Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As was expected but now made official: this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel is Linux 6.6.

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands.

Intel has released OpenVINO 2023.2 as the newest version of their open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues in its never-ending quest for maximizing deep learning performance and efficiency while continuing to expand in its model support and features.

Going back to May 2022, AMD Linux graphics driver engineers were working on AMDGPU driver patches to enable a new Light System DMA "LSDMA" IP block. Since then we haven't heard much about LSDMA until some new patches surfaced yesterday for optionally enabling the LSDMA ring mode for the AMDGPU kernel driver.

Intel has rolled out a new quarterly update to QATlib, its QuickAssist Technology library for Linux systems to enjoy hardware acceleration of various crypto and compression algorithms on QAT Gen 4 hardware.

Dimitri John Ledkov of the Ubuntu kernel team has written about some of the improvements made for the default kernel build on Ubuntu 23.10. Ubuntu's Linux kernel build is now using much less disk space, lower RAM use, and much faster initrd generation.

Mesa 23.3 is gearing up for release in a week or two while out now is Mesa 23.3-rc4 for the latest weekly release candidate to this collection of open-source graphics drivers.

With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) continuing to prove popular mot only for end-users and independent developers but within organizations as well for having easy access to a Linux environment from the confines of Windows 11, Microsoft has added new enterprise-focused security options for WSL.

Intel has released a new version of ISPC, their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler. The ISPC 1.22 release is clocking in a few percent faster across the board as with their release builds they are now making use of LLVM Clang's link-time optimizations (LTO) for speeding up the binaries.

A change proposal currently undergoing discussion for Fedora 40 would change their toolchain's (BFD) linker to error out on potential security issues. Currently BFD is emitting warnings on potential security problems but the F40 proposal is to instead error out so the program being built will fail to link when hitting recognized security issues.

The GNOME GTK toolkit is introducing support for graphics offloading within the toolkit. This new GTK "GraphicsOffload" support is Wayland-only at this time and not working either for non-Linux platforms.

A new feature coming to next-generation Intel graphics display hardware has been revealed in new open-source Linux graphics driver patches: CMRR as an extension of the existing adaptive-sync variable rate refresh (VRR) functionality.

As part of their work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions, Intel compiler engineers today posted a set of GNU Compiler Collection patches for enabling the APX NDD.

Thanks to prolific Mesa RADV contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, a fix is on the way for addressing various issues with Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 games running on Linux.

The newest Wine Wayland driver code to be merged is improved HiDPI support.

Hours after writing about Microsoft's Direct3D 12 back-end for Mesa seeing OpenGL 4.4 support, the in-review OpenGL 4.5 code mentioned in that article happened to land in Mesa.

While not as popular as Rust or other languages these days, for COBOL enthusiasts and those continuing to maintain codebases in this 50's programming language, the out-of-tree GCC COBOL compiler support continues to be worked on in late 2023.

The latest software offering announced today by Canonical with an enterprise focus and their hopes of driving new Ubuntu Pro and support subscriptions is MicroCloud. Their MicroCloud software aims to make it easy to deploy a private cloud that is a "fully functional cloud in minutes" atop Ubuntu Linux.

From SC23 going on in Denver, the PCI-SIG team sent out a news release that they have announced the naming for their next-generation PCI Express cabling... CopprLink.

On 14 December is the previously-announced launch of 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" and Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors via a webcast from NASDAQ that Intel is promoting as the "AI Everywhere" event. AMD meanwhile recently announced an "Advancing AI" event for the week prior. While details on the AMD Advancing AI event are light, it's all the more interesting now with AMD teasing open standards and open-source around the event.

Intel has released new CPU microcode this morning for mitigating a new CPU security vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00950). This new microcode drop also fixes various functional issues on recent generations of Intel processors.

Just two weeks since Fwupd 1.9.7 was released, Fwupd 1.9.8 is now available for this open-source solution that facilities firmware updating on Linux systems for system firmware as well as various devices/peripherals.

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release and in turn also marking the Netplan 1.0 release.

It was just last week that Microsoft got OpenGL 4.3 implemented over Direct3D 12 for use in cases where Windows lacks a native OpenGL driver or for use under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSLg). After implementing a few more GL extensions atop D3D12, Microsoft has now got OpenGL 4.4 in Mesa running on Direct3D.

Merged overnight to Mesa 24.0 is the Rust-written NAK compiler back-end for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVK Vulkan driver.

After a one week delay, Blender 4.0 is now available as the latest major update to this leading open-source and cross platform 3D modeling software.

With newly-merged optimizations to Mesa 24.0-devel, the Intel shader compiler back-end is seeing its scheduling code execute around 30% faster. This big speed-up comes due to overhauling how they store pass information and reusing that for multiple pre-RA scheduling modes.

Since the Linux 6.5 kernel this summer the SLAB allocator has been officially deprecated. This followed the demise of SLOB and trying to get all Linux users over to the SLUB allocator. Patches have now been posted for stripping out the SLAB allocator for good from the mainline kernel.

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!

The Aurora supercomputer originally was supposed to be completed by Intel and Cray/HPE for the Argonne National Laboratory back in 2018. Now at the end of 2023, it's made its first debut on the TOP500 list... But only as a partial deployment and is coming in at spot number two.

One of the great niche features of Ubuntu Linux has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA that's been maintained by Canonical for providing daily kernel builds of the Linux Git kernel state as well as of all point releases and release candidates. Sadly it's now been broken for one month for this very convenient feature.

Kicking off an exciting Supercomputing SC23 week, The Linux Foundation announced this morning that they are forming the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) to help advance an open-source core software stack for high performance computing (HPC). Already a number of national labs, Intel, NVIDIA, and other stakeholders are involved.

Valve's Steam Deck is a heavy user of relying on pre-compiled shaders to yield quicker start times and a more efficient handheld gaming experience. But in cases where bugs happen and a shader compiler fix needs to be back-ported, there isn't a straight-forward means of properly handling that for the Steam Deck. But with new knobs being added to the Mesa RADV driver code, there will be some options for better dealing with this moving forward.

Following the recent talk of XWayland's rootful mode becoming more useful, Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has continued enhancing the XWayland rootful support. Last week he opened up the merge request for adding HiDPI support to this mode.

Ahead of Supercomputing SC23 week, a new version of OpenBLAS has been published for this leading open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library. OpenBLAS 0.3.25 brings new improvements for Intel and AMD x86_64 CPUs as well as a number of general improvements, and continued tuning for other architectures like ARM64, POWER, and LoongArch.

After some time spent in testing, TuxClocker 1.3 with its new AMD GPU features was released as stable overnight.

After a very exciting two weeks, the merge window for Linux 6.7 is now wrapped up and Linus Torvalds has published Linux 6.7-rc1 as the first release candidate leading up to the stable release around the end of the calendar year.

The Linux 6.7 merge window has been downright exciting with additions like Nouveau GSP support and the Bcachefs file-system being added. It's also been downright massive as one of the largest merge windows in recent history in terms of code changes. Here's some statistics of the Linux 6.7 merge window ahead of today's Linux 6.7-rc1 release.

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were merged a few days ago for Linux 6.7. As Greg Kroah-Hartman put it in the pull request, "nothing really major in here, just lots of constant development for new hardware."

While Intel hasn't released a new Atom SoC in years on the consumer side, thanks to the work by Red Hat engineers and others in the open-source community, even drivers for aging Intel Atom platforms continue to receive improvements. One of the areas of ongoing work has been the Linux kernel driver for the Atom ISP camera interface for image signal processing in supporting the web camera on some of these old devices. With Linux 6.7 there is yet more work on the Intel Atom ISP driver.

OBS Studio 30.0 was released as stable this evening as the latest version of this cross-platform software that is popular for screen-casting and widely-used by game streamers.

The Intel-developed Turbostat Linux CLI utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics is seeing a number of feature updates for Linux 6.7 as well as new hardware support.

One of the great aspects of Intel integrated and discrete graphics is the broad support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). Intel "Gen12" graphics back to Tigerlake can handle SR-IOV when there aren't any firmware woes or other issues at play. There is SR-IOV support currently with the i915 kernel driver but Intel engineers are working to architect optimal SR-IOV integration into their forthcoming Xe DRM kernel driver.

While it was supposed to ship back in H1'2023, FFmpeg 6.1 finally released last night as the newest feature update to this widely-used multimedia library.

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has introduced their first Ryzen 7040 series "Zen 4" Linux laptop in the form of the Pulse 14 Gen 3.