Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year has a change coming that will impact users of the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. This change is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER" that has been within the kernel code the past two decades to slowdown how frequent the CPU frequency evaluation occurs. In turn the revised logic can allow for that CPUFreq frequency re-evaluation to occur more often.

For those intrigued by the likes of Fedora Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and NixOS for an immutable Linux distribution but desiring something based on Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux has an immutable variant now available for testing.

While not as common as GRUB or systemd-boot, a new version of Limine is now available for this open-source, modern-focused and portable multi-protocol bootloader.

In addition to the KDE development activity this week, GNOME developers have also been busy polishing their desktop ahead of their next GNOME release in September.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekend update that recaps all of the interesting KDE development activities for the past week.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the engineers at Canonical began focusing more on the performance of Ubuntu and establishing a performance team at the company. This work is ongoing and for Ubuntu 24.10 they are exploring another exciting area: leveraging "-O3" compiler optimizations for Ubuntu packages. Available today is an experimental build of the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs that are compiled for the -O3 optimization level.

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

A one line patch to the Linux kernel is yielding significant performance and power efficiency gains for existing Intel Xeon "Emerald Rapids" server processors on the likes of Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.

For those that have experienced a buggy AMD HDMI audio experience when using recent versions of the Linux kernel, a fix has been submitted today for Linux 6.11 and in turn for back-porting to stable series in addressing "another long-time regression fix for AMD HDMI."

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who has been working on supporting Vivante NPU IP within the reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver has been much time recently focused on enabling the Vivante NPU found within the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. While not yet upstreamed, he's been successful in this effort and seeing good performance for object detection with this hardware.

With the start of a new month comes the latest Steam Survey statistics from Valve for providing interesting software and hardware insight.

Microsoft is today promoting the v3.0 release of Azure Linux to stable / general availability status for this Linux distribution formerly known as CBL-Mariner.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has done a wonderful job providing funding to various open-source projects for advancing their work on free software. STF has been a huge success for prominent open-source projects while now it's also preparing a pilot program for STF Fellowships to provide funding to open-source maintainers that may be doing important work across multiple projects.

Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next patches of Direct Rendering Manager updates that will be targeting the Linux 6.12 kernel later in the year. Notable from this pull is introducing a new DRM Power Saving Policy for display connectors and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Intel closed out July by publishing AVX10.2 technical details as part of a now public document. Intel's compiler engineers are also already at work on enabling AVX10.2 in the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.

July was an interesting month both in the open-source software world with the Linux 6.11 merge window and other software milestones while also being eventful on the hardware side with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series launch as the first of the Zen 5 processors. During July on Phoronix were 255 original news articles written by your's truly and another 15 featured articles / multi-page reviews.

GCC 14.2 hit the Internet today as the first stable point release update to the GCC 14 series following the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release from early May.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has recently begun pushing changes to the Mesa 3D graphics code-base as part of "The Juiciest Refactor Ever". After merging the first of the patches last week, this week has brought more code for this juicy refactoring.

For those intrigued by Ikey Doherty's work in recent times on Serpent OS as a new from-scratch Linux distribution that makes use of lots of tooling, Ikey is kicking off August by releasing the first pre-alpha image of this Linux OS.

Now that I am through with my testing of the initial Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 Linux performance benchmarking and support exploration, I've begun diving in to other areas of the Linux support/performance for these Zen 5 "Strix Point" SoCs. The area for a quick look today is with the yet-to-be-merged AMD Heterogeneous Core Topology patches.

ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann laid out a proposal with deprecation timeline today for beginning to work toward removing many older ARM boards and obsolete features.

Mesa 24.2 is barreling towards its stable release in August while out today is the third weekly release candidate for this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers.

The Xen Project has announced version Xen 4.19 of this open-source hypervisor that is rolling out security improvements, performance and scalability enhancements, and other refinements to this cross-architecture option for open-source virtualization.

The Servo project is out with their latest monthly status report to highlight advancements made on this open-source, Rust-written web layout engine.

One of the many exciting features merged for Linux 6.11 is getrandom() in the vDSO for very fast yet secure random number generation. Now that the kernel bits have landed, it's on to making use of it in the GNU C Library and other libc implementations.

There's been no shortage of cheap, ARM-based handheld game consoles coming to market. Given Linux on Arm tending to work better than Windows and in keeping vendor costs to a minimum, they've tended to be running Linux or Android with various open-source games/emulators. Many of the vendors have kept their Linux support downstream while with time more of these gaming handheld consoles are seeing mainline Linux support. Yet another one being worked on for mainline Linux kernel support is the GameForce Ace.

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging the first release candidate of Linux 6.11 were some last minute updates to Turbostat, the tool that lives within the kernel source tree and used for reporting CPU frequency and idle statistics along with other useful metrics. With Linux 6.11, Turbostat is gaining some new abilities.

For those enjoying the classic game Snake (Blockade) or rather wanting to learn about the SDL3 API to develop your own software using this cross-platform software/hardware abstraction library, a game of Snake has been added to the SDL3 repository to serve as a more full-featured example.

While the Linux 6.11 merge window ended just days ago, Intel engineers are already beginning to submit kernel graphics driver changes to the DRM-Next branch of material they want to get in for the Linux 6.12 cycle that will end out 2024. Notable is they are trying to wrap up the Xe2 graphics support for Lunar Lake and Battlemage discrete graphics so that the support can be exposed by default.

Last year the oneAPI Construction Kit was introduced by Intel-owned Codeplay Software for bringing SYCL to new hardware even for hardware outside of Intel's offerings. One of the early targets of this oneAPI Construction Kit support was for RISC-V processors and now with today's release of oneAPI Construction Kit 4.0 there is finally RISC-V host CPU support.

With the AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" laptops now shipping this week, Intel has announced that their Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors as the successor to Meteor Lake will be formally launching on 3 September.

Since last year there's been support available in the MSM DRM kernel driver for Qualcomm's Adreno 700 series graphics processors. There's also been some Adreno 700 series support in TURNIP as the Mesa Vulkan driver for these newer Adreno GPUs. Now finally the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has merged initial Adreno 700 series support for the Mesa 24.3 release.

Google engineer Rong Xu has proposed adding AutoFDO and Propeller support to the mainline Linux kernel for its Clang-based build as it can help the system performance improve in the up to 5~10% range.

AdaptiveCpp as the open-source compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL is out with a new feature release for this C++ heterogeneous compiler supporting all major CPUs and GPUs.

Ubuntu maker Canonical (Canonical Group Limited) recently filed their financial statements with UK's Companies House that offers a fresh look at their financial performance.

Two years ago DreamWorks Animation made the exciting decision that they would open-source their MoonRay renderer that's been used in production for a variety of animated feature films. That initial open-source drop took place last year as OpenMoonRay and since then it has continued to be improved as an open-source project.

It was just two months ago that Oded Gabbay, the longtime maintainer of the Habana Labs kernel accelerator driver for Linux, announced he was stepping down from his software role and leaving Intel. Oded Gabbay was also a maintainer of the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver. That was a surprising move with Oded Gabbay having been at Intel / Habana Labs for 7+ years and oversaw the creation of the Linux kernel's "accel" accelerator subsystem and more while prior to that having been at Red Hat and AMD. Ofir Bitton was named the Habana Labs driver maintainer following that but now he announced he too is leaving Intel.

While most Linux distributions are running on systemd as the init/service manager, SysVinit is continuing to be maintained. SysVinit 3.10 was released today with one new feature and some fixes. Coincidentally the new feature of SysVinit 3.10 is improving compatibility with systemd's machinectl command.

Immediately prior to the Linux 6.11-rc1 kernel being released yesterday, a set of Compute Express Link (CXL) patches were merged for the Linux kernel. There is some more CXL feature work this cycle but also notable is a documentation update as it now provides a concise look at the current state of CXL support on Linux.

As I noted in yesterday's AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 review and in particular the new RDNA3.5-based Radeon 890M graphics, I used updated DMCUB firmware with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack to workaround some screen freezes and kernel errors initially experience while using the Linux 6.10 kernel. That updated DMCUB firmware is now public within the upstream linux-firmware.git repository for those that may be picking up a new AMD Ryzen AI laptop with RDNA3.5 graphics in the coming days.

Intel is kicking off the new week with a new release to their open-source Compute Runtime stack that provides OpenCL and Level Zero support across Windows and Linux systems with Intel integrated/discrete graphics.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve landed another interesting patch series in Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 24.3... This is what he proclaims to be "THE JUICIEST REFACTOR EVER" for the Mesa GLX code.

TigerVNC 1.14 released last week as the newest version of this high performance, cross-platform VNC client and server solution. Exciting with TigerVNC 1.14 is adding hardware acceleration support.

Alan Coopersmith of Oracle -- thanks to his work on Solaris and maintaining the X11 support -- continues to be one of the few developers left managing new X.Org software component releases. This weekend Coopersmith released libX11 1.8.10 as the newest version of this client-side library for the core X11 protocol.

Wine 9.14 is another release off its usual Friday bi-weekly release regiment and instead debuted on Sunday evening. With this Wine 9.14 release there are yet more fixes and improvements while Wine-Staging 9.14 was also released near concurrently.

Vanilla OS 2 debuted on Sunday as a major release to this Linux distribution now built atop a Debian base for this distro that started out being an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu. Vanilla OS 2 besides switching its packaging base has pulled in the GNOME 46 desktop, the Linux 6.9 kernel, and made a slew of other enhancements to polish its desktop experience while offering a great and secure platform.