Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release.

There used to be a time when Patch Tuesday wasn't so busy in the Linux space, but certainly not this month... Linus Torvalds just pushed the kernel code changes around AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL as well as other security patches.

AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors.

Go 1.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs.

The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components.

Last month Intel announced APX and AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512 that will see both P and E cores in the future supporting this updated Advanced Vector Extensions implementation. Delightfully, today Intel engineers began posting GCC compiler patches for beginning to enable AVX10 support.

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game.

Merged into the GCC 14 codebase is initial support for gprofng, the new GNU profiler.

Rhino Linux has rolled out of beta as a community-based, rolling-release Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu.

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios.

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus.

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts.

For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI.

Sourceware.org that provides the open-source hosting for projects like GCC, Cygwin, and more had long been sponsored by Red Hat and a rather opaque organization. Earlier this year SourceWare.org became part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In addition to now calling the SFC home, they are planning other changes ahead to expand their hosting services, diversifying hardware and software partners, and other changes.

AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 is out this morning as the first update to AMD's official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver since mid-June.

The Linux kernel's "dimmtemp" driver allows for reporting memory temperatures with capable memory modules and when exposed by the Intel processor's PECI (Platform Environment Control Interface). Currently though the DIMM temperature driver is hard-coded to only allow reporting up to 32 DIMMs while a change queued for Linux 6.6 will extend that limit.

Recently merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor development code is implementing a dedicated kernel mode-setting (KMS) thread and allows for pointer motions to bypass the main thread during cursor sprite movements. Ultimately this effort is around lower-latency cursor movements.

Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.5-rc5 as the newest test candidate aiming for the stable Linux 6.5 kernel around the end of August.

Available now for testing is the release candidate of Python 3.12 ahead of its formal release later this year.

The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator.

In addition to Loongson preparing Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for LoongArch to help with MIPS / x86 / Arm binary translation on this domestic Chinese CPU architecture, additional LoongArch features are also now slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle.

Tagged on Saturday was GTK 4.12 as the newest version of this open-source toolkit.

Intel's open-source ConnMan software that is an Internet connect manager focused on embedded Linux devices is out with a new release.

The newest motherboard port to land in mainline Coreboot Git is for enabling the HP EliteBook 820 G2 laptop.

Yesterday KDE developer Nate Graham outlined the progress with the Plasma 6 desktop while out today he's out with his usual blog post that highlights the various KDE changes to have been merged over the past week.

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward.

Back in Linux 6.4 there were Intel HD audio additions for Lunar Lake processors, ACE2.x integration with Lunar Lake has also been worked on as part of the SoundWire support, and also early preparations on the Sound Open Firmware side. With Linux 6.6 there are more audio bits coming together for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors.

For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing.

With KDE Plasma 6 development going well and a beta potentially in a few months, the KDE Neon Linux distribution crew has created a new archive with the latest Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 components to help developers and enthusiasts in testing out this leading-edge open-source desktop code.

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance.

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes.

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase.

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support.

It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops.

An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle.

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks.

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum.

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake.

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates.

LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mid-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office.