Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Debian 12.7 is out today as the latest stable release update for the Debian Bookworm series.

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser.

This week's batch of power management fixes for the Linux 6.11 kernel are just a set of three patches for AMD processors.

A new AVX2 code path for FFmpeg's VVC decoding "vvcdec" is helping provide significant speed-ups for CPU-based H.266 decoding.

Jonas Ådahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository.

Plasma 6.2 this week entered its soft feature freeze ahead of the Plasma 6.2 stable release in October. The focus now is on bug-fixing for Plasma 6.2 and at the moment they are at 301 bug reports, which is their lowest amount going back to 2015. The KDE developers hope over the next month to drop that to less than 200 bug reports.

Following the pull request from earlier this week that enables Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default for Linux 6.12, a final set of feature updates for the Intel kernel graphics driver have been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle.

Following last week's Vulkan 1.3.294 with pipeline binary extension, Vulkan 1.3.295 is out today and it too introduces a prominent new extension.

Microsoft engineers continue contributing to the open-source Mesa graphics driver code for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) usage and other related use atop Windows 11. The latest contribution to Mesa is wiring up direct DPB management for the D3D12 video acceleration code.

While all of the focus recently when it comes to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver has been around getting Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics ready, there is an important last-minute fix that is also needed for ensuring Arrow Lake graphics support is ready for Linux users.

Longtime Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has written an interesting blog post providing an analogy to types of developers compared to road builders and hotels.

The Wine project has released VKD3D 1.13 as the newest version of this open-source code for mapping Microsoft's Direct3D 12 API atop the Vulkan API for helping to accelerate Windows games and applications on Linux.

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS has been released as the first point release of the current Long Term Support series that began in April with the "Noble Numbat" debut.

Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window in mid-September is optional support for displaying a QR code within the DRM Panic handler infrastructure when a Linux kernel panic occurs.

It's happening! The upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be enabling the Xe2 graphics in Lunar Lake and Battlemage out-of-the-box / by-default. The Xe2 support within the open-source "Xe" kernel graphics driver appears to be stable enough now for enabling the support by default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware with the next kernel version. The patches have been submitted.

Following the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 driver release from earlier in the month, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.2 is now available as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

With the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) and Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) introduced first with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, they can be a big performance win for some workloads but can be a pain to setup and with limited software support. It also turns out that since a security advisory issued earlier in the year, current Intel IAA and DSA accelerators aren't safe for use within virtual machines (VMs) and that issue doesn't appear to be resolved until Diamond Rapids and Granite Rapids D processors.

It's crazy that Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to sunset Gallium Nine.

One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased "nontechnical nonsense" raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.

Mesa 24.2.1 was released today as the first bi-weekly point release to the newly-minted Mesa 24.2 stable series. This also marks the Mesa 24.1 series from last quarter drawing to a close with one last point release.

The very useful GNU Screen program for multiplexing terminals between processes is out with a shiny new feature release.

Wireshark 4.4 has been released as the newest version of this leading network protocol analyzer. Wireshark 4.4 brings many new and improved features.

Back in 2019 Microsoft announced Cascadia Code as an open-source font designed for terminals and code editors. This monospaced font they view is great for developers like those using Visual Studio Code. Over the years Microsoft has further improved upon Cascadia Code with subtle revisions while now they are working to roll-out "Cascadia Next" as their next big step forward.

Thanks to the Canonical decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream Linux kernels in Ubuntu releases moving forward, Ubuntu 24.10 shipping in October will have the Linux 6.11 kernel that is debuting as stable in mid-September. Canonical's kernel engineers are currently preparing for rolling out that new kernel version in the Oracular Oriole archive.

The LLVM Fortran "Flang" compiler effort has been a long time coming over the years with this programming language continuing to be popular among some HPC codebases and other applications. The "Flang-New" compiler code has been maturing nicely and is looking like soon it could be possibly be renamed to Flang.

The AMD PMC driver used for the SoC power management controller already supports the initial AMD Zen 5 SoCs but new patches coming in as "fixes" for the Linux 6.11 kernel extend the coverage for some upcoming AMD platforms.

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the Xe Direct Rendering Manager that is becoming the default kernel graphics driver beginning with Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware (it currently works as an experimental option with existing Intel graphics hardware going back to Tigerlake). The latest work coming out of Intel is their latest push on enabling GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

Azure Linux as Microsoft's in-house Linux operating system that is used for a variety of purposes is out with a new feature release.

Being merged for Mesa 24.3 to the Freedreno open-source Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now supporting the Adreno 621 and 505 graphics processors.

Coming as a surprise this afternoon is Microsoft deciding to contribute the Mono Project to be stewarded by the Wine development community.

As the successor to KOffice, Calligra is KDE's office and graphics suite. Today marks the release of Calligra Office 4.0 with updates to the Words word processor, Sheets spreadsheet, Stage presentation, and Karbon vector graphics programs.

LinkedIn has replaced CentOS as their default server operating system choice with Azure Linux to power all of their server needs.

AMD for months has already been working on heterogeneous core topology optimizations for Linux within the AMD P-State CPUFreq driver and other heterogeneous CPU topology improvements for dealing with Ryzen systems sporting a mix of "classic" (full) cores with the denser "C" cores. Today though they've announced a brand new "Heterogeneous Core Driver" for further enhancing Linux support for AMD platforms sporting a combination of core types.

A big set of patches have been submitted for DRM-Next of "new stuff" to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and the AMDKFD compute driver with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle.

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware.

Oracle engineers continue working on the TrenchBoot initiative to advance boot security and integrity for Linux. The tenth iteration of the TrenchBoot patches were posted this week as it works its way toward the mainline kernel.

Miracle-WM as the Mir-powered Wayland compositor inspired by i3 and Sway is out with another new release. It's rather ironic that while Miracle-WM is principally developed by a Canonical engineer associated with Ubuntu Linux, these recent Miracle-WM releases are being driven in part by preparing for a Fedora Miracle spin due out as part of the Fedora Linux 41 release in October.