Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Kodi 20 "Nexus" was released today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used HTPC/PVR software formerly known as XBMC.

Due to Linus Torvalds traveling later in the day, he's released Linux 6.2-rc4 a half-day early as the latest weekly snapshot of Linux 6.2.

The SoC tree's "for-next" branch has picked up a big set of patches that is set to lighten the kernel by 154k lines of code, documentation, and DeviceTree files in clearing out some old drivers and obsolete board/machine support.

As part of Intel's forthcoming Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) specification is the new LKGS instruction for managing the state of the GS segment register in a more flexible manner. With Linux 6.3 the kernel will allow making use of the LKGS instruction where supported on future Intel CPUs.

Another batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code was submitted this week to DRM-Next as additional AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.3.

The open-source developers working on developing the Rust-written Linux DRM kernel driver for Apple M1/M2 graphics as well as the Mesa AGX Gallium3D driver in user-space have now managed to successfully run a basic OpenGL ES 3.1 compute shader on the hardware with this open-source driver stack.

Cloud Hypervisor 29.0 has been released as the open-source virtualization hypervisor that was started by Intel but then began seeing support by the likes of Microsoft and Arm. Cloud Hypervisor was since spunoff to the Linux Foundation where it continues seeing more industry support by the likes of AMD and Ampere.

Out today is GNU Binutils 2.40 as the latest feature update to this wide collection of key binary utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms.

One of the exciting Coreboot / open-source firmware milestones of 2022 was a Coreboot/Dasharo port to a readily available Intel Alder Lake motherboard from MSI with the port being carried out by consulting firm 3mdeb. That port started with the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 and then more recently focused on the DDR5 variant. That MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR5 support has now been upstreamed into mainline Coreboot.

An interesting patch series posted by Intel this week for the Linux kernel is working on implementing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) as a feature coming with future processors to help fend off speculative address accesses across user and kernel mode.

ROCm 5.4 released in November with a point release then coming out in December and now there is another minor update for January to this open-source AMD Linux GPU compute stack.

Following Thursday's Mesa 23.0 feature freeze / branching, Friday brought the first weekly release candidate of this new Mesa 23.0 series.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual Saturday weekly recap to highlight all of the interesting KDE desktop developments for the past week.

The fourth release candidate of Wine 8.0 is now available as the project works toward its stable release in the coming weeks. Wine, of course, allows for running Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms. Valve's Wine fork, Proton, is what powers Steam Play.

Following the Linux kernel deprecating the ReiserFS file-system and with plans to drop the kernel driver in 2025, the next file-system target being evaluated for whether it should stick around the kernel is the Journaled File-System, JFS.

Since Linux 6.0 there has been various graphics driver code being upstreamed for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors, among other Meteor Lake driver enablement work in general. Now coming with the Linux 6.3 cycle is enough of the graphics/display driver support for Meteor Lake being in place that it can actually light up a display.

Back in December AMD posted P-State Linux driver patches for implementing a "Guided Autononmous Mode" of operation to complement the existing passive mode used by the amd_pstate driver and the pending fully-autonomous/EPP mode that has seen many patch revisions in recent months. While much of AMD's engineering focus has been on getting the P-State EPP code upstreamed, out today is the second iteration of that Guided Autonomous Mode support.

The open-source WebKit browser engine used by Apple's web browsers as well as relied upon by several other vendors and software solutions is out with a notable technology preview update.

Intel overnight released the Media Driver v22.6.6 release that serves as their 2022Q4 quarterly feature release. Most notable with this updated open-source media acceleration stack is adding initial support for next-generation Meteor Lake processors.

Mesa 23.0 feature development wrapped up today with the code having been branched from the main branch and now Mesa 23.1 entering development.

Google announced today that moving forward they will be allowing Rust code into the Chromium code-base, the open-source project that ultimately served as the basis for their Chrome web browser.

System76 is kicking off the new year by preparing to release a new AMD-powered Linux laptop, an updated Pangolin model.

Intel today officially announced the Core i9 13900KS as what they claim to be the "world's fastest desktop processor" with up to a 6.0GHz maximum turbo frequency.

Being introduced to the Debian package archive this week is accel-config as Intel's new user-space component for configuring the DSA accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Since early November AMD has been working on Linux patches for Automatic IBRS. AutoIBRS is a new Zen 4 CPU feature intended to provide better performance than generic Retpolines as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. Two months later the Linux AutoIBRS patches still haven't been merged yet but up to their sixth revision.

AMD today sent in a batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver fixes for the in-development Linux 6.2. Notable with this week's AMD graphics driver fixes are a few pertaining to the new Radeon RX 7000 series / RDNA3 hardware.

With the Intel VT-d 4.0 specification there is performance monitoring "PerfMon" infrastructure introduced. A new patch series from Intel is preparing for IOMMU performance monitoring with the Linux kernel code.

In addition to the CentOS Hyperscale SIG making great progress on adapting CentOS Stream for hyperscaler needs, at the opposite end of the table is the CentOS Automotive SIG with their "AutoSD" platform they continue working on adapting to make CentOS Stream suitable for use within vehicles.

For those sticking to the bi-weekly Mesa 22.3 point releases rather than riding Mesa Git, Mesa 22.3.3 is out today in providing the very latest fixes to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Following last month's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, AMD's GPUOpen group has now published the instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for those interested in RDNA3 GPUs.

ASRock Industrial, the independent company spun out of ASRock that is focused on industrial computers, edge systems, hardware for retail environments, has now partnered with Canonical to begin offering certified devices for Ubuntu Linux.

A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver.

NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD.

The NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs that has seen a lot of progress over the past year is now able to run some games like The Talos Principle, which was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0. While the NVK driver is correctly rendering, it's still slow until the kernel driver side is sorted out with re-clocking.

Google on Tuesday released their first post-holidays update to the cross-platform Chrome web browser.

While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out.