Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While Linux 6.3 adds AMD P-State EPP as the "Energy Performance Preference" mode for enhancing the power/performance on recent Ryzen and EPYC systems on Linux, with Linux 6.4 the P-State Guided Autonomous Mode is coming to round out AMD's current CPU frequency scaling driver efforts.

The focus of this new effort isn't to immediately rewrite the Xen virtualization hypervisor in Rust but to begin gradually working toward rewriting some of the smaller Xen Project components in the Rust programming language and to see how everything pans out.

A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

LLVM 16 was released on Friday night as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source compiler stack. From initial AMD Zen 4 support to bringing up new Intel CPU instruction sets and processor targets for their new processors being introduced through 2024, there is a lot of exciting hardware additions in LLVM 16.0. LLVM 16.0 is also notable for faster LLD linking, Zstd compressed debug sections, stabilizing of its LoongArch target, defaulting to C++17 for Clang, and much more. Here's a look at all the exciting changes of LLVM 16.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary that highlights all of the interesting desktop changes made over the course of the past seven days. This week he particularly calls out more Wayland fixes -- a common occurrence in the KDE camp.

Wine 8.4 is out as the newest version of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

A new patch series posted today is of interest and is for firmware-assisted shadowing for AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors as it's necessary for proper SR-IOV support.

While Adobe Flash is officially -- and thankfully -- dead, those interested in Adobe Flash Player for nostalgia or archival purposes, Ruffle is working to emulate Adobe Flash support via this open-source project making use of the Rust programming language.

I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.

Last week following the Linux 6.3-rc1 release Intel engineers already began sending new Intel i915 driver feature code to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window in early May. This week another batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" material was submitted.

While there is Pyston, PyPy, and various other alternative Python implementations being done in the name of performance, Codon is one of the newer ones and is talking up 10~100x faster performance.

Following last month's soft freeze for Debian 12 "Bookworm", this popular Linux distribution is now in its hard freeze until its release time.

The first code has landed into Wine Git as part of the multi-year effort creating a Wayland driver for Wine so that the Windows games/applications running via Wine can enjoy native Wayland support. This isn't yet usable for end-users/gamers but is the early implementation with more parts to follow.

Valve today started their first-ever Steam Spring Sale that runs through next week. In addition to sales on games, this is the first time Valve has offered the Steam Deck at a discounted price.

AWS released Amazon Linux 2023 "AL2023" as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is available to Amazon EC2 customers.

Another set of drm-misc-next patches were submitted today for queuing in DRM-Next until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off this spring.

The US and western government sanctions around the Russian government and its defense industry/companies due to their war in Ukraine has caused interesting issues in the open-source world. A few days after ipmitool was archived/suspended on GitHub that turned out to be due to the current maintainer's affiliation with a Russian tech company, separately there is now a blocking of Linux kernel contributions from selected Russian developers.

It's been nearly one month since AMDVLK 2023.Q1.2 as AMD's latest open-source Vulkan driver code drop while today it was replaced by AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 as what will likely be their last Vulkan driver update for the quarter.

A NVIDIA engineer has opened up a merge request to improve the wlroots Wayland library so compositors based on it can enjoy better gaming performance for dual-GPU systems, namely around laptops sporting a discrete NVIDIA GPU but can help other GPU hardware/drivers too.

Last month Qualcomm published updated patches for their Cloud AI 100 kernel driver to support this inference accelerator. The Qualcomm engineers said at the time that their user-space driver and associated compiler would be published shortly. That panned out and the user-space portion of this open-source AI inference stack was recently published.

Qt 6.4.3 is out today as the newest point release to this current stable series of the Qt6 tool-kit. This release is another big one with 300+ fixes in tow.

Mold 1.11 is out as the newest version of this open-source high performance linker that rivals the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold for very speedy linking across multiple CPU architectures.

Following the PyTorch Foundation talking up PyTorch 2.0 since the end of last year, today marks the PyTorch 2.0 release officially shipping. PyTorch 2.0 has significant optimizations to "supercharge" it with better performance for both CPU and GPU modes of operation.

The SYCL single-source C++ based programming model has begun taking off with Intel investing in it heavily as part of their oneAPI / DPC++ compiler stack and a variety of different open-source projects bringing SYCL to the likes of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, CPU-based OpenMP implementations, SYCL to Vulkan, and more for heterogeneous compute needs. The Khronos Group announced today they have begun working on SYCL SC as a safety-critical variant of this heterogeneous compute programming model.

Last summer DreamWorks announced plans to open-source MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films. Today they have delivered on that exciting milestone with publishing the open-source code.

While Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s has generated a fair amount of attention for being a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC powered Arm laptop that supports running on the mainline Linux kernel, another option on the way is the Acer Aspire 1 that also makes use of a Qualcomm Soc.

I've been playing around with the current development state of Fedora 38 the past few days on several test boxes. While only reaching Fedora 38 Beta this week, it already feels quite polished and stable. To sum it up quite simply, Fedora Workstation 38 is looking like it will be another fantastic release and continuing the modern Fedora Project trend of putting out a bleeding-edge Linux distribution yet production-ready and with far less blemishes compared to releases from years ago.

A patch series is proposing that the SLOB memory allocator be removed from the Linux 6.4 kernel this summer.

Open3D as an open-source library for 3D data processing from 3D machine learning tasks to adaptable viewing of 3D data is out with its newest feature release.

The latest notable high performance computing (HPC) open-source project adding mainline support for AMD HIP with ROCm is SPECFEM3D.

Being merged today into the GCC 13 compiler is the set of T-Head vendor extensions to the RISC-V ISA. This set of vendor extensions is designed to augment the RISC-V ISA and provide faster and more energy efficient capabilities.

The Qt Group as the company behind the Qt open-source toolkit has launched Qt Insight as their newest software offering. However, Qt Insight does not appear to be open-source and is marketed as a SaaS product.

A two year old merge request finally made it to mainline today for Mesa 23.1 to enhance in profiling the open-source Mesa Vulkan drivers.

For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Thinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V.

OpenSSL 3.1 is out today as the new stable release for this widely-used cryptographic library. There are a number of performance optimizations to enjoy with OpenSSL 3.1, including some additional AVX-512 tuning.

The beta of Fedora 38 is out and on-time this morning for those wanting to test this latest major update to Fedora Linux.

Taking place last month in the most wonderful city of Munich, The Khronos Group hosted Vulkanised 2023 as their Vulkan Developers' Conference and Meetup. The slides and videos from the event are now available, including talks on Valve's RADV effort and more.

AMD is using Embedded World 2023 in Nürnberg to launch the EPYC Embedded 9004 series as their 4th Gen EPYC processors intended for telecommunications, edge computing, automation, and IoT applications.

For those wondering how Cloudflare keeps their thousands of servers around the world up-to-date for the latest BIOS and firmware, Cloudflare's engineering blog has put out an interesting post that outlines their process of handling system BIOS updates as well as various other firmware updates.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a blog post how the KWin compositor's DRM back-end has been working to move itself off GBM surfaces (gbm_surfaces) to instead allocate buffers directly and import them into EGL. This ultimately should be a win for the KWin compositor once everything is complete.

The Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" development builds recently transitioned from Linux 5.19 as in use by Ubuntu 22.10/22.04.2 to a Linux 6.1 based kernel. This led some -- including myself -- to wonder if Canonical changed course and shifted to Linux 6.1 LTS instead of the Linux 6.2 kernel that has been out as stable since last month. Fortunately, that's not the case and Ubuntu 23.04 is preparing to soon land Linux 6.2 across all kernel flavors.

The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.

The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is taking a step forward with next quarter's Mesa 23.1 release.

Following last night's Linux 6.3-rc2 release that brings a workaround for system stuttering on some AMD Ryzen systems, that workaround was quickly back-ported to the Linux 6.1 LTS and 6.2 stable series and spun into new releases for Monday morning.

AMD is working to enable VirtIO GPU and pass-through GPU support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor with Radeon graphics.

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) for making use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses so that it can be used for arbitrary metadata. The hope is that this LAM metadata can lead to more efficient address sanitizers, optimizations for JITs and VMs, and more, but it's been a lengthy journey getting the support upstreamed.

David Airlie has managed to get some early code in place for handling VP9 video decoding with Vulkan using the Mesa RADV driver. This early Vulkan Video VP9 support also is accompanied by an FFmpeg branch supporting this experimental Mesa extension.