Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel and Canonical have been collaborating to provide an early "Graphics Preview" stack for Ubuntu 24.10 to provide better support for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" and Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics.

Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025.

The Fish Shell as the interactive, user-friendly command line shell debuted its 4.0 beta release ahead of the holidays. Notably in this release is porting the C++ code over to the Rust programming language.

Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit is out with a new feature release today for closing out the year. The OpenVINO 2024.6 release brings initial support for the Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards as well as further optimizing the Intel NPU support.

Back in August AMD posted Linux patches for L3 Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement (SDCIAE). That L3 Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) work was since announced as part of the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. A second iteration of those SDCIAE were posted this week in working to get this functionality enabled for the mainline Linux kernel.

The Linux kernel already supports the Realtek RTL8125D 2.5G Ethernet controller but additional handling is required to enable the revision B variant of this chipset, which will be coming in the next kernel cycle.

Cloud Hypervisor 43 is out as the newest version of this Intel-backed, Rust-based open-source VMM project that now routinely sees contributions from Microsoft, Arm, Rivos, Tencent, and other organizations.

Building off the release of NetBSD 10.0 that arrived for Easter this year and incorporated a half-decade of work, NetBSD 10.1 is out right before Christmas as the first update to this BSD operating system series.

AMD today sent out a first batch of "new stuff" feature patches to DRM-Next of new code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of material for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification.

Back for the Linux 6.12 kernel EROFS introduced support for file-backed mounts to help with container and sandboxing use-cases. As part of the EROFS "fixes" merged yesterday to the Linux 6.13 kernel, file-backed mounts are now using buffered I/O by default to speed-up container start times.

The latest house cleaning of the Linux kernel is looking to drop support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those platforms from the better part of two decades ago with Cell BE processors that also had worked their way into some supercomputers at the time.

A drm-intel-gt-next pull request was sent in today to DRM-Next of the latest batch of Intel kernel graphics driver updates destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle.

A patch posted on Tuesday for the Linux kernel would introduce new Lenovo Legion WMI driver options for supporting Lenovo Legion laptops as well as the Legion Go handheld gaming console to support different power/performance settings.

AOMP 20.0-1 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this LLVM/Clang downstream focused on shipping the latest AMD patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP accelerator offload support.

Merged today to the Linux kernel are fixes for two vulnerabilities with the Xen hypervisor. One of them concerns a malicious network backend being able to crash a guest after a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest. The other more pressing issue addressed is a Xen hypercall page being unsafe against speculative CPU attacks.

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 as the re-base of the Asahi Linux work for Apple Silicon devices atop the recently released Fedora 41 is now ready for Apple device users.

The LLVM compiler stack offers a number of sanitizers like the AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and others for detecting different coding issues like data races, memory addressing issues, use of uninitialized memory, and more. The newest sanitizer addition to LLVM mainline is TySan as a Type Sanitizer.

NVIDIA today announced the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit as their "most affordable generative AI Supercomputer" with this upgraded Jetson Nano offering 1.7x better GenAI performance while also costing less than its predecessor. This new product looks like an exciting addition to the NVIDIA Jetson line-up and will have performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has decided to extend the Linux 6.1 LTS planned lifespan from four to five years.

While Fedora is often times eager to introduce new spins and other variants as well as supporting a comprehensive set of CPU architectures, it doesn't always drive new users. In the case of atomic versions of Fedora Linux for desktop use on POWER hardware, it turns out there are seemingly no active users.

Merged yesterday as part of "fixes" to the Linux 6.13 were new Intel support additions for their next-generation Core Ultra and Xeon processors.

Qt 6.9 beta is out today as the first test release for this updated Qt6 toolkit.

Fedora is among the Linux distributions that package up the Intel Compute Runtime stack to make it easy to run OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero workloads on Intel graphics hardware via the distribution package manager and without having to jump through any extra hoops. But now with upstream Intel Compute Runtime dropping support for Ice Lake and older leaves the Fedora support in a pickle. Currently they are focusing on the "legacy" branch with older hardware support but for Fedora 42 are looking at upgrading the support to focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support while leaving that older hardware support behind.

Hyprland 0.46 is out today as the newest update to this Wayland compositor that is packing in many new features ahead of the holidays.

Git maintainer Junio Hamano today announced Git 2.48-rc0 as the first test release toward the Git 2.48 distributed version control system release.

Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel's networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput.

For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing.

Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.

Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support.

Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January.

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today.

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays.

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing.

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel.