Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great.

Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window.

Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement.

Following yesterday's belated release of Wine 7.15, Wine-Staging 7.15 is now available that continues to carry hundreds of extra testing/experimental patches atop upstream Wine for bug fixes and other features to empower Windows games and applications on Linux.

Those on rolling-release Linux distributions that are quick to adapt to new toolchain updates are finding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) enabled games breaking when running on the recently released Glibc 2.36. The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH.

Wine 7.15 is out a day late as the newest development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine is also what serves as the base for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play.

With the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors most exciting about these Zen 3+ SoCs has been the energy efficiency improvements and moving from Vega to RDNA2 graphics as with the Radeon 680M found on the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U that I have been running many Linux benchmarks on over the past several weeks. For those wondering if it pays off moving to a newer Linux kernel or Mesa version with Radeon 680M integrated graphics, here are some reference benchmarks I recently conducted.

Sent out this morning is a Linux kernel "fix" that now enabled STIBP when using the IBPB mode for Retbleed mitigations on AMD processors. In other words, more protections needed for this enhanced mode of Retbleed mitigation.

Last week was the main set of RISC-V updates for Linux 6.0 that included improving Svpbmt support, a more robust default kernel configuration, and other improvements. A secondary set of RISC-V CPU architecture updates has now been merged for Linux 6.0.

It's been another busy summer week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing within this open-source desktop stack.

A number of changes were merged into Linux 6.0 for benefiting virtualization when making use of VirtIO.

Intel has contributed support for their oneVPL open-source video processing library to the upstream FFmpeg project for that widely-used, cross-platform multimedia library.

While much of the Intel Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) support appears squared away for Linux 6.0 besides the support still being hidden behind the flag requiring i915.force_probe= to actually enable the experimental support, there still are various DG2 discrete GPU features being tackled by the open-source Intel kernel graphics drivers. One of those "extras" still working its way to the kernel is HWMON subsystem integration to be able to expose power / voltage / energy reporting.

Released in June was the Radeon PRO Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 to deliver AMD's enterprise-vetted graphics driver stack to Windows users. Meanwhile recently debuting is the long-awaited adjacent Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise for Linux driver update.

The colorful fishy codenames are not over for AMD's Linux driver crew! While on the GPU side they have moved to IP block-by-block enablement strategy for their future GPUs, over on the audio co-processor side AMD posted a series of patches today under the "Pink Sardine" codename.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues showing its a formidable file-system option for flash memory devices, especially SSDs and mobile hardware. With Linux 6.0 there are yet more improvements for this file-system driver.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who works on Zink for OpenGL implemented atop Vulkan has managed some more performance optimizations with the upcoming Mesa 22.2 quarterly feature release.

While Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution is known for its aggressive performance optimizations, their kernel build had been going with the default "-O2" optimization but last week did switch over to rolling their kernel with -O3.

While support for the loongArch Chinese CPU architecture was merged in Linux 5.19, it wasn't actually enough to yield a booting system due to some driver code not yet being finished and ready for merging in time. LoongArch was allowed to merge that preliminary code in v5.19 so the Glibc support could land and now for Linux 6.0 more of the CPU port is ready to hit the kernel.

When it comes to the Apple M1 and M2 support on Linux, one of the biggest obstacles to suitable daily use for end-users is the current lack of GPU acceleration. Reverse engineering has been happening for the Apple Silicon graphics processor, early experiments being carried out under macOS and Asahi's m1n1 environment, and the next step will be to start writing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver. To some surprise, the feasibility of writing this DRM kernel GPU driver in the Rust programming language is being explored.

A number of new Linux kernel stable releases are out this week with new mitigations around the latest batch of published CPU security vulnerabilities. Linux 5.19.1, 5.18.17, 5.15.60, 5.10.136, 5.4.210, and 4.19.255 are the new releases out today.

While all of the key Zen 4 CPU functionality appears in place for the mainline Linux kernel, AMD engineers continue working to enable other new Zen 4 features for use under Linux. The newest patches out of AMD this morning are for LbrExtV2.

Following a one week delay due to a last minute blocker bug being discovered, Canonical today has shipped Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS as the first point release to this current long-term support series.

Following GCC 12 introducing LoongArch support earlier this year, Linux 5.19 adding the initial LoongArch port, and Glibc 2.36 adding LoongArch, LibreOffice is now the latest high-profile open-source project adding support for this Chinese processor ISA that started out derived from MIPS64.

GNOME's Shell and Mutter components have released their beta versions for this GNOME 43 milestone. Particularly on the Mutter side are some very exciting changes from improvements to direct scan-out, high resolution scroll wheel support being completed and merged, various Wayland improvements, and more performance optimizations.

A number of TUXEDO Computers' Linux laptops and Clevo laptops that have had keyboard and/or touchpad issues after system suspend cycles should be properly working now with Linux 6.0.

Xorgproto 2022.2 has been released as the newest version of this collection of X.Org/X11 protocols. Most notable with this rare xorgproto update is the introduction of a new extension, XWAYLAND.

Following last week's branching and feature freeze along with the Mesa 22.2-rc1 release, released on Wednesday evening was Mesa 22.2-rc2 as the first week's worth of bug fixing.

Following recent upstream discussions around the -O3 compiler optimizations for the Linux kernel, the Kconfig switch advertising this option is being removed in Linux 6.0.

While last week saw the main set of thermal and power management updates for Linux 6.0, a few more items were sent in this week for the v6.0 merge window.

Weston 11.0 Alpha is out as the newest feature milestone for this reference Wayland compositor that has seen quite an uptick in development activity this year.

With AMD EPYC showing some nice gains on Linux 6.0, I've been eager to begin testing Linux 6.0 on more systems especially now that the v6.0 merge window is winding down... With now having the shiny new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5965WX, I decided to take this high-end 24-core chip for a run with Linux 6.0 Git to see how it performs over Linux 5.19 stable.

The EFI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.0 cycle and contain two notable improvements on the ARM64 side.

IPFS as the "InterPlanetary File-System" protocol for peer-to-peer network support in decentralized file sharing as a distributed file-system is now supported with FFmpeg 5.1. IPFS developers at Protocol Labs are also looking at expanding support for this protocol to other open-source projects.

The Linux kernel continues making preparations around the very exciting Compute Express Link (CXL) thanks to the work of Intel engineers.

The NFS server improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.0 merge window.

In addition to Intel's busy Patch Tuesday, AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the "SQUIP" attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors.

Today's busy patch Tuesday for Intel continues with the Linux kernel getting mitigated for EIBRS Post-barrier Return Stack Buffer (PBRSB). This PBRSB is the latest handling on the "CPU vulnerability nightmares front", the pull request calls it.

As part of today's "Patch Tuesday", Intel has made a new round of security vulnerabilities public -- including a new processor advisory that affects their latest Xeon Scalable and Core wares resulting in new CPU microcode being required.

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs!

AMD engineers have released an updated version of AOMP, their LLVM/Clang downstream that carries the company's latest patches around OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs.

Going back years has been an effort to get 30-bit deep color support on the GNOME desktop under Wayland. Ubuntu and others have been interested in getting 30-bit color support working nicely for the Linux desktop, but while that milestone hasn't yet been crossed, thankfully there is some renewed work in that direction.

The FreeBSD project has published their latest quarterly status report highlighting the advancements made to this open-source BSD operating system.

A patch coming about earlier this year allows setting the system's hostname before user-space starts by way of the hostname= kernel parameter. That patch has now landed as part of Andrew Morton's accumulated changes for Linux 6.0.

With the Linux 6.0 multimedia subsystem changes, the H.265/HEVC user-space API is now being considered stable.