionality.

The GNOME project has announced the much anticipated release of the GNOME 46 desktop.

Announced back in 2021 by the Linux Foundation was Amazon Lumberyard becoming the Open 3D Engine and the Linux Foundation fostering the Open 3D Foundation for evolving this new open-source game engine. Three years later there is now a commercial game announced for the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

DXVK 2.3.1 has been released for this Steam Play component that implements the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan. Notable with DXVK 2.3.1 is VK_NV_raw_access_chains support for more efficient shader code generation on NVIDIA GPUs.

In-step with early Power11 patches in Linux 6.9, IBM engineers have posted the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patches for enabling -mcpu=power11 targeting within this open-source compiler.

Tiny Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans.

Following the revised Bcachefs code making it into Linux 6.9 and a warning for Bcachefs multi-device users to move past Linux 6.7, a batch of fixes was merged overnight for Linux 6.9 while further fixes to this file-system are expected soon.

Running XWayland in rootful mode now allows for working HiDPI and fractional scaling support.

It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers.

More AMD SEV-SNP bits are upstreamed now for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel that is putting the EPYC processor support on the mainline kernel trajectory for "the ultimate goal of the AMD confidential computing side" to hopefully be in great shape come Linux 6.10 later in the year.

Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22.

Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3.

Following last week's main set of power management updates for Linux 6.9 that saw AMD P-State Preferred Core support and tuning for Intel Meteor Lake, a secondary set of power management subsystem changes were sent out today for this new kernel.

The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code.

The Linux 6.9 kernel has a big rework to the CPU timer code that has been years in the making and has some power and performance benefits.