Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

In addition to Intel's busy Patch Tuesday, AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the "SQUIP" attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors.

Today's busy patch Tuesday for Intel continues with the Linux kernel getting mitigated for EIBRS Post-barrier Return Stack Buffer (PBRSB). This PBRSB is the latest handling on the "CPU vulnerability nightmares front", the pull request calls it.

As part of today's "Patch Tuesday", Intel has made a new round of security vulnerabilities public -- including a new processor advisory that affects their latest Xeon Scalable and Core wares resulting in new CPU microcode being required.

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs!

AMD engineers have released an updated version of AOMP, their LLVM/Clang downstream that carries the company's latest patches around OpenMP offloading to Radeon GPUs.

Going back years has been an effort to get 30-bit deep color support on the GNOME desktop under Wayland. Ubuntu and others have been interested in getting 30-bit color support working nicely for the Linux desktop, but while that milestone hasn't yet been crossed, thankfully there is some renewed work in that direction.

The FreeBSD project has published their latest quarterly status report highlighting the advancements made to this open-source BSD operating system.

A patch coming about earlier this year allows setting the system's hostname before user-space starts by way of the hostname= kernel parameter. That patch has now landed as part of Andrew Morton's accumulated changes for Linux 6.0.

With the Linux 6.0 multimedia subsystem changes, the H.265/HEVC user-space API is now being considered stable.

Intel used SIGGRAPH to announce their forthcoming Arc Pro A-series professional GPUs. The initial products include the Arc A30M mobile GPU, the Arc Pro A40 single-slot GPU, and the Arc Pro A50 dual-slot GPU.

Intel used SIGGRAPH today to announce OpenPGL as what they say is the industry's first open-source library for path guiding so renderer developers can integrate "start of the art" path-guiding methods.

Red Hat has been working on a web-based UI for its Anaconda operating system installer and for the Fedora 37 release this autumn they are planning to have an optional preview of this new installer interface.

AMD Automatic Mode Transition (AMT) is a new feature wired up for Ryzen-powered ThinkPad laptops that is being introduced with the Linux 6.0 kernel.

The "char/misc" changes were merged a few days back for the Linux 6.0 kernel with this pull being the rather "random catch-all" area of the kernel for drivers not fitting within other subsystems. Most notable with the char/misc updates for Linux 6.0 is introducing support for Intel's Habana Labs Gaudi2.

OpenBLAS as the high performance, open-source BLAS / LAPACK implementation debuted a new version on Sunday with more CPU optimizations and expanded processor coverage.

The IBM Power CPU architecture updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.0 kernel.

You may recall the Phoronix news earlier this year around an AMD "Sabrina" SoC appearing in Coreboot for open-source system firmware support. Over the past few months we've cited a number of AMD Sabrina hits in open-source code but outside of that haven't heard much else about "Sabrina" or seen it on AMD's roadmaps.

The Linux CIFS/SMB3 client updates were merged on Sunday for the Linux 6.0 merge window. Notable with this round of updates is a performance improvement for the multi-channel mode.

SUSE had been one of the big supporters of ReiserFS two decades ago when it was using the ReiserFS file-system by default but that practice ended in 2006. While SUSE/openSUSE hasn't defaulted to ReiserFS for many years, it has remained an install-time option and retained support for mounting ReiserFS file-systems, but that practice is likely soon ending.

Along with his various other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the Linux 6.0 staging changes this week.

Being merged into Mesa 22.3 this morning for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" are rewritten acceleration structures for the ray-tracing support.

BUS1 started out as a Linux kernel IPC module following the failure of KDBUS and while there still are occasional commits to that out-of-tree BUS1 kernel module, the involved (Red Hat) developers have been primarily working on Dbus-Broker as the high performance, user-space D-Bus implementation that delivers greater speed and reliability over the reference D-Bus code. Now also popping up under the BUS1 umbrella is "r-linux" as a Rust-written, capability-based Linux runtime.

Each new kernel cycle there continues to be more maturity to the RISC-V processor architecture code. With Linux 6.0 there are a few new features wired up as well as bug fixes / clean-ups.

The ACPI and power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.0 landed this week with continued preparations for upcoming Intel and AMD hardware as well as improving existing hardware support.

Earlier this year a developer stepped up willing to maintain Linux's FBDEV subsystem for frame-buffer device drivers since it fell into an unmaintained state in 2016 but even prior to that had been on the decline in the era of more proper DRM/KMS drivers. Helge Deller continues that work overseeing the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem and this week sent in the new patches for Linux 6.0.

Takashi Iwai of SUSE as the Linux sound subsystem maintainer has submitted all the new hardware support and feature updates targeting the Linux 6.0 merge window. The Linux 6.0 sound driver changes are notable when it comes to new AMD and Intel hardware support among other changes.

NetBSD 9.3 has been released as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system known for running on many diverse platforms thanks to its focus on code portability.

For those with a newer ASUS gaming laptop boasting RGB lighting for the keyboard, that functionality could soon be working nicely thanks to work happening within the Linux kernel and the open-source Asusctl project.

Going back to late 2020 there has been bits of Intel Vulkan ray-tracing preparations landing within their Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver in anticipation of Xe HPG with hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Support for old NEC VR4100 CPUs based on the MIPS R4000 core is being removed with the Linux 6.0 kernel leading to devices like the old IBM WorkPad Z50 no longer being supported.

KDE developers have started the month of August to a lot of fixes and polishing for the Plasma desktop.

OpenJ9 v0.33 was released on Friday as the newest version of this Eclipse Foundation Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that was formerly developed by IBM.

While OpenRISC has been around a decade longer than RISC-V and its original support in the Linux kernel dates back to the v3.1 days, on the hardware side OpenRISC hasn't enjoyed nearly as much success as RISC-V and its kernel support not advancing nearly as rapidly. Now with Linux 6.0, OpenRISC is finally exposing PCI bus support.

DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films.

Earlier this week saw the Rust for Linux v8 patches posted that introduced a number of new abstractions and expanding the Rust programming language integration to more areas of the kernel. Those patches amounted to 43.6k lines of new code while "Rust for Linux v9" was posted today and comes in at just 12.5k lines of new code.

Following the release of GNU Glibc 2.36 earlier this week, GNU Binutils 2.39 released today for this common set of binary utilities on open-source systems.

Dbus-Broker as a drop-in replacement for the reference D-Bus implementation while focused on better performance and reliability is out with a new version. Notable with this new Dbus-Broker 32 is the beginnings of AppArmor support that could open the door for Ubuntu Linux switching over to it in the future.

It was just over a year ago Microsoft lifted the lid further on CBL-Mariner as its internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company from running within their Azure cloud environment to also finding use by WSL, and various other use-cases. They have continued issuing updates and expanding the capabilities of this enterprise-tasked Linux distribution.

Earlier this year AMD began posting Linux kernel patches for >a href="https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-4-IBS-Linux">Instruction Based Sampling (IBS) extensions coming with Zen 4 processors. With Linux 5.19 the Zen 4 IBS extensions landed while now with Linux 6.0 the perf tools have been updated for dealing with Zen 4 IBS.

The XFS file-system may be getting up there in age but there are no signs of it slowing down but rather the opposite -- continued scalability work and performance optimizations -- as well as tacking on new features. With Linux 6.0, the mature XFS continues to age well. Separately, the EXT4 file-system updates have also landed in Linux 6.0.

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.2 was released by AMD overnight as their newest official open-source Vulkan driver release for Linux systems.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes targeting the Linux 6.0 kernel of which there is a lot of new hardware enablement and enhancements to existing driver support.

There are a few notable changes worth mentioning when it comes to KVM virtualization with Linux 6.0.

Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.

With Linux 6.0 having some big scheduler changes and tuning that should specifically benefit AMD Zen systems, I've been eager to see how some high core count EPYC servers will benefit from this next version of the Linux kernel. While just a few days into the Linux 6.0 merge window, here are some early benchmarks showing some of the areas where Linux 6.0 is allowing higher performance out of existing AMD EPYC 7003 series hardware.

AMD recently started posting Linux patches for a Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver that is designed to "enhance end user experience by making AMD PCs smarter, quieter, power efficient by adapting to user behavior and environment."

With there recently being a number of new driver proposals for various AI-focused accelerators for the Linux kernel, currently they either go into "char/misc" as the random catch-all area of the kernel or within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem traditionally used for GPU drivers. There's been yet another discussion happening this week over introducing a formal "accelerator" subsystem in the kernel for the growing number of AI devices that may be seeking to provide open-source drivers.

Back in 2020 with Linux 5.11 Intel SGX support was finally merged after undergoing 40+ revisions over the span of years. Fortunately, not taking as long is now Intel SGX2 support that is set to be mainlined with the new Linux 6.0 kernel.

Vulkan 1.3.224 was released earlier today and with this spec update comes VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout as another extension started by Valve developers and will help their Steam Play (Proton) efforts.

It took longer than expected but NVIDIA's CUDA is out with an update providing official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0.