Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new "Round Robin Strict" optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware.

Following the OpenZFS 2.2.7 stable point release earlier this week that brought Linux 6.12 LTS kernel compatibility along with various fixes, OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 is out today as the latest step toward the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release.

The COBOL programming language may be 65 years old since its original release but the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in 2025 might finally see upstream support for it.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14 as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 implementation built atop the Vulkan API for Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

This shouldn't be too surprising especially after Canonical's commitment last year to always ship the latest upstream kernel version for Ubuntu releases moving forward, but the plan was confirmed today that Ubuntu 25.04 intends to ship with the Linux 6.14 kernel.

The SPIR-V target within the LLVM compiler for outputting to this common IR used across different accelerator/device types, different APIs from Vulkan and SYCL to GLSL / OpenCL / HLSL, and adapted for a variety of innovative use-cases could soon become an official target within LLVM.

Merged this week to GNOME's Mutter compositor for the GNOME 48 release is support for the wp_viewport protocol for cursor surfaces in order to provide a nicer experience on cursor scaling.

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki queued up several power management related patches this week for Intel's upcoming Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors as well as the next-gen Xeon Clearwater Forest processors.

Following the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta, CentOS Stream 10 has now reached general availability status. CentOS Stream 10 defines the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 that the RHEL 10 minor versions are created from and ultimately a preview of what's coming down the pipe for future RHEL 10 releases. CentOS Stream 10 had been available in a preview phase since earlier this year while now is considered GA.

While Fedora Workstation has defaulted to using the Btrfs file-system for the past four years, only this past summer was the idea raised of creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) around Btrfs to help advance efforts around this CoW file-system for Fedora Linux integration. This week marks the Fedora Btrfs SIG officially being established.

Building off last month's release of the LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha release for this free software office suite, out today is the first beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 25.2.

A new "Fedora COSMIC" spin of Fedora Linux has been proposed that would feature the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment currently being developed by Linux PC vendor System76.

Earlier this month as part of patches for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel code for x86_64 systems, there was a patch to drop support for 32-bit x86 KVM host support. That patch has now been split off into its own patch series with also now raising the prospects of ending 32-bit KVM host support across all CPU architectures rather than being just an x86-only change.

While the Linux 6.13 merge window only recently ended and that kernel won't be out until around the end of January followed by the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window, Intel software engineers on Wednesday sent out their first two pull requests to DRM-Next of new kernel graphics driver features they are readying for this next version of the Linux kernel.

AMD has added support for another RDNA 3.5 refresh variant to the Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems.

Right ahead of the holidays, KDE Gear 24.12 is out to deliver four months worth of refinements to the KDE desktop applications.

The beta release of Linux Mint 22.1 "Xia" is now available for testing of this desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS releases and known for its Cinnamon desktop environment.

The PanVK open-source Vulkan API driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware within Mesa is now advertising Vulkan 1.1 support rather than Vulkan 1.0. But it's known to be "broken" so don't be too excited about it yet.

Linus Torvalds took to reverting some code tonight within the mainline Linux kernel that inadvertently had broken support having filenames with ❤️ and other special Unicode characters in filenames when on file-systems with case-folding (optional case insensitive file/folder name) support.

While we are awaiting the release of OpenZFS 2.3 that has been seeing release candidates since early October, OpenZFS 2.2.7 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 9.0-4 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running an incredible number of modern Windows games on Linux.

Going back to April 2024, SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as an interesting RISC-V developer board to succeed their HiFive Unleashed that was a nice little RISC-V board. There were delays in shipping the HiFive Premier P550 but they have been making progress and are now ready to ship Ubuntu 24.04 LTS pre-installed on this RISC-V board. They have also lowered the pricing on these RISC-V boards.

For fans of OpenMandriva or just wanting to reminisce over the former Mandrake Linux days, OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 is out today as the newest update to this Linux distribution.

It was just a little more than one month ago that AlmaLinux Kitten 10 became available for testing for this new OS release derived from the CentOS Stream 10 sources that is upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Today the AlmaLinux crew announced the first beta release of AlmaLinux 10.

Back at the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting was an interesting presentation by AMD engineer Joseph Huber for how they have been exploring running common, standard C/C++ code directly on GPUs without having to be adapted for any GPU language / programming dialects or other adaptations.

Miracle-WM is the Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager that is inspired in part by the likes of i3 and Sway. Miracle-WM also has a goal to be a flagship example of a Mir-based full featured window manager with this project being led by a Canonical engineer. Out today is Miracle-WM 0.4 to deliver the latest features.

QEMU 9.2 is out today for this processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project is out with a new monthly status update to detail their latest efforts.

Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.

While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.

Last week I wrote about Linux patches cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel builds for x86_64 CPUs. The new iteration of those patches were sent out today, including the addition of a patch adding the CONFIG_X86_64_NATIVE Kconfig tunable for enabling "-march=native" kernel builds to cater your optimized kernel compilation for the CPU on which you are building the kernel.

Currently the Linux kernel's "perf" performance monitoring subsystem has a limit on 2,048 CPU cores for its CPU map that is set by the MAX_NR_CPUS value. But that's becoming not enough in today's high core count era that patches are looking to raise it to a 4,096 CPU core limit by default.

For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.

A promising patch for the Linux kernel is optimizing the locking contention and scattered address space for the MD bitmap code to improve both the storage throughput and latency.

IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.

The Servo browser engine project is out with their latest monthly status update to outline improvements made to this Rust-based open-source engine.

NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.

GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.

For those wishing to kick off the new week with some interesting technical videos and are into compiler tech, the video recordings from the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting are now online.

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.

The openSUSE project shared today that there is enhanced multi-GPU switching support to enjoy now with openSUSE Linux.

Launched four years ago was the Raspberry Pi 400 as the Raspberry Pi 4 adapted for a keyboard form factor. Launching today is the Raspberry Pi 500 for upgrading that keyboard computer using the Raspberry Pi 5 internals. An official Raspberry Pi Monitor was also released.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.13-rc2 with an initial serving of bug/regression fixes following last week's Linux 6.13-rc1 release that capped off the feature-packed Linux 6.13 merge window.

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.