Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.7 kernel. He's happy with how things have been pacing this stage of the cycle, particularly as he's been battling travels and a head cold this week.

Unvanquished has been a promising open-source first person shooter game in development for over a decade. It started out putting monthly alpha releases and quite a brisk development pace but in recent years the releases have been much less frequent. This year started out with Unvanquished 0.54 being released and in now approaching the end of the year is seeing a new point release.

Linux Mint 21.3 beta is now available for testing as this latest Ubuntu-based, desktop-focused Linux distribution.

Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there's the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels -- most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12.

Lubuntu as the Ubuntu Linux spin featuring the lightweight LXQt desktop has shared some of their plans for the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS release. As part of this release due out in April they are aiming to have an optional Wayland session in place although they don't expect to make it the default until Lubuntu 24.10.

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month's update.

Earlier Phoronix reporting on the "Valve Galileo" as a new Steam Deck device proved accurate and that is the new Steam Deck OLED gaming console. Further improving the upstream Linux kernel support is a set of patches to further refine the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) support for this new platform.

Following last week's initial set of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 6.8, another weekly pull request was submitted on Friday to DRM-Next of further changes.

In addition to Intel preparing to merge their new Xe kernel graphics driver into the mainline kernel potentially for Linux 6.8, their existing open-source Intel kernel graphics driver code continues to be improved upon and receiving new features.

With the recent €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers remain quite busy working on improving the accessibility and security of the GNOME desktop.

It's a Christmas season of bug fixing in the KDE world as following the late November Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 they've shifted from feature work to fixes and with the new test release has received an influx of bug reports.

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M.

The release process has begun for releasing Wine 9.0 as stable early next year.

Vulkan 1.3.273 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API.

Intel engineers maintain multiple Ethernet drivers in the Linux kernel for their wide-range of networking hardware from consumer to high-end data center wares. There's been an ongoing effort to overhaul their Ethernet driver management to reduce code duplication between the different drivers for better code sharing and with an end goal of more unification.

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) are intended to help provide better security for virtual machines and are key elements to both companies investments around confidential computing. It turns out they have a common enemy in their VM security goals: x86 32-bit software.

It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics.

Canonical's Multipass software that is advertised as "cloud-style VMs at your fingertips" and making it easy to spin-up "Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation", is out with a new test release adding snapshots support and other new features.

PoCL 5.0-RC1 is out today as the newest feature release being brewed for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for OpenCL code to run on CPUs as well as running OpenCL code on other back-ends such as atop NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm and other LLVM back-ends.

Friday's release of Wine 8.22 is expected to be the last bi-weekly feature release before shifting focus to the code freeze and making Wine 9.0 ready for release in early 2024. It's coming down to the finish line how much more Wine Wayland driver functionality will be merged in time.

It looks like Intel will soon be submitting their first Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver pull request to DRM-Next for mainlining this modern, current and future hardware focused kernel graphics driver to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It looks like this mainlining is set to still happen in time for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.

Following yesterday's big AMD AI event where they launched the Instinct MI300A / MI300X and ROCm 6.0, today AMD engineers released Radeon GPU Profiler 2.0 along with other GPUOpen tooling updates.

A new drm-misc-next pull request was sent today to DRM-Next bringing a few notable changes for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window.

KDE's KWin compositor has added DMA-Fence deadline support to its DRM back-end that can help ensure rendering is completed on-time and otherwise helping to boost the GPU clock speeds.

Alpine Linux 3.19 has been released as the newest feature update to this lightweight Linux distribution employing Busybox and libc.

As an early Christmas present for Linux kernel developers and others keeping track of kernel development, the git.kernel.org Cgit web interface has rolled out native dark mode support.

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October.

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.

The Red Hat engineers responsible for creating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) are celebrating tonight with LVFS paired with the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility now having served more than 100 million firmware updates!

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community.

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks.

Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot.

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors.

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new "GFX12" hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed.

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives.

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to "several times faster" than the existing JSON functions.

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There's been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey.

Following the SLOB allocator removal earlier this year, the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is now positioned to remove the SLAB allocator. Additionally, the lone good-for-everything SLUB allocator is set to receive further optimizations.

GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility.

Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop.

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI.

TornadoVM 1.0 has been released as the open-source software providing an OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in for allowing Java on heterogeneous hardware from multi-core CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs. TornadoVM allows targeting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V devices for a rather robust array of hardware support.

Published originally back in October were a set of patches for allowing different compression algorithms for the Linux hibernation image to yield faster restore times. That work -- focused on LZ4 compression support -- has been revised as it works toward the mainline kernel.