Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.11 as that newest bi-weekly development release, Wine Staging 9.11 has been released with some 428 patches re-based atop this latest upstream Wine code.

A Linux power management change merged on Friday aims to help ensure AMD Ryzen systems with NVMe solid-state drive storage will work properly when resuming from suspend.

GNOME's longtime document viewer, Evince, was recently forked as GNOME Papers and saw its first release a few weeks back. This new GNOME document viewer has been ported from GTK3 to GTK4 and also brings an improved user interface and other refinements.

Apple compiler engineers have contributed Apple M4 CPU support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler via the new -mcpu=apple-m4 target. Interestingly the Apple M4 is exposed as an ARMv8.7 derived design.

KDE Plasma 6.1 is preparing for release next week on 18 June. KDE developers this week have thus been very busy with last minute finishing touches to this updated desktop while also already beginning feature work on Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.11 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms. With Wine 9.11 we are now roughly at the half-way point before Wine's typical feature freeze and release candidate start that typically begins around early December and this cycle will lead up to the Wine 10.0 stable release in early 2025.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has been working with various KDE designers and developers to establish a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).

LibreOffice 24.8 is now available in beta form for those wanting to test this open-source, cross-platform office suite alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office.

The main set of drm-intel-gt-next patches aiming for the Linux 6.11 kernel were submitted this week to DRM-Next. Most notable with this feature update for the next kernel version is enabling a new hardware replay feature for better reproducing GPU hangs.

Last month some of the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop plans were laid out such as NVIDIA Wayland by default, a new welcome wizard, and more. Canonical's Oliver Smith has posted an update today around some of the ongoing Ubuntu 24.10 desktop enhancements.

Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver "ANV" has reduced the driver start-up time by about half.

Kernel developer and consultant Johan Hovold spent the last two years working on improving ARM Linux laptop support with a particular focus on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s powered Qualcomm SoC. Arm funded this Linaro effort and as a result the ThinkPad X13s enjoys pleasant upstream kernel support now. This Arm Linux laptop project has now concluded but sets a nice base for further ARM Linux laptop improvements moving forward.

While for years there has been the Habana Labs AI accelerator driver within the mainline Linux kernel, this "accel" driver has been focused on just supporting training/inference across their products. Now being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel are upstreaming the Habana Labs network drivers that can be used for scaling out the AI workloads across multiple systems.

Being merged to Mesa 24.2 this week is a set of 12 patches that have been four months in the making for supporting the OpenGL/EGL fixed-rate compression extensions.

The first beta release of the Qt 6.8 toolkit is now available for testing with many new features.

For those interested in running Linux on the Ayaneo Kun handheld gaming console alternative to Valve's Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, among others, a display quirk has been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.10-rc4 release this weekend to fix the display handling.

Here's how an exciting message from a NVIDIA engineer that just hit the mailing list begins: "NVIDIA has been exploring ways to better support the effort for an upstream kernel mode driver for GPUs that are capable of running GSP-RM firmware, since the introduction to Nova."

Fwupd 1.9.21 is now available for this open-source software for facilitating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux and other platforms.

The past few months open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso has been developing an open-source accelerator driver for Rockchip's NPU. The experimental driver has shown the open-source code can compete with Rockchip's proprietary driver and Vizoso has been working to develop an upstream-minded driver for a kernel driver living within the "accel" subsystem and then leveraging Mesa's Teflon for the user-space component. Yesterday the "Rocket" accel kernel driver was posted for the Rockchip NPU.

While the upstream X.Org Server development remains slow with most of the large vendors treating it in maintenance mode and not investing in new features, open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has been one of the few still working to improve the X.Org Server. As part of his work besides pushing new patches and testing of the latest X.Org Server Git state, today he announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit v0.0.1 as a means to help in facilitate testing of the latest X.Org Server Git by making it easier to build it.

Ubuntu maker Canonical put out a news release today around the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II that is an octa-core RISC-V laptop shipping soon with Ubuntu Linux.

Going back to 2022 we've seen work by Intel engineers on adding Meteor Lake SoC support to Coreboot while to date there hasn't been much in the way of actual Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops with Coreboot as a replacement to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. But to be shown later today is one of the first laptop designs using these latest Intel mobile processors and running the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot.

In making the Framework 16 laptop even more appealing to open-source hardware enthusiasts and makers, Framework Computer has published the CAD design files as open-source.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux (nee CBL-Mariner), is out with a new update. In the first new stable release for Azure Linux 2.0 since late April, the Azure Linux 2.0.20240609 update ships with dozens of security fixes to address a wide range of CVEs as well as bringing various bug fixes and other updates.

FEX is one of the open-source projects working on user-mode x86/x86_64 binary emulation atop ARM64/AArch64 Linux. FEX 2406 is out today as the project's newest monthly feature release.

The FreeBSD Foundation has published the results of the FreeBSD Community Survey that reveal interesting insights about FreeBSD usage and its users.

Proton 9.0-2 is out this afternoon as the Valve/CodeWeavers downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games under Linux within the Steam client.

In aiming to make the Rust programming language more suitable for safety-critical software like within automobiles, aviation, and other industries, the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium was announced today.

The AMD Fast CPPC feature enablement for the "amd_pstate" driver has been submitted to the power management subsystem ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 merge window.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 is now officially available for this community Linux distribution release aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 6. With Leap 15.6 comes the inclusion of the Cockpit web administration software and many software updates.

Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.4 has been released with "LPMD" being the open-source daemon for optimize active idle power for modern Core hybrid CPUs under Linux that sport a combination of the E and P cores.

Merged today to LLVM Clang 19 Git is support for the #embed resource inclusion mechanism that is an approved C23 feature. This also makes Clang the first for supporting this pre-processor embed feature.

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL/Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has landed a big patch series into Mesa 24.2 for a universal optimized compute image clear/blit shader and MSAA-resolving pixel shader.

Intel's oneDNN 3.5 has been released as this Deep Neural Network Library for the oneAPI specification and now part of the UXL Foundation. With oneDNN 3.5 comes more performance optimizations for existing and upcoming Intel hardware.

The extensible scheduler "sched_ext" code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it's remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

Systemd 256 is out today as the latest major feature update to this integral component to modern Linux distributions.

The Raspberry Pi 5 features the "RP1" as the in-house silicon design for the southbridge to this single board computer. The RP1 driver maintained by Raspberry Pi is just found in their downstream kernel while a SUSE engineer is working to rework that driver so that it can be eventually mainlined in the upstream Linux kernel.

Merged last month to the GNU C Library (glibc) Git code was a new tunable for non-temporal stores for memset. This optimization for glibc's memset performance was limited to Intel processors given at the time it was only tested/benchmarked on Intel CPUs but now it's proven to be useful too for AMD processors.

Coincidentally coming out on the day of Raspberry Pi's IPO is AlmaLinux providing official support for the Raspberry Pi 5.

While last year we saw Fedora to no longer omit the frame pointer to help in debugging/profiling Fedora packages and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also enabled frame pointers for better debugging/profiling, among other distributions, there is the known performance implications of no longer omitting the frame pointer. But now in aiming to make the best of both worlds, it turns out Red Hat has been developing eu-stracktrace as a new means of profiling without relying on frame pointers.

Last month AMD Linux engineers posted ap atch series for better handling heterogeneous core type CPUs. This is for enhancing the P-State CPU frequency scaling on CPUs featuring a mix of conventional cores and efficiency cores, e.g. Zen 4 and Zen 4C. A third iteration of these patches were posted today.

Google is known for their many contributions to open-source compilers and particular many different sanitizer efforts over the years. Their newest project they have made open-source in this area is GWPSan as a sampling-based sanitizer framework.

Raspberry Pi carried out a successful IPO today on the London Stock Exchange.