Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

On Friday a big set of patches affecting the AMDGPU/Radeon/AMDKFD kernel drivers were submitted for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window opens in the coming weeks. A lot of new feature code is part of this pull for benefiting new hardware, continuing to refine AMD GPU power management under Linux, and more.

With Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP for better securing virtual machines on the mainline Linux kernel, memory is accepted/initialized immediately at boot time by the VMs although the capability exists to have "unaccepted memory" where that memory is only dealt with by the VMs later on or on an as-needed basis. For two years now Intel engineers have been working on this unaccepted memory support and this week posted their thirteenth iteration of these fundamental Linux kernel patches.

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" began as an open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation that has become quite a comprehensive implementation over the years. But in leveraging the LLVM/Clang compiler stack, over time PoCL has grown beyond just a CPU implementation to also support OpenCL execution on NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA-capable GPUs, and more. The latest now coming with PoCL 4.0 is support for Intel Level Zero execution for running this OpenCL implementation over Intel Arc Graphics GPUs.

Serpent OS started out as a new Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty, the same developer that rose to fame for starting the Solus Linux distribution prior to a hiatus. Serpent OS was getting off the ground when the surprise full-circle announcement came in April that Solus Linux would build off Serpent OS.

KDE developer Nate Graham began his weekly development recap by noting that Plasma 6.0 development continues and its stability is improving daily as well as seeing new features.

Linux laptop/desktop vendor System76 has made some improvements to their Coreboot open firmware offerings to benefit their latest Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" wares as well as prior generation devices.

Red Hat has decided they will be doing less work on desktop applications and will stop shipping LibreOffice as part of a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release (presumably RHEL10). This is also limiting Red Hat's engagement in working on LibreOffice packaging for Fedora while the hope is that the Flatpak'ed LibreOffice will fill the void.

On Monday, 5 June, will mark 19 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews.

It's almost a daily occurrence to find interesting Linux kernel patches (and to other open-source projects too!) by Intel's large cabal of open-source engineers. The latest crossing my radar is for allowing the Linux "intel_idle" driver to run inside virtual machine (VM) guests.

The Linux 1-Wire "w1" subsystem is used for supporting drivers with hardware that communicates via a single wire (plus ground) in a simple master-slave configuration The Linux kernel has drivers such as for W1 over GPIO, i2c to W1 bridge, and supporting some very old hardware. The W1 subsystem hasn't seen much work recently while for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle will be seeing a larger update.

By pairing Wine and QEMU, Hangover continues as one of the open-source projects working to allow Windows games/apps run on other architectures like AArch64 and potentially POWER, RISC-V, and others too.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver within Mesa 23.2-devel is now able to expose OpenGL 4.6 support for Qualcomm's Adreno 600 series graphics processors.

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for May 2023 and on a percentage basis show the Steam on Linux marketshare growing ever so slightly.

In addition to System76 developing an in-house Linux laptop design, it also turns out they have been working on a new desktop/workstation PC offering.

For those fond of the Apache NetBeans integrated development environment, NetBeans 18 is now available as the latest version of this programming IE primarily geared for Java, PHP, and HTML5/CSS development.

There is a Linux kernel scheduler patch now queued via TIP's sched/core branch that can help with task scheduling on AMD processors sporting multiple last-level caches (LLCs / L3 cache) per die. This minor improvement came after a discovery by a Linux kernel developer on his AMD Zen 2 desktop.

Chinese hardware vendor Loongson is working on extending the open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv Linux kernel graphics driver so it has PCI device support and in turn will work with their hardware based on the Vivante graphics IP.

Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra on Wednesday posted the latest patches for the EEVDF scheduler, the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First approach that is based on a research paper from the late 90's. Ultimately the hope is for EEVDF to replace the existing CFS scheduler code.

For those interested in GPU overclocking, AMD has posted the patches for implementing the "legacy" OverDrive overclocking infrastructure for newer SMU13-based Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel driver.

In case you missed any of the Phoronix articles in May due to holidays or other factors, here is a look back at the most popular open-source and Linux content among the 239 original articles published on Phoronix during the past month.

Intel has released a major update to its wonderful, open-source OpenVINO toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues working out great for optimizing and running AI models on a variety of hardware and continues to introduce new features.

Following yesterday's release of Chrome 114, Google today promoted the Chrome 115 series to beta.

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have out a rather significant set of patches this week to their display code "DC" for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

For next year's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical is planning to offer an Ubuntu Core based immutable desktop OS flavor as an alternative to the traditional Ubuntu Desktop image. A new Ubuntu.com blog post today outlines Ubuntu Core usage for an immutable Linux desktop.

There's been a proposal in the works for Fedora 39 to raise its default vm.max_map_count in order to satisfy some Windows games running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. A revised proposal has now been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

The openSUSE project announced that MicroOS Desktop GNOME has been renamed to openSUSE Aeon and MicroOS Desktop Plasma is now known as openSUSE Kalpa.

Linux Foundation Europe has announced the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project to help facilitate more performant, commercial-ready software for the RISC-V processor architecture.

FFmpeg's next release (v6.1) will prove quite exciting with Vulkan Video support merged for decoding H.264, H.265/HEVC, and AV1 content. Plus there are more Vulkan Video features and other improvements in the next version.

The V3D Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers has landed support in mainline Mesa for native ASTC texture compression support.

With yesterday's NVIDIA R535 Linux driver beta one of the unlisted changes with this driver update is revising the driver license around the firmware handling to make it more explicit around permitting the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware binaries to make it easier for redistribution and use by the Nouveau open-source kernel driver.

Armbian 23.05 is out today as this Arm-focused Debian-based Linux distribution effort is approaching its tenth anniversary.

Google has promoted Chrome 114 to stable across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.3.5 today along with the 5.15.114, 5.10.181, 5.4.244, 4.9.284, and 4.4.316 point releases for those long-term (LTS) kernel versions.

NVIDIA has a nice treat to end out May for Linux users by publishing their first beta build in the R535 feature series.

The folks at Purism have announced their latest product in the form of the Librem Server v2. Starting out at $2999 USD, these new servers are built around four-year-old 9th Gen Core CPUs already discontinued by Intel.

Intel this week is using Computex 2023 to make some disclosures around next-generation Meteor Lake processors for laptops. The most exciting aspect relayed in advance during our press briefing last week was that all Intel Meteor Lake processor SKUs will feature their new Vision/Versatile Processing Unit.

As a step toward further improving AMD laptop support under Linux, AMD engineers have been working on WiFi radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation support for Linux with their latest laptops.

As a temporary workaround for helping recent versions of Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Linux under Valve's Steam Play with Intel Arc Graphics, Intel's open-source Mesa driver is temporarily no longer identifying as "Intel" graphics via its graphics vendor ID in order to workaround an issue.

System76 continues teasing the in-house laptop design they are working on codenamed Virgo.

Last week XFS users began encountering metadata corruption on the latest Linux 6.3 point releases. Following kernel developers and those testing the kernels on affected hardware over the US holiday weekend, it's believed the issue has been tracked down to one missing patch that is a one line of code being deleted.

One of the new features of Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) but for this generation is only being activated for CPUs going to select cloud providers. Intel TDX allows better isolating virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-TD software on the platform. This limited roll-out of Intel TDX has worked out okay with the Linux support for this security feature still being in flux. Sent out today was the 14th spin of the 113 patches needed for getting KVM TDX support wired up within the Linux kernel.

While GCC 13 saw its first stable release several weeks back, for those taking their time in moving to major new compiler releases and still relying on the two-year-old GCC 11 series, out today is the GCC 11.4 point release.

Arm today announced the new high-end Cortex-X4 CPU core design for delivering their most powerful Cortex compute cluster.