Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.3-rc4 as we reach around the half-way point of the Linux 6.3 kernel's development cycle.

It's been one month since the release of Mesa 23.0 while it's finally been succeeded by Mesa 23.0.1 as the first point release containing a wide variety of bug fixes throughout this ecosystem of open-source 3D graphics drivers.

OpenMandriva ROME 23.03 has been released as the "rolling release" flavor of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the beautiful days of Mandrake Linux.

With the Linux 6.2 release kernel developers addressed "a tasty target for attackers" after it was realized that the per-CPU entry data was not being randomized, even in the presence of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The per-CPU entry area randomization has been present since Linux 6.3 but then was realized it's being activated even if KASLR was disabled, so now that is changing to avoid possible confusion.

Rob Clark on Saturday sent out a pull request adding the DMA-BUF/DMA-FENCE deadline awareness code to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Merged this weekend to the LLVM 17 development code-base is initial support for RISC-V's vector crypto extension ISA.

José Expósito announced the release this weekend of libinput 1.23, the input handling library used these days across the Linux desktop for both X.Org/X11 and Wayland based environments. With libinput 1.23 comes a few notable new features.

KDE developers remain quite busy working on Plasma 6.0 development along with preparing fixes for further Plasma 5.27 LTS point releases.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 is now available with a few more fixes for this BSD operating system update. A FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 release is also inbound as an extra release candidate with one more bug fix, after which the stable release should happen.

In addition to the mainline Linux kernel seeing recent support for the Arm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and Lenovo Yoga C630, among others, another Lenovo model working toward mainline kernel support is the Lenovo Flex 5G.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution that they make public, CBL-Mariner, began with a very niche focus while over time has continued adding additional packages as it is worked into becoming a more robust Linux platform.

MidnightBSD as the desktop-focused OS forked from FreeBSD and relying on the Xfce desktop environment by default is out with its big MidnightBSD 3.0 update.

AMD on Friday sent out new patches for enabling some new graphics IP "blocks" as part of their block-by-block enablement strategy they've been using to introduce new GPU support to their Linux graphics stack by focusing on smaller patch series with versioned parts of the GPU rather than big monolithic patch series with colorful fishy codenames.

The Intel XeSS SDK 1.0 release happened last September while now has been succeeded by XeSS SDK 1.1. Though like the prior release, the XeSS SDK isn't fully open-source with just the bits around game integration being public.

AMD has been teasing FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) as the latest version of their game upscaling tech that will be released later in the year. AMD began showing off FSR 3 to game developers this week at GDC while also re-affirming their open-source commitment.

Not to be confused with Valve's downstream, VKD3D-Proton, that is used by Steam Play but Wine's VKD3D codebase itself is out today with a new version of this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation.

Intel's open-source engineers continue to be quite busy working on their Meteor Lake enablement ahead of those initial mobile processors shipping later this year.

Sent out today were the latest AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches having the latest work done by AMD internally on this display/monitor portion of their driver code. Notable with this round of 19 patches is preparation work for upcoming eDP 1.5 laptop displays.

While GCC 13 is working its way toward its official GCC 13.1 stable release in the next few weeks, with this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release updates it has already begun switching over to this major annual compiler update.

While not part of the upcoming Blender 3.5 release, AMD engineers are working to land their HIP ray-tracing (HIPRT) support within the Blender open-source 3D modeling software that will offer nice rendering speed-ups for AMD RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs.

The Framework Laptop as a modular and upgradeable laptop has garnered much interest from the open-source community and PC enthusiasts the past few years. Until today though the upgradeable laptops have just been Intel Core powered while today the company had some big announcements.

Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS is available today as the newest point release for those continuing to employ this older long-term support releases.

One month ago NVIDIA released the 530 series Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to stable with the NVIDIA 530.41.03 driver release.

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors.

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Out today is a new version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment as the hyper-converged infrastructure software with hosted hypervisor.

Chinese fabless semiconductor company Zhaoxin, which was started ten years ago as a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government to create domestic x86 CPUs, is now in the process of working on supporting their newest Yongfeng processors with the Linux kernel.

A new version of MoltenVK has been released, the open-source library that maps the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for making use of this industry standard graphics/compute API on modern iOS and macOS devices.

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election.

On top of today seeing the KDE XWaylandVideoBridge announcement, the debut of GNOME 44 with its many Wayland improvements, and XWayland 23.1 being released with multiple new features/improvements, there is more good news for Wayland fans. Google has merged to the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code support for Wayland fractional scaling via the fractional-scale-v1 protocol.

Following recent rumors and leaks, Valve today officially announced Counter-Strike 2 that they announce as the largest technical leap in Counter-Strike's history.

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

GNOME 44 is now officially out as the latest half-year update to this widely-used open-source desktop.

KDE developers David Edmundson and Alex Poi have begun working on XWaylandVideoBridge as a new project to help improve Linux desktop screen sharing for X11-based applications that may try to share the contents of Wayland screens, such as could be the case for some software like Discord, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and others.

Mozilla announced today they are investing $30 million USD to build Mozilla.ai as a new start-up focused on "building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem."

Canonical is preparing to ship an updated set of Ubuntu Font files for the Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release but is hoping to see more user testing ahead of the official release next month.

Canonical has been preparing to ship a Linux 6.2 based kernel for Ubuntu 23.04 and now it's in the process of rolling out over the coming days.

AMD has upstreamed a basic RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism for GPU use to LLVM's libc and wired it up for AMDGPU use.

Introduced last week with the Vulkan 1.3.244 spec update was a new extension, VK_KHR_map_memory2, which is seeing fast support from the open-source Intel "ANV" and Mesa Radeon "RADV" drivers as well as NVIDIA's newest Vulkan driver beta.