Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements.

NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver.

Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature.

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support.

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform.

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture.

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August.

All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.

MidnightBSD 3.2 is out as the newest feature update to one of the few desktop-focused BSD operating systems still being maintained. MidnightBSD 3.2 continues to be derived from FreeBSD sources while shipping with a nice Xfce-based desktop experience.

Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Andrew Morton on Sunday sent in his "MM" pull requests for Linux 6.11 of the areas of the kernel he manages.

GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation.

Yann Collet released LZ4 v1.10 today as a major update to this extremely fast compression algorithm. Most significant with LZ4 1.10 is adding multi-threaded compression support for much faster performance with today's modern multi-core processors.

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review.

Konstantin Komarov with Paragon Software has prepared the latest patches for the NTFS3 kernel driver that is providing the modern NTFS read/write file-system support on Linux systems.

Intel's oneAPI Video Processing Library (VPL) GPU Runtime 2024Q2 release is now available along with an updated quarterly release of the Intel Media Driver.

Back in March were a set of patches to the Linux kernel's XZ embedded compression implementation with the project having switched from public domain to the BSD Zero Clause License along with other changes to update that in-tree code. Since then the notorious XZ backdoor situation was discovered in the upstream XZ project. With those major issues behind, Lasse Collin today sent out an updated set of patches for updating the in-tree XZ code for the Linux kernel.

Just prior to the Mesa 24.2 code branching / feature freeze on Thursday, two merge requests landed working on cleaning up some Mesa interfaces and code modernization.

Kees Cook submitted all of the hardening updates this week for the Linux 6.11 merge window in beefing up the kernel's defenses against various attack vectors and vulnerabilities.

A change proposal was raised this week for upgrading Fedora's LXQt desktop offering to the recently released LXQt 2.0 for the upcoming Fedora 41 release.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 6.11 have been merged and it's a very exciting one for AMD EPYC servers with SEV-SNP guest VM support finally being in the mainline kernel.

Palmer Dabbelt on Saturday sent out the RISC-V architecture updates for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 debuted as stable today for this rolling release model of OpenMandriva. With the new release comes the transition to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop but the OpenMandriva developers aren't yet comfortable enough to use Wayland by default and thus the X11 session is preferred.

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board.

The crypto subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel.

With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops. But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions. On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop.

With Linux 6.11 over on the Arm-focused SoC side there were three new SoCs and 59 new machines/boards added for Arm and RISC-V. The MIPS pull request was submitted overnight for this next kernel version and there is just two new SoCs being introduced.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a summer time update that highlights the interesting improvements made to the KDE desktop and related apps over the past two weeks.

Eric Engestrom is once again serving as the Mesa release manager and today took to forking the Mesa 24.2 codebase followed by issuing the first release candidate.

Back in January AMD quietly posted an XDNA Linux kernel driver for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs. The driver has been maintained within that GitHub repository since but without any clear effort for getting this accelerator driver reviewed and merged into the upstream Linux kernel. Today that first step is finally being taken with the Ryzen AI XDNA Linux kernel driver patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and dri-devel to begin facilitating the upstream review process for getting this AI accelerator driver in the mainline kernel.

Red Hat developer Karol Herbst continues improving the support for Rusticl, the Rust-based modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D drivers.

All of the SoC and platform updates slated for the Linux 6.11 kernel have been merged including new SoCs and adding DeviceTree files for a number of new systems, including some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.

NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland library continues to be maintained as an EGLStream-based Wayland external platform library for client-side Wayland support to EGL atop EGLDevice/EGLStream.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has sent out all of the sound driver patches for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.

Vulkan 1.3.291 was published this morning and with this specification update comes one prominent new extension: VK_AMD_anti_lag.

The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that started out a decade ago providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has now enabled support for the X1-85 GPU that is found within the Snapdragon X1 Elite and Snapdragon X1 Plus laptop SoCs.

The Fedora change proposal was approved this week by their engineering and steering committee to support AMD SEV-SNP virtualization host support to allow easily launching confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with Fedora 41.

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches.

The Intel-initiated Sound Open Firmware project for open-source audio DSP firmware and related tooling is out with a new v2.10 release. SOF continues to be backed not only by Intel but also Google, AMD, Realtek, NXK, Mediatek, and other organizations.

With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64.

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release.

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.