Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

Last night when writing about the Clang AutoFDO and Propeller optimization patches sent in for Linux 6.13 I had wondered whether Linus Torvalds would go through with the pull request given some of his past commentary around aggressive compiler optimizations... But to much delight, this evening Linus Torvalds has merged the Kbuild pull request that introduces Clang-based AutoFDO and Propeller compiler optimization support for allowing greater kernel performance out of tailored (profiled) workloads.

In what could be a wonderful holiday for the Linux desktop, it looks like the Wayland color management protocol might finally be close to merging after four years in discussion.

As an alternative to the GNOME System Monitor application for system monitoring, Resources has been in development as a currently unofficial, GNOME-aligned resource/hardware monitoring application written in the Rust programming language. Resources v1.7 was released on Friday and now has the ability to monitor NPU usage and other enhancements.

In addition to the USB updates and big staging flush merged yesterday for the Linux 6.13 kernel merge window, the "char/misc" pull was also honored for that catch-all of various kernel changes. With the char/misc pull there are some notable additions for those wanting to write kernel drivers within the Rust programming language.

The Rust Hypervisor Firmware is a project out of the Cloud Hypervisor umbrella for developing open-source, Rust-based firmware that can be launched from any environment able to load ELF binaries and run them via the PVH booting standard. Rust Hypervisor Firmware v0.5 is out this weekend with the newest capabilities.

KDE developers have wrapped up a busy November with many fixes and other refinements landing this last week of the month.

Making for an even more exciting Black Friday is the Kbuild pull request submitted today for the near-over Linux 6.13 merge window... And it includes Clang Auto Feedback Directed Optimization (AutoFDO) support for kernel builds as well as Clang's Propeller.

Just a quick reminder this "Black Friday" if you would like to help show your support.

For those with some extra time over the US holiday weekend, LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha 1 has been published as the newest feature version of this open-source, cross-platform office suite that is a great alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office.

Along with the staging changes, Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes for the nearly-over Linux 6.13 merge window.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is out today with all of the pull requests for Linux 6.13 of the areas of the kernel he oversees. Most notable with the updates on the staging side are clearing out several drivers seeing no real code activity and no apparent users of the mainline Linux kernel... As such the staging pull lightens the kernel by around 107k lines of code.

A number of Vulkan Video enhancements landed this week in FFmpeg Git thanks to open-source developer Lynne that has been advancing the Vulkan Video encode/decode capabilities in this widely-used multimedia library.

The UBports community today released Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 as the latest version of the smartphone/tablet Linux platform currently running off an Ubuntu 20.04 base.

In mid-October was the release of a developer preview for Ubuntu 24.10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops. Yesterday an updated Ubuntu 24.10 release was made available catering to these popular, current-generation ARM-powered laptops that typically ship with Windows 11 for ARM.

There are a few Network File System (NFS) enhancements worth pointing out with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.

Open-source developer Rui Ueyama who is the lead developer of the Mold high performance linker and previously on the LLVM lld linker has written a detailed mailing list post that highlights some observed performance bottlenecks within the Linux kernel.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL GPU compute support as well as being depended upon by the Windows 3D driver stack has now removed platform support up to and including Ice Lake.

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience.

Adding to the interesting code building up for next spring's release of the LLVM 20 compiler stack is having the Tenstorrent TT-Ascalon D8 as the newest RISC-V processor target.

Merged last week back toward the start of the Linux 6.13 merge window were a number of interesting IO_uring enhancements for this first major kernel version of 2025.

Systemd 257 is nearing release as the next major feature release for this widely-used init system and software suite on Linux systems.

For those making use of the Microsoft exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel brings an optimization that will help some operations by reducing the FAT chain traversal.

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.

The RISC-V CPU port updates have been sent out for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.

The SoundWire subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This cycle brings new AMD driver support as well as supporting the MIPI DisCo 2.0 specification.

Sent out on Tuesday was the modules pull request for Linux 6.13 that have some low-level improvements but it noted that the biggest kernel modules highlight wasn't in that pull request itself but had been added by way of the memory management pull. This was a change by a Microsoft engineer around caching of kernel modules into huge pages.

MIPS has begun working on the open-source compiler toolchain support for their P8700 RISC-V based processors. Initial patches posted today bring-up the MIPS P8700 RISC-V support for the LLVM compiler stack.

Days after announcing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W for $7, Raspberry Pi today announced the Compute Module 5 at the $45 price point.

Merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel was the long-awaited real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support and allowing it to be enabled across x86/x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V CPU architectures. With the Linux 6.13 kernel, LoongArch is joining the RT party.