Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The much anticipated Godot 4.0 open-source game engine continues inching closer to release. When that release is finally out, Godot 4.0.x point releases will likely be coming in quick and some plans for Godot 4.1 are already being discussed.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 has been released and this collection of protocols is now headlined by the addition of fractional scaling support!

The U-Boot open-source bootloader that is widely used for embedded devices has finally landed support for HTTP and TCP along with a basic "wget" implementation for downloading images via HTTP/TCP.

Back in September was a big patch set working out classes of tasks for hybrid CPUs and more properly implementing Intel Thread Director for Linux. This work to better the performance/efficiency of modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has now advanced past the "request for comments" stage with a new patch series sent out on Monday.

The Apple SoC CPUFreq driver worked on by the Asahi Linux crew for CPU frequency scaling with the M1 and M2 chips under Linux looks like it could soon be reaching the mainline kernel.

Cryptsetup 2.6 is now available as the newest version of this utility for managing disk encryption on Linux systems in conjunction with the DMcrypt kernel module.

ClamAV as one of the leading open-source anti-virus / anti-malware toolkits for Linux / Windows / BSDs has finally reached the version 1.0 milestone.

Earlier this year the Open-Source Firmware Foundation was created to help advance open firmware development. Today the Coreboot project has officially joined the Open-Source Firmware Foundation.

A little more than a week ago AMD quietly released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise Linux 22.Q4 driver, also advertised more recently as the AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q4 for Linux driver package. With most Linux enthusiasts and gamers happily using the upstream open-source components in the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the new quarterly release slipped under the radar until now.

With KDE Gear next year there will be improved support for accessing files from Apple iOS devices like iPhones and iPads. There already exist several KDE implementations for accessing files off iOS devices while a new one written against the latest KIO code has been merged.

Following the NVIDIA 525.53 Linux beta from earlier this month, NVIDIA is closing out November by releasing the v525.60.11 driver as their first stable Linux driver in the R525 series.

Red Hat engineers this morning for the first time publicly announced their work on Composefs, a new opportunistically-sharing and verified image file-system.

Similar to SUSE/openSUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform requiring x86-64-v2 CPU support, the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed is beginning to transition to require x86-64-v2 micro-architecture support.

One of the new hardware drivers set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is the OneXPlayer sensor driver for supporting hardware monitoring on the x86_64-based handheld gaming devices. While OneXPlayer devices ship with Windows by default, Linux is becoming an increasingly sought after target particularly with prospects for running SteamOS.

OpenRGB 0.8 was released on Sunday night as this project's largest release ever and coming after nearly one year in development. OpenRGB as a reminder is the open-source, cross-vendor and cross-platform software for RGB lighting control across many different devices from GPUs and motherboards to keyboards and other lighted peripherals.

Back in October the open-source Coreboot firmware project began seeing patches for new AMD SoCs codenamed "Morgana" and "Glinda". That work has continued and over the weekend the "Mayan Morgana" was merged as the reference motherboard for the Morgana SoC.

Linus Torvalds just christened the Linux 6.1-rc7 kernel as what is now expected to be the second to last release candidate before Linux 6.1 is officially released in December.

Talked about for over two years now has been a "readfile" system call to efficiently read small files. This should be a win when dealing with small files like those exposed via sysfs while it's taken time to come together and stalled out several times. This week Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the readfile patches leading to hope that this new syscall might finally be on a path for mainlining.

While these days the Intel-owned Habana Labs Linux software stack is a shining example of an open-source AI accelerator solution with mainline kernel driver support and also helping bring together the new compute accelerator subsystem, it wasn't always so blessed. Initially there was the closed-source user-space bits that fortunately last year was opened up with SynapseAI Core.

While for years Intel has been very well regarded -- and rightfully so -- for their open-source Linux hardware support, occasionally there are exceptions. One such exception currently is Intel's IPU6 drivers for their MIPI cameras found on many newer Alder lake laptops and presumably upcoming Raptor Lake laptops too. The IPU6 drivers remain outside of the Linux kernel and will still likely be that way for sometime.

With the Linux 6.1-rc7 kernel set to be released later today, it will become easier making use of the AMD P-State driver for that enhanced CPU frequency scaling driver intended for Zen 2 and newer EPYC/Ryzen platforms that make use of ACPI CPPC.

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame has been working the past several months of adding getrandom() to the vDSO for achieving better performance and working the needs of user-space developers. Early results have been impressive and this week Donenfeld sent out the seventh iteration of these patches.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.8 Wayland compositor is now available for testing.

At the start of the calendar year Samsung engineers posted Linux patches bringing to enable the Tesla full self-driving "FSD" SoC within the mainline Linux kernel. Linux 5.18 picked up the initial Tesla FSD SoC support and since then other support remnants have continued to be worked on like media functionality. The latest open-source, upstream-focused Tesla FSD SoC work is on enabling PCIe functionality.

Open-source graphics driver engineer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux team landed a number of stream-out fixes this week for RADV's Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) Stream-Out handling.

As we approach the end of 2022, an initial "request for comments" was sent out this week on a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver for supporting Atari systems from the early 90's.

The US Thanksgiving week showed no signs of slowing down the global KDE development with there being many user interface improvements, bug fixes, and other improvements to have landed for this open-source desktop environment.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard issued a Black Friday release with Wine 7.22.

Just some quick "Black Friday" / holiday reminders for those that enjoy the daily original open-source news, Linux hardware reviews, performance benchmarks, and more put out each and every day on Phoronix.

The UBports community continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for running this Linux distribution on smartphones and tablets is out with OTA-24 as their newest over-the-air update.

Red Hat engineers are working on changing their BIOS RAID "fake RAID" support within the Fedora installer for the F38 cycle.

After many months of work, the wp-fractional-scale-v1 protocol for Wayland is set to be merged imminently for fractional scaling support.

While Sound Open Firmware 2.3 was released back in September with AMD Rembrandt and Intel Raptor Lake support, among other changes, out this weekend is a new point release to the prior v2.2 series.

The Broadcom V3DV VideoCore open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a rewritten occlusion queries implementation for better performance and reliability.

Landing this week within Mesa 23.0 is an initial implementation of Vulkan's VK_KHR_present_wait extension, which Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team and VKD3D-Proton notoriety has referred to as a "very useful" extension but due to current spec limitations is for now only being made opt-in via a DriConf option so it can be handled on a per-game/app basis.

It was just last week that Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC and thanks to their work with Linaro engineers, there are already patches under review for enabling this high-end Snapdragon chipset for the mainline Linux kernel.

Mesa 22.3 had been expected to release this week but instead Mesa 22.3-rc4 was issued and in turn the v22.3 introduction is now expected for next week.

Red Hat is out this week with a new version of Stratis, its Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM that is intended to provide features and functionality akin to ZFS and Btrfs but with the proven reliability of XFS.

The Qt Group today announced the release of Qt Creator 9 as the newest feature release to this open-source Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment.