Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

After being in development for years, Intel's shadow stack support is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle. The shadow stack support is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) security functionality.

Promoted to general availability (GA) status today is the OpenJDK Java 20 update with a number of new features.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed another Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement today for Mesa 23.1-devel to further along its VKD3D-Proton capabilities for enjoying Windows Direct3D 12 games on Linux with Steam Play.

Red Hat developer David Airlie has shown off the progress being made on bringing up not only the open-source Mesa NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" but doing so while making use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware that ultimately is needed for being able to deliver better open-source driver support and performance.

Asahi Linux developer Asahi Lina has posted an update on the ongoing work bringing up their Rust-written DRM kernel driver along with the AGX Gallium3D Mesa OpenGL driver as well as progress towards the in-development Vulkan driver too.

Besides the ongoing work around the reverse-engineered Apple Silicon graphics driver being brought up in the Rust programming language, the other notable Rust effort within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel subsystem is a rewrite of the basic VGEM driver in this increasingly-used programming language. That Rust VGEM driver has now been sent out on the mailing list for review as part of a request for comments.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel the Habana Labs AI driver has moved to the new "accel" accelerator subsystem/framework while for the Linux 6.4 cycle this summer this Intel driver is continuing to speed ahead as it prepares support for the new Gaudi2 AI hardware and making other improvements for this open-source training/inference stack.

Trisquel 11 is now available as the latest major release for this one of a few Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved Linux distributions that is "100% libre" and meets all of the fully free software requirements. Trisquel 11 is re-based against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while making various other changes in the process.

Labwc 0.6.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox.

In addition to the ASUS Z590 motherboards seeing sensor monitoring support with patches queued for Linux 6.4 that were talked about earlier this month on Phoronix, the latest nct6775 driver activity now queued in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch is allowing support for another three dozen ASUS motherboards.

GNU Coreutils 9.2 is out today as the newest feature update to this widely relied upon collection of core utilities commonly found on Linux systems as well as other platforms.

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 23.04 release, Canonical has published Mir 2.13 as the latest version of their software project that in its current incarnation is focused on serving as a Wayland compositor and abstraction layer.

More Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" code was merged this weekend into Coreboot as part of enabling this latest generation Intel server platform to enjoy this open-source system firmware solution when paired with the necessary Intel FSP binaries.

Apache CloudStack 4.18 LTS has been released as the newest version of this open-source cloud computing software that allows building out your own cloud atop various hypervisors and allows easy management for large networks of VMs.

Getting back on track for its new release rhythm, Intel today published the Compute-Runtime 23.05.25593.11 version along with the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.13230.7.

The open-source cURL project providing the widely-used curl CLI program for downloading of data across numerous network protoocols along with its associated library is celebrating 25 years of the project. As part of the celebrations, curl 8.0 was released today.

Dragonfly as what's a high performnace in-memory database compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has reached version 1.0.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc3 as the latest weekly test candidate for the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel that is slated to debut as stable toward the end of April.

Libreboot 20230319 has been released as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing only pure open-source firmware replacements to proprietary BIOS/UEFI platforms compared to all the blobs permitted in upstream Coreboot.

A change sent in this Sunday ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc3 release is a late addition adding a throttling mechanism to protect the hypervisor from potentially malicious AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) guests. The change is to protect the AMD Secure Processor from being potentially overloaded with requests by nefarious guest VMs.

Serpent OS as the new Linux distribution project by Solus Linux founder Ikey Doherty has made public its build infrastructure as it begins building more packages and opening up packaging work to outside contributors.

The third and potentially last release candidate of FreeBSD 13.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable 13.2-RELEASE around the end of March.

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.