Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems.

The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment.

For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors.

ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero.

As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed.

Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack.

It looks like the Red Hat change restricting access to RHEL sources that was announced last year is having the unintended consequence of causing some headaches for CentOS special interest group (SIG) projects.

As a follow-up to last week's article around the GCC compiler seeing patches for AMD RDNA3 GPU support so that it's "working for most purposes", that code has now been merged and it's also been confirmed to also bring the RDNA2 support up to a working state.

Linux hardware vendor Purism that is known for their crowd-funded Librem 5 smartphone effort, Linux-loaded laptops, and other privacy-minded wares announced a first public offering of Purism stock on the StartEngine platform.

Nick Clifton with Red Hat announced today the release of GNU Binutils 2.42, the newest feature release to this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and Unix-like systems as part of the compiler toolchain.

Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software.

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there is already a NZXT Kraken Linux driver for supporting hardware monitoring and controls for various NZXT all-in-one CPU liquid cooler products. A new Linux driver was posted today for supporting the latest generation of the NZXT AIO CPU coolers.

While a number of Linux distributions are experimenting with x86-64-v2 baselines or offering x86-64-v3 optimized packages for assuming AVX/AVX2 support by default for their packages, the CachyOS Linux distribution has been experimenting with offering x86-64-v4 packages for those running on Intel or AMD systems with AVX-512 support.

GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers.

Ubuntu has long provided a "low-latency" kernel build intended for industrial embedded systems and other latency sensitive environments. Ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical is looking at applying those low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel build.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.8-rc2 as the newest weekly test release of this kernel set to debut as stable in March.

With a goal of delivering a Wayland-only Budgie 10 desktop release later in 2024, Budgie 10.9 debuted today with the early-stage porting work to Wayland.

Now being past the Wine 9.0 code freeze and the bi-weekly development releases back underway with eyes now set on Wine 10.0 next year, the 12th part of the Wine Wayland driver has been published for review. This latest set of Wine Wayland work is on implementing display mode change emulation.

New code submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 cycle are some AMD additions now set for premiering in today's Linux 6.8-rc2 release.

There's been some new work pending for further enhancing the GNOME desktop when it comes around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR). Separately, there's new merge requests pending for adding laptop battery charge threshold controls from the GNOME UI.

TuxClocker as the open-source, hardware/driver vendor independent overclocking and power management control utility for Linux systems is out with a new feature release. This Qt-based utility for enthusiasts continues adding new controls primarily around greater power/performance tunables for CPUs and GPUs.

The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion.

Endeavour OS as the popular desktop rolling-release Linux distribution built upon Arch Linux has published updated ISOs that bundle in the stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well as other package updates.

As some terrific news, Canonical laid out their kernel plans for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and they are being ambitious with plans to ship the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel as their default kernel on this next long-term support Ubuntu desktop/server distribution.

The Budgie desktop that started off as the desktop project within the Solus Linux space has written a lengthy blog post outlining their highlights for 2023 as well as providing a glimpse ahead for 2024. The Budgie desktop is working eagerly on Wayland and XWayland support and hope to advance enough this year to deliver a Wayland-only release.

The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support.

We're nearly one month to the day until the release of the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release alongside the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0. Developers aren't letting up at all with more performance optimizations and fixes continuing to hit the codebase.

Following the recent Wine 9.0 stable release earlier this month, Wine 9.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development release in the new series that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 10.0 stable release in early 2025.

While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming.

While not quite as exciting as yesterday's AMD XDNA driver publishing for Ryzen AI on Linux, a notable patch series out of AMD today on the Linux front is enabling AMD Core Performance Boost controls within their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

Red Hat announced today that beginning April they will be rolling out a new pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux use in the public cloud.

As part of the renewed efforts around the Servo open-source web engine and making it usable for embedded purposes, the Servo engine has been tacking on a number of new features in recent weeks.

Simon Ser just released Sway 1.9-rc1 as the newest test release for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

The uutils project providing a Rust-written Coreutils re-implementation has released v0.0.24 and it passes another 29 GNU test cases as the project nears its 1.0 release.

AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 has dropped as AMD's first open-source Vulkan API driver release of the new year for Radeon graphics on Linux.

With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI.

Following this morning's embargo lift on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 specification, Mesa merge requests were opened by Intel and RADV stakeholders in beginning to implement the new extensions for these Mesa Vulkan drivers and promoting existing extensions to their newly-minted state.

For the better part of two years we've seen Intel open-source software engineers working on preparing the Linux kernel for FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery for defining new transitions for changing privilege levels. Intel's been working hard on the FRED kernel plumbing for better performance, lower response times, and improved robustness and it's looking like FRED could be set to land come Linux 6.9.

The Khronos Group today announced their Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone as a specification for their latest API features and meeting the needs of 2024 graphics processors and other hardware. Vulkan Roadmap 2024 builds upon Vulkan 1.3 and the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 specifications to deliver next-generation capabilities.

GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software.

In addition to OBS adding AV1 VA-API support, some more good Linux video acceleration news this week is Valve enabling VA-API DRM hardware-accelerated video decoding when using Remote Play with the newest Steam beta.

Intel engineers on Wednesday released OpenVINO 2023.3 as the latest major update to this leading open-source AI toolkit. The OpenVINO 2023.3 brings "full support" for new Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake processors, other Intel hardware support improvements, and continuing to expand support around generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs).