Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The beta release of Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" was released in time for some weekend testing.

For months there has been talk and speculations around Raspberry Pi working to release a Compute Module 5 (CM5) in putting the power of last year's Raspberry Pi 5 into the small form factor for various embedded/industrial applications. It's pretty much a given that the Compute Module 5 will come, it's just a matter of when. With recent activity by Canonical engineers working on Ubuntu Linux, it's looking like the CM5 could be here soon.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable this time around are some new feature additions for the popular Wacom drawing tablet support.

Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year.

After seven months under review, Google's Gfxstream code has been upstreamed into Mesa 24.3 as a Vulkan virtualization solution.

The OpenZFS project has merged DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the ZFS file-system to bypass the ARC for reads and writes.

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report.

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working.

After many years in the making, it finally was merged overnight... The real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support was merged a few hours ago into Linux Git for this year's Linux 6.12 kernel!

Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers.

After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux.

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates have been submitted and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

The core perf subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

Intel engineers today released OpenVINO 2024.4 as the newest version of their open-source AI toolkit. OpenVINO 2024.4 prepares for upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" processors, supports newer Gen AI models, now supports Python 3.12, and finally adds official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

The scheduler updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel and come with several notable enhancements.

The Microsoft Hyper-V updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel. They are mostly small changes but does bring work to optimize the boot time for large Hyper-V VMs.

The XFS file-system changes have been merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel and introduce new ioctls for being able to exchange the contents of two files.

For anyone still relying upon virtual reality (VR) applications written for the OpenGL API rather than the Vulkan API that has been dominant among VR apps (and other modern games / software) for years, the Mesa code and in particular the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver now supports the OpenGL VR (OVR) extensions.

An interesting merge request opened this week and already merged for Mesa 24.3 comes from an Autodesk engineer adding Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) around Apple's Metal API for use on macOS.

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged.

GNOME 47 is out today as the latest major update to this popular open-source desktop environment.

Not to be confused with the proposal a few days ago by an AMD engineer for Attack Vector Controls for broader control over CPU security mitigation handling, the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel is adding new Kconfig options to allow for more build-time control over what CPU security mitigation code is compiled for the kernel.

The big set of power management updates for Linux 6.12 have landed.

Intel Compute Runtime 24.35.30872.22 released today as the newest tagged version of this open-source GPU compute stack providing oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL support for Linux and Windows systems.

Merged as part of the Linux Security Modules (LSM) updates for the Linux 6.12 kernel is the new Integrity Policy Enforcement (IPE) module that has been years in the making. Integrity Policy Enforcement is an alternative to access controls.

The Btrfs file-system continues marching ahead with the Linux 6.12 kernel.

A patch was sent out on Sunday for adding new Linux kernel configuration options for tuning the kernel build to different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. The intent is on generating kernel builds that are faster for use on modern Intel and AMD systems. However, this patch is likely to not be accepted in the mainline kernel and has already been criticized upstream Linux kernel developers.

Last week the initial AMD Zen 5 "znver5" enablement for LLVM/Clang was posted by an AMD compiler engineer. That code has since undergone review and merged for LLVM 20 Git and yesterday then back-ported for LLVM 19.

OpenJDK 23 is now generally available as the reference implementation to Java 23.

The printk changes to finish the NBCON consoles work has been merged for Linux 6.12! This is the last remaining blocker on real-time "PREEMPT_RT" support from being upstreamed. We're now tantalizing close to seeing the real-time kernel support merged after many years of being out-of-tree patches.

LLVM 19.1 is out today as the first stable version of the LLVM 19 compiler stack including the Clang 19 C/C++ compiler.

The beta of Fedora 41 is out today ahead of the planned stable release in October for this leading-edge Linux distribution with many new features.

Canonical today shipped Mir 2.18 as the latest version of this set of open-source libraries for assembly Wayland-based shells. Mir 2.18 brings a number of new features including Wayland server-side decorations.

Ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops beginning to ship starting next week, the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.8 is now available as the latest software update for embracing the Intel NPU for AI offloading.

Jakub Kicinski submitted the networking subsystem updates over the weekend for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable this cycle is Device Memory TCP for zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions.

The FreeBSD camp today released FreeBSD 13.4 as the newest point release to the FreeBSD 13 stable series for those that haven't yet migrated to the FreeBSD 14 series.

Red Hat engineer Paolo Bonzini submitted the initial batch of KVM changes targeting the Linux 6.12 kernel. This is just the first batch and notably lacking all of the KVM x86 Intel/AMD changes for the cycle. But in the non-x86 space there is a fair amount of activity for this next kernel version for those making use of KVM as part of the open-source virtualization stack.

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

All of the ARM SoC and platform updates have been sent out for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Exciting this cycle is finally having initial support for the Raspberry Pi 5 plus supporting several more Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops.

The MMC updates for the Linux 6.12 kernel include the introduction of a new kernel subsystem for Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) drivers.

The EROFS read-only open-source file-system has seen initial patches posted today for beginning to re-implement the C code within the Rust programming language for better safety guarantees and the possibility of more performance optimizations.

Following the weekend news of the AMDGPU kernel driver becoming too large that it's causing the Plymouth boot splash screen on slower Linux systems to time-out, longtime AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák expressed a new idea for helping to reduce some bloat from this AMD kernel graphics driver.

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.11 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.11-gnu kernel is now available that is the downstream stripping out driver support/features depending upon closed-source microcode/firmware and other modifications in the name of software freedom and ensuring no closed-source bits are used on Linux-libre-enabled systems.

The file structure is one of the most widely-used data structures by Linux kernel drivers. The file struct represents an open file and thus obviously very important and ubiquitous throughout the kernel. With the Linux 6.12 kernel the file struct has been adjusted so it's smaller than before and in turn could help with performance for file-heavy workloads.

Presented earlier this month at the Open-Source Firmware Conference was TamaGo as a means of running Go programming language code bare metal on Arm SoCs as well as eyeing RISC-V too. TamaGo can allow for "0% C and 100% Go code" for ARM/RISC-V device firmware to enhance security.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates were among the early pull requests submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle in advance of this week's Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit in Austria. Among the EDAC work this cycle is preparing memory address translation support for future AMD platforms.

The 64-bit ARM changes were submitted in advance for the now-open Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. There is work for Arm on the confidential computing side this cycle and other new features.

Valkey 8.0 was released today as this leading fork of the Redis open-source code that was started by the Linux Foundation early in the year and backed by organizations from Amazon/AWS to Google Cloud, Oracle, and others. With the Valkey 8.0 release a big focus has been on increasing performance and striving to being capable of delivering one million requests per second.

Jens Axboe submitted the block and IO_uring changes already for the now-open Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable from this Linux I/O work is adding async discard support to IO_uring.

As expected the Linux 6.11 kernel has been promoted to stable and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and other autumn Linux distribution releases.

It's expected to be the Linux 6.11 release day! We are just hours away from hopefully seeing Linux 6.11 stable christened as the kernel set to power the likes of Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora 41. Here's a reminder of some of the most interesting new features and changes to look forward to with Linux 6.11.

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.

Yet another early pull request for the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window is the sound (audio) driver updates for this next kernel cycle. There is a lot of sound driver work this cycle from new audio bits to removing legacy Intel driver support.

Ahead of the expected Linux 6.11 stable release today and the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit happening this coming week in Vienna, Intel engineer Rafael Wysocki submitted early the ACPI updates among the other areas of the kernel he oversees as part of the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window.