Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Valve has just released a SteamOS 3.6.9 beta as the newest update to their Arch Linux derived operating system powering the Steam Deck and other gaming devices.

Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor.

Following the recent Mutter 47 beta release that also marks the feature freze point for GNOME 47, there still are some High Dynamic Range (HDR) display preparations being merged ahead of this next stable desktop release due out in September.

A set of nine patches were posted for review on Tuesday in aiming to get the Apple Touch Bar working well under Linux for the x86 T2-based Macs.

A seemingly late patch for the Intel Idle (intel_idle) Linux kernel driver enables support for upcoming Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors.

Dragonfly 1.21 released today as the newest version of this modern, drop-in replacement to Redis and Memcached. This performance-optimized in-memory data store has added a few interesting features with the new release.

Mold 2.33 is out as the newest version of this high speed linker as an alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. With Mold 2.33 there are still new performance optimizations being worked out by lead developer Rui Ueyama.

OpenZFS 2.2.5 is now available as the newest stable update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Yesterday the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor saw tearing control support merged while today another prominent Wayland protocol has been merged: linux-drm-syncobj-v1 for explicit sync support.

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.

Following last month's NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta release where the open GPU kernel modules are used by default with Turing GPUs and newer, the NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux driver has debuted today in stable form for the R560 series.

While there is no shortage of consumer network attached storage (NAS) devices these days, those able to run a mainline Linux kernel, open bootloader, and other open/mainline software components is a bit more challenging. Thanks to the work of open-source developer Heiko Stuebner, the QNAP TS-433 is looking to be an interesting candidate for those wanting a nice 4-bay NAS while being able to load it with a mainline Linux kernel build and other upstream open-source software.

A number of GPU hang fixes have been merged for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver within Mesa. These fixes should help further enhance the current RDNA3 GPU driver support and also has fixes for stabilizing the upcoming RDNA4 GPU support.

For those making use of JSON data with the PostgreSQL database server, now merged code to make use of SIMD for JSON escaping has shown up to a 4x improvement for query performance when dealing with lots of JavaScript Object Notation data.

AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0.

Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent in a new round of x86 platform driver fixes today for the ongoing Linux 6.11 kernel cycle. This pull request has a few items worth mentioning as part of this fixes queue.

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3!

At the start of the year AMD posted an open-source XDNA Linux driver to GitHub for supporting the Ryzen API NPU IP found within their newest Ryzen mobile SoCs. It wasn't until last month though in mid-July that AMD began the process of submitting the driver for review so that it can work its way toward the mainline Linux kernel within the "accel" accelerator subsystem. Today brings a second revision to that driver.

A one year old merge request to support Wayland's Tearing Control protocol (tearing-control-v1) has finally been merged into the Sway compositor codebase.

Mozilla Firefox 129.0 is now available for download ahead of its formal release announcement on Tuesday. Making Firefox 129 notable is that for non-local sites it's now replacing HTTP with HTTPS by default. Firefox will now aim for HTTPS as the default protocol on non-local sites.

A three month old merge request finally landed in mainline LLVM Git this past week to deliver improvements initially for Intel Meteor Lake processors.

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year is expected to see a number of new Kconfig options introduced for greater build-time control over what CPU speculative execution security mitigations are included as part of the kernel build.

In-step with the GCC compiler beginning to see Intel AVX10.2 support patches, the LLVM Clang 20 Git code is already seeing initial AVX10.2 code merged for this open-source compiler.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.11 is now available for testing.

As the next step toward releasing GNOME 47.0 in mid-September, the GNOME 47 beta release is imminent and today the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor "47.beta" releases were made.

GNU Binutils 2.43 is out as stable this Sunday as the newest update to this important piece of the open-source GNU compiler toolchain.

Last August I wrote an article about the open-source AMD GPU kernel driver crossing 5 million lines of code -- including their overzealous header files -- and following the recent Linux 6.11 merge window curiosity got the best of me with how much larger the kernel driver is now that the initial RDNA4 support is merged... Well, it's about to cross 5.8 million lines, or about a 16% increase just over the past year.

Ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel due for release later today there is the weekly "x86/urgent" material to merge.

Building off some "request for comments" patches sent out in April, a new set of patches appeared on Friday for the Intel P-State Linux driver for setting the asymmetric CPU capacity on hybrid systems. This is another attempt at helping to improve the Linux kernel scheduler behavior in ensuring optimal task placement between Intel Core processors having a mix of P and E cores. This patch series in particular helps when SMT / Hyper Threading support is disabled or like with upcoming Lunar Lake processors where there is no HT support.

It's been four years now that the Btrfs file-system has been the default for Fedora on the desktop. The Fedora and Btrfs love affair has been going well and is only getting better with more integration enhancements planned and a special interest group (SIG) now getting off the ground for furthering these efforts.

The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July.

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year has a change coming that will impact users of the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. This change is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER" that has been within the kernel code the past two decades to slowdown how frequent the CPU frequency evaluation occurs. In turn the revised logic can allow for that CPUFreq frequency re-evaluation to occur more often.

For those intrigued by the likes of Fedora Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and NixOS for an immutable Linux distribution but desiring something based on Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux has an immutable variant now available for testing.

While not as common as GRUB or systemd-boot, a new version of Limine is now available for this open-source, modern-focused and portable multi-protocol bootloader.

In addition to the KDE development activity this week, GNOME developers have also been busy polishing their desktop ahead of their next GNOME release in September.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekend update that recaps all of the interesting KDE development activities for the past week.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the engineers at Canonical began focusing more on the performance of Ubuntu and establishing a performance team at the company. This work is ongoing and for Ubuntu 24.10 they are exploring another exciting area: leveraging "-O3" compiler optimizations for Ubuntu packages. Available today is an experimental build of the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs that are compiled for the -O3 optimization level.

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

A one line patch to the Linux kernel is yielding significant performance and power efficiency gains for existing Intel Xeon "Emerald Rapids" server processors on the likes of Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.

For those that have experienced a buggy AMD HDMI audio experience when using recent versions of the Linux kernel, a fix has been submitted today for Linux 6.11 and in turn for back-porting to stable series in addressing "another long-time regression fix for AMD HDMI."

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who has been working on supporting Vivante NPU IP within the reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver has been much time recently focused on enabling the Vivante NPU found within the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. While not yet upstreamed, he's been successful in this effort and seeing good performance for object detection with this hardware.