Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The belated first release candidate of Mesa 24.3 is now available for testing of the upgraded OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers commonly used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Following a one week delay, Wine 9.21 has been released as the latest development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems. We are also closing in on the approaching Wine 10.0 stable release.

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release as a big step forward for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops.

Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.

Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.

Mesa 24.3 feature development is now over and Mesa 25.0 has entered development with Mesa Git.

As the latest on the compiler enablement front for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids processors, LLVM Git has merged support for the AMX-AVX512 instructions for next spring's Clang 20 compiler release.

A patch posted on Thursday by one of Intel's long-time Linux kernel engineers would begin treating outdated Intel CPU microcode as a security vulnerability that would be reported to user-space via the existing sysfs vulnerabilities reporting.

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.

The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter.

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024.

Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland.

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.

AMD ROCm 6.2.4 is out today as the newest point release for this Radeon and Instinct open-source GPU compute stack.

Following the GIMP 3.0-RC1 tagging, the GIMP project has now put out their lengthy write-up outlining many of the new features to enjoy with this first release candidate of the much anticipated GIMP 3.0. Plus there is a few words about future releases when moving past the upcoming GIMP 3.0 stable.

Linux I/O expert and block/IO_uring maintainer Jens Axboe of Meta has recently revisited his patches around uncached buffered I/O. Back in 2019 the "RWF_UNCACHED" effort was started by Axboe to address a throughput cliff in performance once the page cache fills up. That work faded away but Axboe recently took to crafting a set of fresh patches for implementing uncached buffered I/O and they are showing extremely promising results.

Systemd 257-rc1 is out today as a big feature update for this release that brings many new features and other refinements to this key piece of the Linux operating system stack.

Patches for the Linux kernel over the past week are preparing for an SNC6 sub-NUMA clustering mode. This is the first time I've seen patches or mentions of an SNC6 mode compared to SNC 1/2/3/4 modes with existing processors.

The upcoming Mesa 24.3 graphics driver stack will deliver a very nice performance win with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for aging RDNA1 "GFX10" graphics processors.

Yet another exciting feature expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is the introduction of the Lazy Preemption model.

The cURL 8.11 release is now available for this widely-used open-source software library and CLI utility used for downloads and supporting a variety of network protocols for file transfers. Most notable with cURL 8.11 is sporting official WebSockets support.

Intel's oneCCL open-source software that is the oneAPI Collective Communications Library focused on providing an efficient implementation of deep learning communication patterns is out with a new release.

The long elusive GIMP 3.0 image editor that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop has finally reached the release candidate phase of development.

Upstreamed at the start of the year was the Imagination PowerVR open-source DRM kernel driver for newer Imagination Rogue GPUs. That upstream kernel driver is now being extended to cover the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus subsystem as a set of network protocols for real-time distributed control of automated industrial systems. But now five years later, Fieldbus is being removed from the mainline Linux kernel since the code hasn't been maintained.

Due to the possibility of DMA attacks from connected Thunderbolt devices, Linux and other platforms have built up safeguards over the years and different security levels for Thunderbolt to better protect systems having this high speed interface exposing PCIe. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the logic of the kernel is being enhanced to better detect and trust built-in Thunderbolt controllers.

LXQt 2.1 is now available as the latest feature release to this Qt-based lightweight desktop environment. Most significant with LXQt 2.1 is the introduction of the lxqt-wayland-session component.

Queued up over the past month into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle has been initial support for Xe3 graphics to be found with Panther Lake processors. The initial Xe3 graphics driver support patches have been trickling in while the final drm-intel-next pull ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window has readied support for actually being able to light up a display connected to Xe3 LPD graphics with Panther Lake.

The x86-simd-sort project from Intel has been an interesting open-source software effort for much faster number sorting by using AVX-512. There's been lightning fast number sorting with AVX-512 and AVX2 code paths also added to broaden the appeal in helping CPUs without AVX-512. Projects like Numpy have been making use of this library while today x86-simd-sort 6.0 was released and also comes a few days after PyTorch has begun using this library too.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week and now queued already via tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch is support for a new AMD CPU feature we haven't heard about until now... ERAPS, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security.

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is working on Manjaro Data Donor "MDD" as a new data collection tool of its users. This is intended to succeed their former ping-based solution for user counting plus incorporate hardware/software data collection on users. Once deployed, this will be opt-out handling for the data collection.

Fujitsu has upstreamed support for their next-gen "Monaka" Armv9 processor into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase in time for the GCC 15 release coming out early next year.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is adding a device aliasing file feature that could appear in the upcoming Linux v6.13 merge window.

Select newer Dell/Alienware laptops with a "WMAX" thermal interface will see ACPI Platform Profile support now exposed with the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

AMD Linux engineer Borislav Petkov kicked off the new week by volleying a patch for adjusting the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO, a.k.a. "Inception") vulnerability mitigation handling for capabilities to be found with affected processors running on newer CPU microcode.

CachyOS continues to be a fascinating Arch Linux based distribution that pushes the boundaries of out-of-the-box performance with a variety of patches, optimization techniques, specialized package builds, and more. One of the latest areas they are exploring is making use of AutoFDO for their kernel builds.

Nine years after the Raspberry Pi Touch Display was announced as a 800 x 480 pixel LCD panel catering to the Raspberry Pi, today the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 was announced.

Linus Torvalds has just issued the Linux 6.12-rc6 kernel release as we close in on the stable Linux 6.12 kernel release later in November.

The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update.

The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel.

The Linux Mint crew is out with their newest monthly status update that outlines the activities of this desktop Linux distribution over the course of October.

With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has pushed the latest Apple Silicon OpenGL "AGX Gallium3D" and Vulkan "Honeykrisp" code from the Asahi Linux development repository into the Mesa Git codebase ahead of this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release.

While the mainline Linux kernel has begun seeing initial support for various Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops, various feature limitations are outstanding before these Qualcomm-powered laptops really become usable for daily use. For instance, just a few days ago the audio firmware was finally upstreamed to make setting up X1 Elite laptops easier. Another important feature as an example is CPUFreq driver support for CPU frequency scaling to ensure optimal performance and power efficiency.