Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has reaffirmed the company's commitment to the open-source ROCm compute stack and working with the community and ultimately improving their software support.

Some Fedora Enterprise Linux Next (ELN) plans were shared on Friday with the process of launching CentOS Stream 10 getting underway that will ultimately form the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

As a follow-up to yesterday's article about the believed fix for the Nouveau use-after-free bug plaguing Linux 6.3 users of this open-source NVIDIA driver, the fix has now been merged to Linux 6.4 Git and in turn should also be picked up for an upcoming Linux 6.3 point release.

Distrobox is the open-source project for quickly and easily firing up other Linux distributions as containers on your desktop. Distrobox is a delight to use if needing to try different Linux distributions on your system or wishing to leverage different distributions for specialized workloads.

It may be the middle of summer but there are no signs of Plasma 6.0 development efforts slowing down at all with this being another interesting week for KDE development.

Python 3.12 isn't even being released until October and Python 3.13 won't be out until H2'2024, but already the developers working on tuning CPython performance are aiming to make more enhancements this next development cycle.

Mozilla's Firefox 116 web-browser should have experimental PipeWire camera capturing support available for Linux users.

As a follow-up to the potentially nasty open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver bug in Linux 6.3, the issue is believed to have been figured out and a patch is pending that appears to address the issue.

The Vulkan API v1.3.254 specification update was published today with just a few fixes/clarifications to the documentation but also two new extensions.

AMDVLK 2023.Q2.3 is out today as the newest snapshot of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver.

FreeSync Panel Replay is a new feature for AMD Ryzen laptops with the DCN v3.1.4 display block or newer for helping to reduce power usage when the screen contents are unchanged.

Arm and NXP engineers have posted the initial open-source Linux driver patches for an Ethos-U driver for their machine learning processor to enable Linux to dispatch AI inference jobs to the hardware. It's yet another inference/accelerator driver working its way toward the mainline kernel but is off to a rocky start with many code issues being raised.

A new version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" is now available, a modern Linux desktop that continues to mimic the look and feel of the old CDE Unix desktop environment.

While IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent years for helping to deliver more performant and efficient I/O, it's also been home to various security vulnerabilities. Due to ongoing security issues, this interface for asynchronous I/O is being restricted or outright disabled across Google products.

While yesterday brought a major update to the Steam client stable series, tonight brings a new update to the Steam beta series with some notable enhancements to the Linux client.

As part of Linux hardware vendor System76's ongoing work around their COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution, recently their development team has been working on enhancing the automatic window tiling capabilities.

The recent leaks and reports around Intel Core Ultra were true and today Intel unveiled what they call their biggest brand update in 15 years for their consumer CPU line. Beginning with the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is this new client branding.

Working towards a stable release in September, today marks the release of the first Qt 6.6 Beta.

For helping to ensure optimal performance of AArch64 binaries generated by LLVM/Clang for the Neoverse-V2 processor cores, LLVM 17 Git has received a proper Neoverse-V2 scheduling model.

Since last month Loongson engineers have begun posting Linux patches enabling their upcoming 3A6000 series LoongArch processors under Linux. Yesterday they posted new patches and revealed that Loongson 3A6000 processors support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT).

Following Oracle releasing an updated GraalVM this week, released yesterday was a new version of Eclipse OpenJ9 for this high performance, open-source JVM.

Microsoft's CBL-Mariner team has published v2.0.20230609 as the newest update to their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes inside and outside the Redmond company.

Following recent Steam client beta updates that have introduced many new features, Valve tonight rolled out a rather big Steam client update to stable users.

Following an exciting AMD AI Day yesterday where they launched the Ryzen PRO 7000 series for desktops and laptops, launched Genoa-X and Bergamo server processors, and introduced the MI300X, there is additional exciting news today... AMD just published the code for their new openSIL project that is working on open-source CPU silicon initialization with Coreboot support and in the coming years will ultimately replace AGESA.

It's recommended to avoid using the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver on the current stable Linux 6.3 series as there is a serious bug present that could cause varying issues to your system.

Ahead of the stable release being planned for August, today marks the availability of LibreOffice 7.6 Beta 1 for those wanting to help in testing this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

Following last month's NVIDIA 535 Linux driver beta that was launched at the end of May, NVIDIA has now released the 535.54.03 Linux driver as the first stable R535 driver in this new series.

Thomas Gleixner of Linutronix, which was acquired by Intel last year, and his team are working on cleaning up the Linux x86/x86_64 boot process. A set of 17 patches that touch the early Linux kernel initialization code and other tree-wide changes have now been posted for discussion.

Microsoft has published the latest release of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) implementation for running Linux distributions within the confines of Windows. With the WSL 1.3.10 update there is now experimental memory reclaim support and other changes.

Oracle has published the latest community edition releases of GraalVM targeting JDK17 and JDK20. GraalVM also continues to support a variety of other languages beyond Java as well.

While Imagination continues bringing-up their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa, when it comes to their open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver it for now continues living out-of-tree. On tuesday though marked their third version of the PowerVR kernel driver being published.

Ahead of the planned full specification release in 2025, the PCI-SIG has now shared with its members the first review draft "v0.3" of PCI Express 7.0.

For some months now RADV ray-tracing has been enabled on a per-game basis while finally today in a change for next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release is RADV ray-tracing support being exposed by default for all software.

Beyond launching Bergamo and Genoa-X, AMD's AI Day also showcased the new AMD-Pensando DPU offerings and also previewed more of their next-gen Instinct MI300 accelerator APU.

In addition to AMD announcing the Ryzen PRO 7000 series this morning, they have now announced Bergamo, Genoa-X, and other new data center offerings.

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago.

Meta engineers have proposed a shared wakequeue "swqueue" feature for the Linux kernel's CFS scheduler that can help with a small throughput performance improvement and slightly better latency, particularly for AMD systems with multiple CCXs.

The convenient Mesa Matrix tracker that has long shown Vulkan and OpenGL versions and extensions supported by the different open-source drivers has also now begun reporting OpenCL support.

One of the interesting Intel i915 DRM kernel driver patch series being worked on recently is fdinfo memory statistics with the ability to report per-process/client memory statistics around vRAM use.

Last month I wrote about the virtual ALSA driver being developed for the Linux kernel. That driver has now morphed into the Virtual PCM Test driver and is on its way with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

Following my recent RADV+Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarking for various games and workloads, Valve's Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz was hopping on some of the benchmarks where this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation lagged behind the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver that provides OpenGL support within guest virtual machines running with VMware virtualization products is now finally defaulting to using the modern NIR intermediate representative rather than Gallium3D's TGSI.

In recent months AMD open-source graphics driver engineers seem to be taking more interest in supporting the Xen hypervisor with their graphics hardware. It's not clear yet externally if this is just due to customer demand or other yet-to-be-announced interest in Xen.

While the upstream Linux kernel support for RISC-V continues to improve with new ISA features, support for more RISC-V SoCs, and other enhancements, in some areas the open-source RISC-V code continues to play catch-up with the other mature architectures supported by the Linux kernel. One of the areas still pending is enabling KASLR support for RISC-V on Linux to enhance system security.

The cpupower tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree can be used for easily querying and setting various CPU power-related features. This tool now has patches pending for extending it for exposing more functionality found within AMD's modern P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 12.0, the Debian GNU Hurd port has been released that rather than utilizing the Linux kernel is making use of GNU Hurd.

Support for RISC-V's Vector ISA is now expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window.

For Linux gamers relying on Microsoft Xbox controllers, the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel will enable rumble support for several newer controller models.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released a new version of Fwupd, the open-source tool that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing motherboards/systems and various peripheral devices to enjoy firmware updates easily from Linux.