Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Merged one year ago for Linux 6.6 was the EEVDF scheduler as a replacement to the CFS code and designed to provide a better scheduling policy for the kernel and being more robust. With a new set of patches for this "Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First" scheduling code, it's nearing the point of officially being completed.

Ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window set to close tomorrow, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent in a set of two VFS fixes. One of the fixes is more noteworthy that is for a five year old bug that could cause on-disk corruption, security issues, or a kernel crash.

While most Linux file-systems are rather robust in recovering when the system experiences a power loss, the UBIFS file-system is more prone to problems when a power-cut happens. With patches submitted for the Linux 6.11 merge window, UBIFS is seeing some hardening so it can better cope with the loss of power.

In addition to refining the KDE Human Interface Guidelines, KDE developers have been busy with a variety of other tasks this week in polishing their open-source desktop stack.

Merged today for Q4's Mesa 24.3 feature release is a brand new open-source Vulkan driver: Honeykrisp, the driver providing Vulkan API support for Apple Silicon GPUs as part of the Asahi Linux effort.

Following Linus Torvalds receiving an Ampere Altra Max workstation from Ampere Computing, he's been dabbling more with ARM64 now that it affords him more AArch64 compute power than his Apple Silicon powered MacBook. Torvalds kicked off the Linux 6.11 merge window by landing some of his own code to further enhance the ARM64 kernel and as we approach the end of the v6.11 merge window this weekend, he's merged some more ARM64 code.

LLVM 19.1-rc1 was released today as the first tagged development snapshot of LLVM 19 that is working its way toward the stable LLVM 19.1 version expected in September.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 1.9.22 as the newest version of this open-source solution for allowing system and peripheral firmware updates to be carried out quickly and easily from Linux systems.

With the Linux 6.11 kernel merge window wrapping up this weekend, I've begun "kicking the tires" on the new kernel that will then see the weekly release candidates over the next two months. For some initial Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 Git benchmarking on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation, the new kernel is appearing fit and offering some nice performance gains in a few areas.

For those striving for a quiet PC while having high-end specs, ASRock today announced passively-cooled Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.11 merge window. The x86 platform drivers predominantly benefit Intel/AMD laptops on Linux but also some other x86 non-laptop hardware and then more recently also some ARM64 laptop drivers appearing in this area of the kernel.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very popular with the VFX crowd, those relying on the SideFX Houdini 3D animation software are running into a bit of a pickle if trying to use RHEL 9.4. There's a glibc bug causing random crashes for Houdini that Red Hat has been slow to pickup but is now going to be shipped by AlmaLinux early to satisfy VFX users.

Back in early June the KDE Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" were updated. These design principles for KDE software were updated to modern standards, adapt to the latest Qt toolkit behavior, and also making it more inviting to new contributors. Since then the KDE HIG has continued to see more refinements.

Oracle today released the first public beta of their VirtualBox 7.1 virtualization software.

Linux Mint 22 was formally released today as the newest major release of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base while featuring its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment and other software apps.

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.

When it comes to virtualization with the Linux 6.11 kernel, in addition to the latest AMD SEV-SNP code making it upstream, for those making use of VMware virtualization products their initial "VMware Hypercall" API has been merged.

The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 14 as the newest version of this Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE) for developers.

Earlier this month AMD talked more about their Unified AI Software Stack plans for debuting in the coming months to provide a unified software view where AI work can be seamlessly offloaded to Ryzen processors, AMD graphics, or AMD Ryzen AI NPU hardware. Another possible and exciting prospect came to mind when going through the LLVM/Clang 19 changes this week.

The open-source software pieces have come together where Fedora / Red Hat developers are hoping that for Fedora 41 there can be out-of-the-box support for the web cameras on newer Intel laptops.

Miguel Ojeda has sent out the big Rust pull request for the nearly wrapped up Linux 6.11 merge window. This contains all of the latest Rust programming language infrastructure now ready for the mainline kernel.

The HID subsystem updates recently landed into the mainline Linux 6.11 kernel codebase.

For fans of ollama as an open-source means for easily running large language models (LLMs) on your system, ollama v0.3 has been released with support for the newest exciting models.

This weekend the ASUS ROG Ally X began shipping as an upgraded version of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console that launched last year. The ASUS ROG Ally X is still powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC and for the most part similar to the original model but now with 24GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory up from 16GB of LPDDR5-6400, twice as large battery capacity, 1TB of NVMe storage rather than 512GB, improved input controls, improved cooling, and other refinements. But it still is running Microsoft Windows 11 out-of-the-box.

Following LLVM/Clang recently dropping support for AMD 3DNow! instructions, the open-source compiler stack is now pushing the MMX SIMD instruction set to a backseat. Moving forward the MMX intrinsics will not make use of MMX but rather be mapped to SSE2. This is all fine unless you are wanting to use this modern code compiler on an Intel Pentium MMX / Pentium II / Pentium III or AMD K6 / K7 processor from the late 90's.

While we have been super eager for the AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processor launch that's been set for 31 July, AMD has issued a last minute delay. Instead the processors will launch in two stages in August.

One of the newest patch series out from AMD this week is on providing I3C HCI driver support for their MIPI I3C IP block found within their latest processors.

Going back two years has been the effort for adding getrandom() to the vDSO in order to enhance the performance. This work has yielded as much as 15x the performance in showing very fast while being secure user-space RNG needs. A few weeks back Linus Torvalds was unconvinced by adding getrandom() to the vDSO, but after going back through the patches he gave it another go. Today the work has managed to be mainlined for Linux 6.11.

The latest Rust for the Linux kernel work led by Miguel Ojeda is on preparing the Rust kernel code for various CPU security mitigations.

Intel today released IGC 1.0.17193.4 as the newest version of the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used for their compute stack on Windows/Linux as well as by their Windows graphics driver for shader compilation.

While not as notable as the nice EXT4 performance optimization making it into Linux 6.11 or features like XFS real-time FITRIM and self-healing Bcachefs on read I/O errors, the Bcachefs, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems saw smaller updates for the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle.

It's not too often that the ATA pull request for a new Linux kernel merge window has much worth mentioning. With Linux 6.11 there is a change to the kernel defaults worth noting over the default SATA link power management policy. In this case most Linux distributions have been setting a better default themselves and is now a case of the upstream kernel defaults catching up.

The latest video acceleration improvements to report on with the open-source AMD Radeon driver front is support in Mesa 24.3-devel for passing HDR metadata in the AV1 encoder.

Intel's OSPRay ray-tracing engine as part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit continues to serve as a great, scalable and portable RT engine for high fidelity visualizations. With OSPRay 3.2 released today, they continue advancing this open-source engine further.

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel is making it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and other Arch derived distributions relying on Pacman.

Ahead of launch for new discrete/integrated graphics backed by open-source Linux drivers, it can often be difficult to ascertain the level of support pre-launch given the complexity of today's GPUs, we are past the days of long monolithic patch series for new hardware enablement, and also not knowing about what features may be added for the next-generation hardware. But if latest Mesa developer comments hold, it looks like for Intel Xe2 graphics the open-source Vulkan driver at least has "most" of the code now in place.

DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements.

NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver.

Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature.

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support.

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform.

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture.

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August.

All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.

MidnightBSD 3.2 is out as the newest feature update to one of the few desktop-focused BSD operating systems still being maintained. MidnightBSD 3.2 continues to be derived from FreeBSD sources while shipping with a nice Xfce-based desktop experience.

Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Andrew Morton on Sunday sent in his "MM" pull requests for Linux 6.11 of the areas of the kernel he manages.

GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation.

Yann Collet released LZ4 v1.10 today as a major update to this extremely fast compression algorithm. Most significant with LZ4 1.10 is adding multi-threaded compression support for much faster performance with today's modern multi-core processors.

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review.

Konstantin Komarov with Paragon Software has prepared the latest patches for the NTFS3 kernel driver that is providing the modern NTFS read/write file-system support on Linux systems.

Intel's oneAPI Video Processing Library (VPL) GPU Runtime 2024Q2 release is now available along with an updated quarterly release of the Intel Media Driver.