Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While the Linux v6.13 merge window has been over for less than one week, already the first pull requests of new feature code are being submitted to DRM-Next for queuing the display/graphics driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window in two months.

While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.

It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.

Canonical's Matthieu Clemenceau as the Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Foundations Team has provided a public roadmap around some of the plans for Ubuntu 25.04. This next Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release that is due out in April is set to enjoy more performance optimizations and other exciting bits.

Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman officially designated Linux 6.12 as this year's long-term support (LTS) kernel version.

The Rust-based Redox OS original open-source operating system project is out with a new status report to detail the enhancements they have made over the past several weeks.

System76 today released the newest development/testing version of their Rust-based desktop environment designed for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.

Alpine Linux 3.21 is out today as the newest version of this simple, lightweight, and security-minded Linux distribution that is popular for use within containerized environments, embedded systems, and more.

With the new Linux kernel patches posted yesterday for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernels on x86_64 CPUs as part of that patch series was introducing new Kconfig build options around the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. It turns out though that Torvalds is completely against how the x86_64 feature levels are handled by the compiler toolchain folks and doesn't want to see it invading the kernel.

The Linux 6.8 kernel merged the Imagination PowerVR driver as a new open-source driver for supporting the PowerVR "Rogue" graphics architecture and being developed in tandem by Imagination Tech with their upstream Mesa Vulkan driver. Initially this PowerVR driver was catering to ARM SoCs with the Rogue graphics while now the open-source driver is being extended to work on RISC-V too.

The "AMDXDNA" accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU is set to be introduced in the Linux 6.14 kernel next year. Ahead of that debut, a new set of patches from AMD surfaced on Wednesday to provide fixes and code improvements as well as introducing support for newer Ryzen AI "NPU6" IP.

Patches from a Bytedance engineer for the Linux kernel allow for overcoming the current 4K page size limitation of RISC-V and introduce a new 64K page size option.

Building off the Mesa 24.3 release from two weeks ago is now Mesa 24.3.1 as the first stable point release following their usual bi-weekly release regiment.

The DRM Panic infrastructure has been in the Linux kernel for several releases now and allows for a kernel-based experience similar to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death as well as more recently allowing QR code kernel error messages and other features. The Intel kernel DRM driver has seen some patches for enabling DRM Panic support.

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

As a follow-up to last month's article around the Debian 13 release processes continuing and desktop artwork voting underway for Debian 13 "Trixie", the winning desktop theme/artwork was announced today.

AMDVLK 2024.Q4.2 is out today as the newest official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release for Linux systems.

Fedora stakeholders are evaluating supporting an Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) software stack with next year's Fedora 42 release.

As we approach 2025, hopefully none of you are still running x86 32-bit kernels / 32-bit OS software on x86_64 processors, but should you still be into that, there are improvements on the way.

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is out as the newest monthly-ish update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Linux and Windows for the OpenCL and Level Zero support. This Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is also the last update ahead of next week's Battlemage availability with the Arc B580 graphics card.

VTE-based terminals on Linux like Ptyxis are now seeing support introduced to better display progress state for long-running processes with a more visually pleasing progress bar. Microsoft's Windows Terminal has already supported this feature while now with systemd beginning to support using these Operating System Command escape sequences, Linux terminal support is on the rise.

Longtime Linux game porter Ryan Gordon has introduced initial asynchronous I/O APIs for the in-development SDL3 library. On Linux these async I/O APIs allow making use of the modern kernel IO_uring functionality.

Merged for Mesa 25.0 yesterday to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is enabling more storage compression on Tigerlake graphics hardware and newer.

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.

A new feature proposal seeks to improve the Fedora Linux experience when running under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 11.

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 era games is out with the newest version of the RTX-Remix runtime that is powered in part by DXVK for Direct3D to Vulkan mapping.

While long overdue, the PostgreSQL database server has finally deprecated MD5 password support with its latest code.

FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE is out today as a strong, incremental update to the FreeBSD 14 series.

Years ago when new OpenGL spec releases would occur, it could take months or years for the open-source Mesa drivers to catch-up in supporting the latest versions... Thankfully in the Vulkan space it continues to prove to be a very different story. As we've seen with prior Vulkan specs, today's Vulkan 1.4 spec release is greeted by same-day Mesa patches.

Mir 2.19 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu/Canonical project making it easier for other desktops/environments to embrace Wayland support. This set of libraries for building Wayland-based shells has added a few new features with today's update.

As a lovely early Christmas present, The Khronos Group used SIGGRAPH Asia today for announcing the Vulkan 1.4 specification release.

While the Linux 6.13 merge window just closed yesterday in landing all of the new features and functionality for that first kernel version of 2025, already for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle to follow a feature was queued up early this morning in a TIP branch: AMD per-core energy counter support.

While Intel has been under much financial difficulties and as they pursue their build out of new fabs to better compete with TSMC, to much surprise Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired effective today.

Building off the early October release of Qt 6.8 LTS, Qt 6.8.1 is out today with more than 550 fixes collected over the past two months.

An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.

Llamafile 0.8.17 debuted this weekend as the newest version of this Mozilla research project for making it easy to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) within a single file. As implied by its name, Llamafile leverages Llama.cpp along with other open-source software into one consistent framework for helping to make single-file LLM executables a reality.

Merged over the US holiday weekend was a big update to the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver code for Mesa 25.0... 71 patches in fact making up this merge request.

Olivier Fourdan has merged support for using the xdg-system-bell protocol by XWayland for dealing with "system bell" functionality for Wayland compositors supporting this newer protocol for ringing the system bell or otherwise implementing a visual indicator that a system bell type event may have been triggered.

During October the Steam Linux marketshare crawled back up to 2.0% while overnight Valve published the Steam Survey results for November 2024.

Lutris 0.5.18 is out today as the newest version of this open-source game manager for Linux systems to help with installing and playing a variety of games whether they be native Linux titles, emulated Windows games with the likes of Wine / Proton, or console emulated games and more. Lutris also continues integrating with the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other online game services for providing a nice Linux gaming experience.

As expected, this evening Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.13-rc1 to cap-off the two-week Linux 6.13 merge window. With Linux 6.13 comes many new features.

Following the Xfce 4.20 Pre1 release from one month ago, Xfce 4.20 Pre2 is ready for testing ahead of the planned desktop release in two weeks.

The turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting CPU frequency/idle statistics and other metrics is gaining some new capabilities as part of the Linux 6.13 cycle.

November was filled with interesting Linux benchmarks ranging from the Apple M4 testing kicking off to ongoing AMD Zen 5 benchmarks both for desktops and servers, a lot of exciting upstream kernel activity (and some drama...), and more. Even with the end of year holidays around, there remains new and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During November there were 250 original news articles on Phoronix along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length benchmark articles.

NVIDIA engineer Yonatan Maman posted a set of "request for comments" patches this Sunday to implement GPU Direct RDMA "P2P DMA" for device private pages. This is the latest in the effort by multiple vendors to allow more efficient data sharing between GPUs/accelerators and other devices like network adapters.

Submitted today for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc1 release as part of the "x86/urgent" material is a fix for aging Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors where for the past year and a half they could potentially find very slow boot times.