Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Back in May there were Linux kernel patches posted as a workaround for Arm CPU errata around the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) handling. Initially this workaround was just noted as the Cortex-X4 and Neoverse-V3 as being affected, but now it turns out many more exciting Arm processor cores are impacted.

Nearly every Linux kernel cycle has bought patches to bump the version of the Rust language targeted by the kernel as it worked toward having a suitable minimum version. With the latest Linux kernel patches, it looks like we may be finally approaching the point where a safe minimum version can be specified and for the Linux kernel to in turn allow supporting multiple different versions of the Rust compiler.

LLVM Clang 19 this morning landed initial support for the -std=c2y and -std=gnu2y options for targeting the next C programming language standard.

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with its monthly development summary that notes some interesting work taking place.

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek has released Miracle-WM v0.3 as the newest version of this Wayland tiling compositor built atop Mir. Miracle-WM is beginning to be useful and practical enough for daily driving by its lead developer.

The kernel powering Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) has long been using the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel while finally it's now upgraded past that aging long-term support kernel and onto the current Linux 6.6 LTS series.

Vulkan 1.3.289 was released at the end of last week with a handful of clarifications/corrections to the Vulkan API specification plus one new maintenance extension.

Intel engineers today released version 2.22 of libva, the driver-agnostic library for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Most notable with libva 2.22 is adding a new interface for Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266).

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey hardware/software details for the month prior. The June 2024 results show a decline to the Steam on Linux marketshare but staying above the magic 2% threshold.

Data collection around users tends to be a very touchy subject in the Linux/open-source world even when opt-in and Fedora Workstation 42 has just seen a proposal raised to do just that. If approved the Fedora Workstation 42 release would roll-out an opt-in metrics system of anonymous user information from system settings to hardware information and desktop usage patterns.

AMD's Radeon Developer Tool Suite from their GPUOpen group has now migrated to the Qt6 graphical toolkit.

Linux Mint has kicked off the start of July by releasing the beta of Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" as the next iteration of their desktop distribution built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and with plans to support it until 2029.

Qualcomm has begun landing performance optimizations into the GNU C Library "glibc" for benefiting their new Oryon-1 CPU cores as found in the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus SoCs.

GNOME's Mutter 46.2-1ubuntu0.24.04.1 package was uploaded on Friday for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users. This Mutter compositor update not only brings Mutter 46.2 changes to this current Ubuntu release but also pulls in all of the 46.1 upstream changes too.

Linux developer Stefan Wahren has been working on adding support for suspend-to-idle (s2idle) to the Raspberry Pi single board computers. It's working and there are power-savings benefits, but the downside is that initially the support is just for older Raspberry Pi boards.

Qualys went public today with a security vulnerability they have discovered within the OpenSSH server that could lead to remote, unauthenticated code execution.

With the month of June wrapped up, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news and reviews from notable hardware launches to a lot of exciting kernel activity.

AMD on Friday sent out another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD patches for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window opening up in about two weeks.

Arch Linux built EndeavourOS has released new install media in celebrating the project's fifth anniversary. Making this 5th anniversary release all the more exciting is the project has restored support for EndeavourOS on ARM.

GNOME 47 Alpha is approaching in the coming days and on Sunday evening the "47.alpha" versions were declared for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor. This alpha milestone is a big one with seeing enhanced VR headset support, the ability to build Wayland-only desktop environments, GNOME Shell accent color integration, and other Wayland improvements.

The Linux 6.10 kernel cycle continues trending along nominally and giving hope for an on-time stable kernel release in two weeks.

The RISC-V kernel port with Linux 6.11 is introducing the ability to handle memory hot plugging/unplugging.

For those interested in laptops powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC, it's looking like the ASUS Vivobook S15 model could be one of the first devices with decent Linux support. There are patches undergoing review for upstreaming the ASUS Vivobook S 15 DeviceTree support so that much of the basic functionality is working under Linux but various features are known to be broken.

The Etnaviv kernel graphics driver that provides reverse-engineered open-source support for Vivante graphics (and NPU) IP has seen a fresh round of patches ready to go for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in mid-July.

With the first half of the year drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix so far in 2024. Year to date there has been 1,530 original news articles so far and 78 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly. There has been a lot happening in 2024 from Linux kernel improvements to exciting new hardware and other open-source advances.

Merged on Saturday ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc6 release is the latest batch of x86 platform driver changes. Notable as part of this week's fixes is improving support for the very latest (2024) LG laptop models.

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm.

For the Branch History Injection variant of Spectre (Spectre BHI) there is a patch pending to add a new mitigation option for that two year old CPU security vulnerability.

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake generation hardware.

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week.

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update.

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025.

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine.

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

Merged into Mesa 24.2 on Thursday is Vulkan sparse binding support for the CPU-based Lavapipe driver.

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work.

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso had been doing a lot of work on the Etnaviv driver stack for open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante driver support that began with the 3D graphics support but Vizoso tackled enabling the Vivante NPU IP as well. After all the successes with the Etnaviv NPU support, he turned his attention to creating an open-source driver stack for the Rockchip NPUs. Now thanks to a new sponsorship deal, he's back to making more Etnaviv improvements.

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution.

Sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms.

Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell. Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers.

PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.

The NVIDIA 555.58 Linux driver has debuted this morning as the first stable version in the R555 driver series. The NVIDIA 555 Linux driver is the most exciting in recent times with offering Wayland explicit sync support, more stable Wayland support in general, and GSP firmware is now used by default on RTX 20 / Turing and newer GPUs where the GPU System Processor is present.

Linux 6.11 is shaping up to be an exciting summertime kernel cycle for AMD Ryzen owners. The newest feature now being queued ahead of next month's merge window is Core Performance Boost support within the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

Sent out on Wednesday were the latest set of DRM-Xe-Next changes of the last round of feature updates for this Xe kernel graphics driver targeting the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

AMD compiler engineers have released AOMP 19.0-2 as the newest version of their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler that carries all of their latest work around OpenMP/AOCC GPU device offloading to Radeon and Instinct hardware. With this updated AOMP compiler is now run-time support for zero-copy with CPU-GPU unified shared memory and various other new features for this GPU/accelerator-focused compiler.

Last year a new kernel feature merged in Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps for file-systems as a means of better timestamp handling originally for NFS compared to the existing coarse-grained timestamps with the once per jiffy timestamps being used for invalidating NFS caches. But multi-grain timestamps was reverted just weeks after landing in the mainline kernel due to corner cases like a newer file with a coarse-grained timestamp appearing earlier than another file with a fine-grained timestamp. Due to subtle bugs like that, multi-grain timestamps were dropped before Linux 6.6 was even released while now there is a revised attempt.

Upcoming Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors will support a new Structural Based Functional Test at Field (SBAF) testing capability to help verify the health of the CPU cores.