Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs.

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts.

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages.

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

GNOME 48 is moving along with the GNOME 48 Alpha packages due this weekend followed by the beta in early February. GNOME 48 is still making good progress in its goal to release on 19 March.

Sony engineers are proposing that the LLVM Clang compiler changes its default C++ mode from C++17 to C++20. This coincides with Sony planning to soon upgrade their PlayStation 5 compiler downstream to C++20 by default.

This week brought the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta as well as a number of last minute feature changes for this desktop update due for release in February.

Merged this Friday night for Mesa 25.0 is initial Vulkan Video AV1 decode support for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.

Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes.

Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit.

Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system.

Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors.

A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution.

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.

Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.

Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations.

Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.

After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their December 2024 development recap. The developers involved did a great job ending out 2024 with a lot of exciting improvements for this scratch-based open-source operating system.

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V.

Intel software engineers this week sent out two pull requests landing more of their final kernel graphics driver feature changes destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.

A set of patches posted this week for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is beginning to expose additional i2c buses that are used by some OEM/AIB partners for implementing RGB lighting controls and other extra functionality with Radeon graphics cards.

For those with an Intel Core Ultra system bearing the company's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), some nice driver enhancements are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

FEX 2501 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts.

KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post on his quest of providing optimal High Dynamic Range (HDR) display experience with the KDE desktop. The latest focus by Xaver has been on fixing the "night light" mode support under KDE Plasma on HDR displays.

Open3D v0.19 is out as the newest feature release to this open-source library for 3D data processing in C++ and Python. Open3D provides various 3D data structures, processing algorithms, 3D visualizations, physically based GPU rendering, and machine learning integration with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow to offer powerful 3D data processing capabilities.

It turns out the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" has a strict mandate that packages must be able to be built for the x86_64 CPU architecture. Software not supporting x86_64 like ARM-only software is not permitted for the common Arch Linux AUR repository.

While it's very rare in recent times for a new OpenGL extension -- especially one that is exciting -- given the continued great adoption of the modern Vulkan API, in 2025 we are looking at an interesting addition to OpenGL with cross-vendor mesh shading via a proposed GL_EXT_mesh_shader implementation.

AMD's GPUOpen team today released HIP RT 2.5 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP. This library in turn is used by the likes of the Blender 3D modeling software for ray-tracing acceleration on Radeon GPUs.

Following weeks of rumors, today at CES in Las Vegas as part of debuting other new wares, Lenovo introduced the Legion Go S handheld gaming console option that is officially licensed by Valve for SteamOS.

HipScript is a new open-source project that allows for compiling and running AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA code within web browsers by leveraging WebAssembly and WebGPU.

In time for the upcoming release of Mesa 25.0, Mesa's Lavapipe software Vulkan API implementation is now the latest driver exposing Vulkan 1.4 support.

Keith Packard is known for his X.Org/X11 work over the course of many years but alongside other software projects he also maintains Picolibc as a C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Recently he sent out a patch for adding Picolibc support to the GCC compiler.

For fans of the Budgie desktop environment that got its start out of the Solus Linux distribution, the Budgie 10.10 release expected later this quarter will be their first release that is Wayland-only.

A pull request submitted this week to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is introducing the notion of device memory "DMEM" to cgroup with the main intended use being to restrict device memory usage based on the cgroup hierarchy such as for graphics cards with their dedicated vRAM.

Originally proposed for the Linux kernel nearly one year ago was CBD as the CXL Block Device. Now up to its third revision, the Linux CBD patches are calming down and the performance gains are looking quite nice.

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release with Monday having brought the fifth and potentially final release candidate.