Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Back in May there was a patch series by Google engineers working on encrypted hibernation support for Linux that would be protected by the platform hardware itself like with a TPM module as well as user authentication by a password or other means. Sent out today is a second revision to that Linux encrypted hibernation support.

As I've written about the past several weeks, AMD engineers have been preparing a Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver for Linux. The AMD Platform Management Framework for future hardware appears similar to Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) and designed to enhance the thermal/power performance of future platforms.

CodeWeavers today announced the availability of their Wine-based CrossOver 22 software for enjoying Windows applications and games atop Linux, ChromeOS, and macOS.

Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big "v2.0" release.

Earlier this year was the surprise announcement of Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa. That driver has since been mainlined in Mesa and the Imagination developers continue working on improving their Vulkan API coverage. Simultaneously they have been working on a proper, upstream-friendly open-source DRM/KMS kernel driver and that code now is far enough along that it's been sent out for initial review.

Sound Open Fimware is already four years old as what started out as Intel pushing for more open firmware around audio DSPs. Since then we've seen Mediatek begin to support "SOF" as well as some AMD hardware supporting Sound Open Firmware. Out today is SOF 2.2.1 as the latest from this open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

Mozilla is ready to ship Firefox 104.0 this morning as the latest incremental improvement to this open-source, cross-platform web browser.

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory.

Flatpak 1.14 has been released as the newest feature release for this leading open-source solution for sandboxing and distribution of Linux applications.

Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver and has been spending nearly two years now involved with the Asahi Linux crew working on reverse-engineered Apple M1/M2 graphics support has shared a new status update.

Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC.

For the past decade going back to the early GTK3 days there has been the "Broadway" back-end that allows for GTK interfaces to be rendered within HTML5 web browsers. Aside from demos and other toys, there hasn't been too much widespread use reported with this GTK HTML5 back-end and some distributions like Ubuntu and Debian haven't been shipping the Broadway support with the newer GTK4. However, that is changing now for Debian and with this autumn's release of Ubuntu 22.10.

For those making use of Kexec reboots for booting to a new kernel without fully bringing down the system to reduce the server downtime from POST'ing and other hardware initialization tasks, Kexec reboots may soon be much faster on 64-bit Arm and RISC-V systems.

Following last week's release of KDE Gear 22.08, Kdenlive 22.08 is out as the newest version of this open-source, KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear video editing software.

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.0-rc2 as the newest weekly test candidate for this next major kernel series.

In addition to the R300g driver seeing new shader optimizations, also being merged this week to Mesa 22.3 were some fixes for the recently-introduced new NIR back-end for the Rade R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series.

The open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" being developed for Mesa has seen a busy week of new development activity on this work-in-progress solution.

Thanks to being open-source, the Mesa R300 Gallium3D driver that is used for supporting OpenGL on the ATI Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 series up through the Radeon X1000 "R500" series has seen a new set of performance optimization work twenty years after the R300 GPUs first shipped.

Cloud Hypervisor 26.0 released this week as the newest version of this Rust-based hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and secure computing. The open-source Cloud Hypervisor started out as an Intel software project and continues to be led by them while now under Linux Foundation stewardship and continuing to see contributions from the likes of Arm and Microsoft.

Intel's open-source Linux bring-up for Meteor Lake continues. The latest open-source patches on the Meteor Lake front are for the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) changes for these 14th Gen CPU graphics.

The latest Mesa 22.3-devel code for Zink's OpenGL on Vulkan implementation has hit an important milestone with the latest code refactoring: it looks like this OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API with the RADV driver is beginning to outpace AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver providing native OpenGL support for Radeon GPUs.

KDE developers had another busy summertime week adding more features to their open-source desktop environment.

SDL 2.24 has been released as the newest update to this widely-used abstraction layer library commonly used by cross-platform games, including heavily by games on Steam.

AMD has put out another point release in the ROCm 5.2 series for their "Radeon Open eCosystem" GPU compute stack for Linux.

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks.

Tow-Boot 2021.10-005 is now available for this open-source project that describes itself as "an opinionated distribution of U-Boot."

Out this morning is version 12.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection.