Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.3.5 today along with the 5.15.114, 5.10.181, 5.4.244, 4.9.284, and 4.4.316 point releases for those long-term (LTS) kernel versions.

NVIDIA has a nice treat to end out May for Linux users by publishing their first beta build in the R535 feature series.

The folks at Purism have announced their latest product in the form of the Librem Server v2. Starting out at $2999 USD, these new servers are built around four-year-old 9th Gen Core CPUs already discontinued by Intel.

Intel this week is using Computex 2023 to make some disclosures around next-generation Meteor Lake processors for laptops. The most exciting aspect relayed in advance during our press briefing last week was that all Intel Meteor Lake processor SKUs will feature their new Vision/Versatile Processing Unit.

As a step toward further improving AMD laptop support under Linux, AMD engineers have been working on WiFi radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation support for Linux with their latest laptops.

As a temporary workaround for helping recent versions of Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Linux under Valve's Steam Play with Intel Arc Graphics, Intel's open-source Mesa driver is temporarily no longer identifying as "Intel" graphics via its graphics vendor ID in order to workaround an issue.

System76 continues teasing the in-house laptop design they are working on codenamed Virgo.

Last week XFS users began encountering metadata corruption on the latest Linux 6.3 point releases. Following kernel developers and those testing the kernels on affected hardware over the US holiday weekend, it's believed the issue has been tracked down to one missing patch that is a one line of code being deleted.

One of the new features of Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) but for this generation is only being activated for CPUs going to select cloud providers. Intel TDX allows better isolating virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-TD software on the platform. This limited roll-out of Intel TDX has worked out okay with the Linux support for this security feature still being in flux. Sent out today was the 14th spin of the 113 patches needed for getting KVM TDX support wired up within the Linux kernel.

While GCC 13 saw its first stable release several weeks back, for those taking their time in moving to major new compiler releases and still relying on the two-year-old GCC 11 series, out today is the GCC 11.4 point release.

Arm today announced the new high-end Cortex-X4 CPU core design for delivering their most powerful Cortex compute cluster.

Due to Linus Torvalds traveling over this US Memorial Day weekend, he released Linux 6.4-rc4 about twelve hours ahead of schedule.

Vulkan 1.3.251 is out today as a rare Sunday morning spec update for this Khronos graphics/compute API.

A few days ago I wrote about a Linux kernel patch being prepared for fixing Intel hybrid CPU SMP/HT topology reporting due to the way the Linux kernel was currently counting the number of Hyper Threading siblings for each core. Fortunately, that fix which is apparently becomes more pressing for upcoming Meteor Lake processors, has now been picked up in time for today's Linux 6.4-rc4 release and is set for back-porting to stable kernel series.

Following the release of Wine 8.9 on Friday for enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux, Wine-Staging 8.9 is now available for this more testing/development-focused flavor of Wine that more liberally picks up in-development patches.

The Debian 12 "Bookworm" release is quickly approaching with an early June release date while for helping facilitate more last minute testing is a fourth release candidate of the updated Debian Installer.

The Virgl driver within Mesa for allowing open-source OpenGL support within virtualized environments in conjunction with the Virglrenderer is now capable of exposing OpenGL 4.6.

An updated set of patches were posted on Friday that seem to improve the Linux guest VM performance when the host is under heavy memory pressure.

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers are looking at making use of Netlink for exposing RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and telemetry features of kernel graphics drivers to user-space for their modern GPUs.

Even with summertime approaching KDE developers remain very busy further enhancing the desktop stack and continued efforts around Qt6 porting and the Plasma 6.0 desktop.

Ahead of the US holiday weekend is the latest bi-weekly release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications running well on Linux and other platforms thanks to this open-source project.

A new AMD open-source driver posted for code review that's aiming for the upstream Linux kernel is the QDMA driver.

Multiple users have been reporting metadata corruption issues on the XFS file-system when upgrading to the Linux 6.3 stable kernel.

For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Announced on Thursday was the Ubuntu High Performance Computing (HPC) team to promote Ubuntu Linux for running AI/ML, energy, bioinformatics, meteorology, and other workloads on Ubuntu Linux.

A fix is on its way to the mainline Linux 6.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel series to fix x86 topology reporting for Intel Hybrid systems. The topology bug within the kernel becomes more pronounced for Meteor Lake laptops where currently internal Intel test laptops can report the systems having 11 CPU sockets rather than the proper number of cores all contained within one CPU socket.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.5 cycle kicking off in about one month is a new Linux x86 optimization patch for further tuning csum_partial, the function used within the kernel for calculating 32-bit checksums on blocks of data. Much lower latency and higher throughput can be observed with the newly-optimized csum_partial on the latest Intel/AMD processors.

The Qt 5.15 Long-Term Support branch as the last release in the Qt5 series is one step closer to retirement with The Qt Group now having ended its standard support for legacy license holders.

Following the recent sdl12-compat test release, sdl-compat v1.2.64 has been released as the newest version of this library implementing the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for enhancing game compatibility on modern Linux environments.

For those that prefer waiting to the first point release before shifting to a new Mesa3D quarterly feature release, Mesa 23.1.1 is out today so you can now begin upgrading to this latest set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

PostgreSQL 16 is up to its first beta milestone today with new performance optimizations and continued security enhancements.

IBM engineers have been working through some multi-block allocator improvements for the EXT4 file-system driver. In particular, they aim to address some shortcomings that were discovered when running various tests on IBM POWER hardware with a 64k block size.

Sent out last week by Alexandre Bailon with Bay Libre is the AI Processing Unit "APU" Direct Rendering Manager driver to interface between CPUs and AI Processing Units. The hope is this APU driver could be re-used by various hardware drivers while the initial focus is on bringing up the AI capabilities of the MediaTek MT8183 SoC.

Going back to 2020 has been work by Intel's open-source engineers on implementing Key Locker support for Linux. Intel Key Locker allows for encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw/actual key. AES keys are converted into handles with Intel Key Locker that can then be used for carrying out encryption/decryption on that system until revoked or system state changes. Intel engineers on Wednesday posted their seventh iteration of the patches for supporting Key Locker on Linux.

In addition to Microsoft's Build 2023 conference this week where they announced expanded archive/compression format support, Windows Terminal improvements, more AI tech, and other initiatives, they also happened to release CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution.

Since the early bits of Wine Wayland support were merged back in March for building up a native Wayland display driver, Alexandros Frantzis has continued submitting more of the code for review and upstreaming. Wednesday marked the third chunk of Wine Wayland code to be merged.