Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As expected the Linux 6.11 kernel has been promoted to stable and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and other autumn Linux distribution releases.

It's expected to be the Linux 6.11 release day! We are just hours away from hopefully seeing Linux 6.11 stable christened as the kernel set to power the likes of Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora 41. Here's a reminder of some of the most interesting new features and changes to look forward to with Linux 6.11.

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.

Yet another early pull request for the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window is the sound (audio) driver updates for this next kernel cycle. There is a lot of sound driver work this cycle from new audio bits to removing legacy Intel driver support.

Ahead of the expected Linux 6.11 stable release today and the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit happening this coming week in Vienna, Intel engineer Rafael Wysocki submitted early the ACPI updates among the other areas of the kernel he oversees as part of the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window.

With the mainline Linux kernel beginning to see DeviceTree support for a few Snapdragon X1 powered laptops like the ASUS Vivobook S15 and Lenovo Yoga Slim7x, Ubuntu developers at Canonical appear to be beginning their exploration around supporting some of the Snapdragon X1 hardware with Ubuntu Linux.

The Linux 6.11 kernel is expected to be christened as stable tomorrow. Ahead of that stable release one of the last minute "fixes" is adding in another ID for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake processors.

As a very last minute change ahead of tagging GNOME Mutter 47, merged this morning to Mutter is support for the XDG session management Wayland protocol. This protocol is useful for letting clients request support from the compositor for saving the window state for use on future executions. However, it's currently disabled by default and won't be entirely baked until GNOME 48.

Niri 0.1.9 is out today as the latest update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that is written in Rust.

Casilda is a new open-source project by GNOME developer Juan Pablo Ugarte to serve as a Wayland compositor widget. Casilda allows for embedding other processes windows within a GTK4 application.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window opening on Monday, the printk updates were submitted in advance given the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit also taking place next week in Vienna. Notable with the printk updates is finishing up the NBCON console work that is notable as the last major blocker before real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined.

The EROFS read-only file-system changes have been submitted now for ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. Notable this cycle is EROFS adding support for file-backed mounts.

KDE developers were busy this week in Germany for their annual Akademy developer conference but they still managed to release a Plasma 6.2 Beta as well as some early feature work toward Plasma 6.3.

GNOME developers have been making progress on being able to individually encrypt user home directories as well as modernizing platform infrastructure as part of the investments made by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.

As written about early in the year, future Intel CPUs will be moving past the "Family 6" identification used since the mid-1990s with the P6 micro-architecture. Since then Intel has continued releasing new CPUs under "Family 6" with different model IDs while AMD has been more open to changing its Family ID every Zen generation or two. With Intel using Family 6 for so long it led to a lot of Linux kernel code just relying on Model ID comparisons for determining between Intel CPU generations and the like. Thus a lot of Intel CPU model handling reworks are needed for preparing future Intel CPU generations that will no longer be in Family 6. With Linux 6.12 it looks like that work will be wrapping up.

AMD engineers today posted the first "request for comments" patches in enabling support for Secure AVIC guest handling as a new hardware feature with upcoming processors.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used on Windows as a shader compiler back-end and both for Windows/Linux as part of their OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack can now be compiled for RISC-V 64-bit.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku OS is out today with its fifth beta release as it works toward the long-awaited Haiku R1 stable release.

Following the GNOME Foundation Executive Director leaving after less than one year, the GNOME Foundation has formally begun their search for a new executive director.

While not quite as exciting as the latest ARM64 laptops sporting the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 series SoCs, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop using the older Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is now available to boot and install using the generic ARM64 images of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10.

David Kaplan who is a Senior Fellow at AMD focused on security technologies has published an initial set of Linux kernel patches for "Attack Vector Controls" in rethinking the CPU security mitigation handling. The proposed Attack Vector Controls makes it easier to manage desired security mitigations to have enabled/disabled based upon intent of the system rather than having to be knowledgeable about individual CPU security vulnerabilities and the various tuning knobs.

Most of you have fortunately not had to think about Adobe Flash support in years, but for those still having some old assets in Adobe Flash/SWF format or wanting to relive some old games/entertainment based in Flash, the open-source Ruffle project remains one of the leading contenders for dealing with Flash in 2024 and beyond. Ruffle is a Rust-based emulator for Adobe Flash that continues to be actively developed and supporting more features.

The LoongArch changes for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening. For enhancing KVM virtualization on these Chinese CPUs is enabling Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for accelerating ARM/x86 binary translation.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser merged two notable features yesterday for Linux users.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is set to make a €688,800 investment into the Samba open-source project that re-implements the SMB networking protocol and focused on better file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems.

As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts.

AMD today committed their GC 11.5.2 firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git for the necessary firmware binary blobs needed for hardware initialization by their open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver with this newer RDNA3.5 variant.

With Fedora 41 working its way to release toward the end of October, some early feature/change proposals for Fedora 42 are being filed for what will be the Fedora Linux release out next spring.

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 is out today for providing the set of Wayland protocol XML files for currently non-standard protocols that are relied upon by the Plasma desktop with KWin compositor.

AMD engineers continue work toward upstreaming their XDNA kernel driver for Linux in enabling the Ryzen AI NPU on open-source. The "v3" patches were posted on Wednesday but given the timing it looks like it will be missing out still on merging for the upcoming Linux 6.12 LTS cycle.

Ojaswin Mujoo with IBM has posted an initial set of "request for comments" patches implementing extsize hints for EXT4, similar to the hints being worked on for the XFS file-system. This is important work in ultimately striving toward handling non-torn / atomic writes within the EXT4 file-system.

With the upcoming PostgreSQL 17 database server release there is some initial AVX-512 optimizations that are looking quite nice according to Intel's findings.

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Last month Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund announced they would be opening a fellowship program for open-source maintainers. The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has been providing great investments into open-source projects while this fellowship is around investing in open-source maintainers that may be working on multiple open-source projects. The application process is now open for those interested open-source maintainers.

For those continuing to make use of the open-source Redis in-memory, key-value database rather than some of the new open-source forks such as Valkey, the first milestone release of Redis 8.0 Community Edition is now available for testing.

Merged yesterday into the code for Mesa 24.3 is initial support within the PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali v10 graphics hardware. The v10 architecture is for second-gen Valhall GPUs and goes along with the ongoing Linux kernel driver work for the Panthor CSF-based driver support.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has recently been devoting some time to enhancing their GitLab deployment with new features and also in welcoming the Mono project to their GitLab instance. In case you missed it, Microsoft recently shifted stewardship of Mono over to Wine.

While Gentoo Linux recently ended their support for Itanium (IA-64) hardware, this popular source-based Linux distribution continues to support other aging platforms... Today they sent out an announcement highlighting their improved support for MIPS and Alpha based hardware.

Oracle today released version 7.1 of their VirtualBox virtualization software with an improved GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing support, OCI integration improvements, and other enhancements.

Early in the year we enjoyed seeing AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support upstreamed for the GCC 14 compiler in making it into that annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release. It was great seeing AMD Zen 5 support make it into this open-source compiler well ahead of any Zen 5 products being announced. Since then the GCC support for the new Znver5 target has continued to be improve upon meanwhile we've been waiting to see similar treatment for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Finally this week that AMD Zen 5 (znver5) support has been submitted for review in upstreaming it for LLVM.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, Canonical is introducing permission prompting for more control over Snap access to systems to enhance security.

With Linux 6.11 expected for release on Sunday that in turn will mark the start of the two-week merge window for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 cycle will get underway and work towards its stable release in mid to late November. Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window here is a look at some of the material anticipated for merging during this next cycle.

Device Tree patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for review and possible upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel for booting Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods that use the A7 to A11 SoCs.

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo.

ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack.

With this past weekend's release of Linux 6.11-rc7, the kernel changes for the week were larger than prior RCs and Torvalds was a bit hesitant on releasing v6.11 this coming Sunday due to the upcoming that takes place next week in Vienna, Austria. But after a bit of time and feedback from other kernel developers, Torvalds is now more inclined to release Linux 6.11 this coming Sunday rather than dragging it out for an extra week.

The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant.

WolfSSL is an embedded SSl/TLS library designed for a range of use-cases and available as open-source under the GNU GPLv2. WolfSSL was recently packaged and added to Fedora Linux since Netatalk began building against wolfSSL and in the longer-term plans to require its use. So the Fedora packager of Netatalk went ahead with packaging up wolfSSL. But this in turn has led to issues and as of today is now being "immediately retired from Fedora."

Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues.

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core.

With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs.

AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program.

While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu.

Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release.

Intel engineers have been working on enabling NPEM for Linux: Native PCIe Enclosure Management as a means of standardized storage LED indicators.

Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof.

Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension.

The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers.

Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update.