Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.13-rc4 kernel as the newest weekly test release leading up to Linux 6.13 stable by mid to late January.

OpenShot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular open-source video editor. This Qt-based cross-platform non-linear video editor has a new default theme and many other enhancements in time for editing any of your year-end or holiday videos.

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits.

Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using both Family 18 and Family 19 identification for future processor models.

Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework.

For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there's a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that's found on most of the X1 laptop models.

For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system.

Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs.

In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application.

The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system.

The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers.

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code.

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update.

It's not only KDE seeing nice improvements ahead of the holidays but GNOME developers were also busy this week preparing new improvements to their open-source desktop stack. There's been some rather exciting changes on the GNOME front as we prepare to cap off the year.

While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes.

Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there's been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements.

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 10.0 is now available for testing with another 15 bugs fixed this week.

Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week's set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month.

If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content.

The openSUSE project announced today YQPkg as a new package management tool for openSUSE Linux distributions.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat just released Wayland Protocols 1.39 as the latest set of updates to this de facto repository for Wayland protocols.

DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve's Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly.

A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12.

The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window.

Joshua Hahn has posted the latest "request for comments" draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes.

In early 2023 DreamWorks open-sourced their MoonRay renderer as OpenMoonRay. Since then they have continued advancing this award-winning production MCRT renderer. Before closing out 2024 they have now released OpenMoonRay 1.7.

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.