Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 released last week with RAIDZ expansion, fast deduplication, and direct IO support among other changes for this ZFS file-system implementation for use on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3-rc2 is out today with a few more interesting changes.

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a GCC 15.0.0 status report for outlining the current development state of the GCC 15 open-source compiler as it works its way toward the stable GCC 15.1 release in the early months of 2025.

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

Inkscape 1.4 released on Sunday as the newest version of this cross-platform, open-source vector graphics editor.

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November.

With a number of patches queued this week into the staging tree ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel, a number of old and no longer maintained hardware drivers are set to be removed in the next kernel cycle.

As a result of user feedback and being able to reproduce some annoying ad experiences, particularly on mobile devices, I've been able to make some enhancements to hopefully improve the user ad experience when browsing Phoronix.

Building off the recent infrastructure merged for Mesa 24.3 as a build option to allow Rusticl driver support to be enabled by default, Red Hat's Karol Herbst has added the Asahi Gallium3D driver to the default list.

Adding to the growing set of features for NVK as this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa, the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate fragment shading rate extension is now supported.

While Azure Linux 3.0 has been available since the late summer, for those continuing to rely on Azure Linux 2.0 in production there is a big update out this weekend. Azure Linux 2.0.20241006 brings dozens of security fixes to this Microsoft Linux distribution.

Wayland Protocols 1.38 is out with three new staging protocols.

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly development summary to highlight advancements made to this unique OS.

With Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake systems now shipping and the Linux support largely settled, Intel open-source software engineers have begun ramping up their support for Panther Lake due out in a year.

A Friday evening job posting has confirmed and reinforced details around their future AI GPU compute stack, presumably what's been referred to as the Unified AI Software Stack.

Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 6.2, the KDE developers are busy addressing some of the initial fallout from this desktop update as well as more feature work aimed at Plasma 6.3.

As another interesting AMD announcement this week following their Advancing AI event yesterday where they launched the EPYC 9005 series and other new hardware, they've continued with a few more soft announcements in the lead-up to the OCP Global Summit happening next week. The latest interesting tid-bit is their plans to incorporate Project Caliptra into their products beginning in 2026.

The IO_uring asynchronous I/O API for Linux is quite novel and has proven performance benefits. With time IO_uring has been adapted to other areas of the kernel like networking and now with a proposal raised by an Arm graphics driver engineer, it could potentially be adapted for use by Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics drivers.

The drm-xe-next pull request earlier this week began preparing open-source driver support for Intel Xe3 graphics to premiere with Panther Lake processors. That code is beginning to queue for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle. Today a drm-intel-next pull request was sent out to prepare for more Intel Linux kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 6.13.

DRM_Log is an effort that continues to be worked on by Jocelyn Falempe at Red Hat as a new boot logger for printing the kernel messages on the screen.

With 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors now launched, AMD provided a same-day release of their updated AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler "AOCC". This is AMD's downstream version of LLVM/Clang/Flang where they provide optimized AMD processor support with code that hasn't yet worked its way up into LLVM proper.

Back in August I wrote about AMD beginning work on a new Linux driver to help with heterogeneous core CPUs. On Thursday a second iteration of the AMD HFI Linux driver patches were posted with this driver continuing to work its way toward the mainline kernel.

Collabora's Faith Ekstrand provided a status update yesterday at XDC 2024 Montreal around the state of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver as a means of open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GPUs.

After the AMD Advancing AI Event yesterday where they launched AMD 5th Gen EPYC processors, Instinct product updates, and new high-end networking gear, they also put out a blog post to affirm their "commitment to open security technologies in the data center."

At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.

In addition to announcing the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors and the latest on the AMD Instinct front, Lisa Su at the AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco also announced the AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU and AMD Pensando Pollara 400 Ultra Ethernet AI NIC.

Alyssa Rosenzweig provided an update today at the XDC 2024 conference in Montreal on the open-source "Honeykrisp" Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs within Mesa and related work as part of the Asahi Linux project to provide for a nice Linux gaming experience atop the ARM-based Apple devices.

The Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" ISOs are now officially available as the newest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux.

AMD today quietly posted a new open-source Linux kernel driver for review... the AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver. This AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for Linux is intended to help optimize performance on systems sporting 3D V-Cache such as the AMD Ryzen "X3D" parts and the EPYC "X" processors.

While Intel Xe2 graphics have just debuted with Lunar Lake and we are awaiting Battlemage discrete GPUs with Xe2, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun work enabling Xe3 graphics! Xe3 driver work is now underway for next-generation Intel graphics.

For those making use of Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) on Linux systems, there is an enticing performance optimization on the way.

The Open 3D Engine as the open-source game engine developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella and began as an advanced version of the Amazon Lumberyard engine is out with a new feature release. Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 24.09 is out today with a variety of enhancements for this cross-platform game engine.

While not a long-term support release, Ubuntu Server 24.10 is delivering an interesting proof-of-concept for supporting NVMe/TCP based installations.

Slipping under my radar until now was the Vulkan API 1.3.297 spec update released last week that introduces a new extension, VK_EXT_present_mode_fifo_latest_ready.

The long-in-development GNOME triple buffering support that is patched into the Ubuntu and Debian builds and available for years in patch form might need to undergo a redesign. That's to better accommodate the NVIDIA Linux driver and likely help other non-Mesa graphics drivers too.

Microsoft Linux engineers have continued preparing the Linux kernel to support Hyper-V Dom0 for Linux to run as the root partition.

Originally published last summer were patches from Intel for the Linux kernel to introduce a PCI Express bandwidth controller Linux driver to provide a PCIe cooling mechanism via bandwidth reduction to devices in order to prevent thermal issues. One year later this driver continues to be worked on and today brought the eighth iteration of these patches.

The GCC 14 compiler marked Itanium IA-64 support as obsolete with plans to remove that Intel architecture in GCC 15. But for now at least the Itanium Linux compiler support has seen some reprieve with it being un-deprecated.