Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As was expected following an uptick in kernel patches mid-to-late in the cycle, Linus Torvalds today opted to issue Linux 6.1-rc8 rather than going straight to the stable release for Linux 6.1, which is also expected to serve as this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel.

Ahead of the Linux 6.1-rc8 kernel that Linus Torvalds is expected to issue shortly rather than going straight to Linux 6.1 stable, a revert for a small change leading to "huge performance regressions" in select areas has fortunately been caught and reverted.

There isn't too much interest in Solaris these days and the once vibrant open-source (Open)Solaris community is a small fraction of its past, but OpenIndiana Hipster continues pushing forward as the operating system forked from OpenSolaris and now serves as a distribution derived from the Illumos code-base.

A new release of Polychromatic is now available, the open-source GUI front-end for managing Razer devices on Linux by way of the community-managed OpenRazer drivers.

Thanks to the ongoing work led by Intel's Linux engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel will feature more feature work around enabling Compute Express Link (CXL) functionality.

The newest Apache software project hitting the version 1.0 milestone is the Apache IoTDB as a time-series database focused on serving as a database to the Internet of Things (IoT).

With SDL 3.0 in development and it taking a more modern focus and doing away with various pieces of old code, one of the latest chunks of code being retired is the OpenGL ES 1.0 2D render path.

CUPS print server lead developer Michael Sweet has announced the release of PAPPL 1.3, his printer application framework to help in developing CUPS Printer Applications as replacements to conventional printer drivers.

Intel's oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" is preparing to embark on its v3.0 release that improves performance not only for current and upcoming Intel hardware but also furthers along the NVIDIA and AMD support too.

It's been an exciting start to December in the KDE world.

Greg Kroah-Hartman released a trio of stable kernel updates this morning that are notable in part for having mitigated the recently disclosed i915 driver security issue affecting Intel "Gen12" graphics from Tigerlake integrated graphics up through the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics.

While the Sway Wayland compositor has long been available via the Fedora package repositories, Sway fans within the Fedora space are hoping that Fedora 38 will ship with a Fedora Sway spin being available for an easy and out-of-the-box experience for running this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

With the new Mesa 22.3 release one of the changes for vintage hardware users is the introduction of "HasVK" as a Vulkan driver forked from Intel's ANV codebase.

The lightweight Xfce 4.18 desktop is planning to release in two weeks while out now is the Xfce 4.18 Pre2 development milestone.

For those looking to enjoy the ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD platforms, OpenZFS 2.1.7 is now available.

Valve just posted their November 2022 Steam Survey results and it shows the Linux gaming marketshare continue to climb, driven by the success of their Arch Linux powered Steam Deck handheld gaming console.

Intel engineers have been busy bringing up Meteor Lake support for Linux from the improved integrated graphics to other areas of this next-gen Core processor that will eventually succeed Raptor Lake. In addition to heavy and ongoing work with the i915 kernel graphics driver, the initial Meteor Lake support has been merged now for Mesa.

It's been a while since trying out the BSD operating systems on bleeding-edge hardware while a Phoronix Premium recently asked about the BSDs on Raptor Lake. Well, here are my initial experiences trying to run FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD on the Intel Core i9 13900K desktop.

The past few months there has been a change proposal discussed around adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default compilation flags for packages being built for Fedora Linux. Adding this option would improve the profiling/debug-ability of the packages but with possible performance implications. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now rejected this contentious change proposal.

While NVIDIA users have been enjoying hardware ray-tracing with the Blender 3D modelling software for years with the OptiX back-end and RTX GPUs, the ray-tracing support for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics is still coming together for this industry-standard, open-source 3D modelling software.

With November now in the books, here is a look back at the most popular original open-source/Linux content on Phoronix from the 245 original articles written by your's truly over the past month. It was an extremely exciting month given the launch of the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors with up to 96 cores per socket, AVX-512, and with all of the improvements meant outright insane generational improvement and currently slaughtering the competition. The Linux 6.1 kernel nearing the limelight, early development work on Linux 6.2, and the continued embracing of the Rust programming language by the open-source ecosystem all made for an interesting November.

NixOS as the Linux distribution built atop the purely-functional and declarative Nix package manager is out with a new release to kickoff December.

Intel engineers have published their "2022Q3" patch queue for FFmpeg along with a "2022Q4 RC1" set too for representing the latest yet-to-be-merged patches for improving FFmpeg video acceleration with Intel graphics.

Developers behind the Genode open-source operating system framework that uses a micro-kernel design have released their v22.11 update.

Yesterday marked new releases of the SVT-AV1 and Rav1e open-source AV1 video encoders.

Mesa 22.3 is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics driver components.

While several X.Org DDX drivers in the past have implemented a "TearFree" xorg.conf driver option to try to eliminate screen tearing when running an X.Org Server without a composited environment, the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX that is widely used has lacked that option. That is until a developer finally stepped up and has pending support for the "TearFree" option.

Following several ROCm 5.3 point releases, AMD today shipped ROCm 5.4 as the newest version of their open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

Here's a last call that if you wanted to participate in this year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday holiday deal to help support Phoronix, today is the last day of the sale.

CVE-2022-4139 was made public today as an i915 kernel graphics driver security issue affecting all Gen12 graphics -- from integrated Tigerlake graphics up through the latest Raptor Lake graphics as well as the in-development Meteor Lake code plus the discrete GPUs of DG2/Alchemist and Arctic Sound.

A set of "request for comments" patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement support for CPU scheduler policies to be implemented as (e)BPF programs.

For the past two decades the RPM package manager software has relied upon its own OpenPGP parser implementation for dealing with package keys and signatures. With Fedora 38 they plan to have their RPM package shifted to use the Rust-written "Sequoia" parser instead.

While AMD EPYC Genoa launched a few weeks back and the Ryzen 7000 series launched in late September, one of the AMD Zen 4 patch series we are still waiting to arrive for the mainline Linux kernel is the Automatic IBRS enablement.

It's happening: the new "accel" compute accelerator subsystem is now queued for introduction with the Linux 6.2 kernel once that merge window opens in December.

Google released Chrome 108 on Tuesday that is the last major feature update for 2022 with this cross-platform web browser.

DXVK-NVAPI 0.6 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source project that bridges the DXVK Direct3D-on-Vulkan layer with NVIDIA's proprietary driver NVAPI library for utilizing various NVIDIA-specific features.

At the start of the year SDL attempted to prefer Wayland over X.Org/X11 thanks to the maturing Wayland support for this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer by numerous cross-platform games. But that change was later reverted over ecosystem challenges around Wayland. Now as we approach the end of the year, SDL is again trying to prefer Wayland over X11.

Beyond Intel's well regarded open-source software work deep down the stack on everything from ensuring timely new hardware support to optimizing the Linux kernel with various performance optimizations and investing heavily in the upstream GNU and LLVM toolchains (and much more!), they also make terrific software ecosystem advancements higher up the stack. One of their most promising areas of open-source software work in recent years has been around oneAPI. Next week Intel will be hosting a virtual oneAPI DevSummit for AI and HPC where they will be showing off their latest software advancements.

The much anticipated Godot 4.0 open-source game engine continues inching closer to release. When that release is finally out, Godot 4.0.x point releases will likely be coming in quick and some plans for Godot 4.1 are already being discussed.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 has been released and this collection of protocols is now headlined by the addition of fractional scaling support!

The U-Boot open-source bootloader that is widely used for embedded devices has finally landed support for HTTP and TCP along with a basic "wget" implementation for downloading images via HTTP/TCP.

Back in September was a big patch set working out classes of tasks for hybrid CPUs and more properly implementing Intel Thread Director for Linux. This work to better the performance/efficiency of modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has now advanced past the "request for comments" stage with a new patch series sent out on Monday.

The Apple SoC CPUFreq driver worked on by the Asahi Linux crew for CPU frequency scaling with the M1 and M2 chips under Linux looks like it could soon be reaching the mainline kernel.

Cryptsetup 2.6 is now available as the newest version of this utility for managing disk encryption on Linux systems in conjunction with the DMcrypt kernel module.

ClamAV as one of the leading open-source anti-virus / anti-malware toolkits for Linux / Windows / BSDs has finally reached the version 1.0 milestone.