Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

A new set of patches have been posted for the Linux kernel that implement AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for the amd-pstate driver.

As a lot of active development continues around the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and the developers eyeing a beta in a few months, it appears work on this Qt6-ported desktop environment is coming together quite nicely.

The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation.

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32.

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation.

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series.

NVIDIA today rolled out a new stable point release in their R535 series for Linux users to provide a handful of bug fixes.

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 that require new microcode while prior Zen CPUs require a kernel-based solution.

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.

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.