Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has received another small but measurable performance improvement for various games.

While Debian and its derivatives are quite popular with ARM single board computers, the ARM64 Secure Boot support has been broken for at least two years. But a fix is on the way and it should appear for this year's Debian 12 "Bookworm" release.

As anticipated the AMD P-State driver extension building out the Guided Autonomous Mode of operation has been sent in as part of the CPU frequency scaling / power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel.

Fedora 39 this autumn is looking at boosting its vm.max_map_count default to better match the behavior of SteamOS / Steam Deck and allowing more Windows games to run out-of-the-box with Steam Play.

With the Linux 6.4 kernel there is the ability being introduced so that the machine keyring can optionally only store CA-enforced keys.

The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.

In clearing up the state of various X.Org packages that have been effectively unmaintained for years, an attempt is being made to better communicate the status of some "retired" X.Org packages that Linux distributions should work towards removing as they are no longer being maintained.

After being deprecated for several years, Security Enhanced Linux "SELinux" beginning with the Linux 6.4 kernel can no longer be run-time disabled.

Open-source Linux graphics driver engineer Melissa Wen with Igalia, Joshua Ashton with Valve, and Harry Wentland with AMD have been working on kernel mode-setting (KMS) color pipeline enhancements for SteamOS and in particular for enhancing the Steam Deck.

Kdenlive remains one of the best available fully open-source non-linear video editing solutions available. With today's release of Kdenlive 23.04 they continue enhancing its feature set and improving the UI/UX for those editing videos on the Linux desktop.

With Linux 6.3 released that marks the opening of the two-week Linux 6.4 merge window. David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates already for Linux 6.4 with the assortment of kernel graphics/display driver updates.

Following this afternoon's release of the Linux 6.3 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.3-gnu has already been released as this downstream kernel flavor that removes support for loading binary-only modules and trying to de-blob other driver code that otherwise depends upon "non-free" code.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3 as the newest stable kernel version.

The Linux 6.3 stable kernel is likely to be released later today so here is a reminder about the most exciting aspects of this spring kernel release.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on ensuring 100% open-source system firmware support without any lurking binary blobs is out this Sunday with a new feature release.

It's been just shy of ten years since Intel launched their Haswell processors that were very successful at the time and was followed by Broadwell. While Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are primarily concentrated on recent and future Intel hardware platforms, occasionally there is an improvement worth mentioning for mature platforms like Haswell and Broadwell. A new patch series this week will help with some minor graphics power-savings for those still running a nearly decade old Intel Linux laptop.

The Flashrom project that serves as an open-source firmware/ROM flashing utility not only for system BIOS/UEFI on motherboards but also capable of flashing firmware for various network / GPU / storage controller cards and other programmable devices has decided to effectively split into two.

Google engineers continue working on enhancing the Linux infrastructure around supporting High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) for Chrome OS.

Mesa 23.0.3 was released on Friday as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source user-space GPU driver components.

A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps.

Mesa's Zink driver that implements OpenGL atop the Vulkan API has for a while been in wonderful shape for open-source AMD Radeon graphics and even in decent shape for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack while it's also been getting into more robust shape for use on Intel's dedicated graphics cards.

KDE developers were quite busy this week... In addition to shipping KDE Gear 23.04, lots of bug fixing took place this week with around half of Plasma's VHI priority bugs being addressed.

Building off December's release of Manjaro 22.0, this Arch Linux based distribution is out now with its next iteration.

Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted today to address a pressing problem since Linux 6.2.

While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages.

While the upcoming Mesa 23.1 stable release enables RadeonSI build support for Rusticl and is working out overall, the RadeonSI driver with this Rust-written OpenCL driver is nearing the point of officially passing OpenCL conformance.

For more than one year Intel's been working on developing the Xe Linux kernel graphics driver as a modern Direct Rendering Manager driver for Gen12 and newer integrated/discrete graphics. For recent hardware this is to replace the existing i915 kernel driver usage. The Intel open-source developers continue working toward the milestone of being able to submit this driver for mainlining in the upstream Linux kernel.

Yesterday just hours after writing about a RADV optimization by Valve for an "upcoming game" to nearly match the performance they see under Windows, another performance improvement for an "upcoming game" has been merged.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel likely being released as stable on Sunday, pull requests have already begun to be submitted of feature code for the Linux 6.4 merge window.

This week the FreeBSD project published their Q1-2023 status report that outlines various technical and organization accomplishments made for the past quarter.

Rust 1.69 is out today as stable as the newest update to this increasingly popular programming language that has become passionate to many open-source developers for its memory safety guarantees and other principles.

If you rely on an Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter, you will want to look forward to upgrading your Linux kernel build soon... A fix was committed today after Intel engineers discovered this particular Ethernet chipset had only been running at around 60% of its maximum speed due to a regression introduced back in 2020.

A new patch series from AMD today for the Linux kernel enables Dynamic Boost Control support that can be found with some Ryzen SoCs for tuning the processor for optimal performance.

Back in January Intel engineers posted Linux patches for Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) as a feature being introduced with future Intel CPUs. Intel engineers today posted a set of patches extending that LASS support to the realm of KVM virtualization.

Valve's Linux graphics driver developers continue relentlessly optimizing the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" and today landed an optimization for an unnamed, upcoming game where now it's able to nearly match the performance enjoyed under Windows.

Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release images are now available for download for those wanting to fetch the latest Ubuntu desktop or server builds or alternatively the various downstream flavors/spins.

Building off the Wine 8.0 stable release from January, out today is Wine 8.0.1 as the first maintenance point release to this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux, Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware support has added support for the Dell Latitute E6400, a laptop from the Intel Core 2 Duo days that was popular with many businesses and can be found via various used channels for around $100.

Opus 1.4 is available today as the first update in four years to this open-source, royalty-free versatile audio codec.

Following the Lutris 0.5.13 beta from mid-February, a second beta of this open-source game manager is now available.

KDE Gear 23.04 has been released today as the newest version of this collection of KDE desktop applications.