Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

Last year it was announced that Intel's oneAPI software initiative evolved into the UXL Foundation for making compute accelerators more open as well as opening things up to more cross-vendor collaboration and adoption. Intel started the Unified Acceleration Foundation with the Linux Foundation, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Announced today is that the UXL Foundation has begun collaborating with The Khronos Group.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers is working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite powered laptop to market.

Mozilla Firefox 127.0 binaries are available for download today ahead of tomorrow's official announcement. Firefox 127 brings a few nice changes for this month's feature update.

After an attempt in early 2023 didn't pan out, today an AMD Linux engineer posted a new kernel patch series for enabling per-core RAPL energy counter support for AMD processors. With this patch series when using Linux's venerable perf utility it's now possible for reading the power use on a per CPU core basis using a new "power_per_core" PMU.

Going back just under two years was the propsal for adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the quest to achieve faster performance for obtaining random numbers in user-space. That effort while seemingly simple remains an ongoing and contentious matter.

A lot of AMD GFX12 IP enablement landed in Mesa 24.2-devel over the past week for bringing up the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming RDNA4 graphics.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.10-rc3 as a rather pleasant week for this stage of the kernel cycle.

Arch Linux derivative CachyOS that is optimized for a nice desktop experience and shipping a nice set of performance optimizations/tuning by default is out with its June 2024 refresh.

In addition to debuting their "Peano" LLVM compiler back-end for Ryzen AI NPUs on Friday, AMD also submitted a new batch of feature code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver of new feature code aiming for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

Intel's IGB and IXGBE network drivers within the mainline Linux kernel are being adapted to support firmware updates for the underlying driver. To date such functionality was limited to Intel's out-of-tree versions of these drivers for their higher-end network hardware.

Mold 2.32 is out as the newest feature release for this high speed code linker that rivals LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

There was a very exciting Friday evening code drop out of AMD... They announced a new project called Peano that serves as an open-source LLVM compiler back-end for AMD/Xilinx AI engine processors with a particular focus on the Ryzen AI SOCs with existing Phoenix and Hawk Point hardware as well as the upcoming XDNA2 found with the forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series.

GNOME developers continue to be quite busy this summer from enhancing their desktop with more security and accessibility features to further crafting GNOME OS.

Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications.

Out for testing this weekend is the OBS Studio 30.2 beta software for those into live-streaming their desktop and other screen recording purposes. With the OBS Studio 30.2 release there are video encode improvements for Linux, support for multi-track video streaming, hybrid MP4 output, and other new features.

The KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop is due for release in a little more than one week. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham thinks this is going to be a "good one" with a lot of new features, better performance, and more.

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack.

The patches have been years in the making around AMD SEV-SNP encrypted virtualization and various elements have been upstreamed in prior kernel versions while for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle are finally the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) bits for launching SEV-SNP protected guest virtual machines.

The patches recently covered on Phoronix for up to 162% faster AES-GCM encryption/decryption with modern Intel and AMD processors is now queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle!

SPIR-V used by the likes of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan is a common intermediate representation (IR) / intermediate language for consumption by device drivers. With code now merged into LLVM, AMD has introduced the notion of vendor "flavored" SPIR-V for containing extra information pertinent to the GPU device/driver being targeted.

The second beta is now available for testing of the upcoming Python 3.13 release that is bringing an experimental JIT, a new interactive interpreter, and other big features for this annual Python feature release.

On Thursday the first set of Intel Xe driver feature updates were submitted to DRM-Next of material intended for merging with the Linux 6.11 kernel in July.

Merged to the Linux kernel back in 2018 was an LG Gram laptop driver for supporting various hotkeys and extra functionality of these LG laptops. That driver is now being extended to support the latest LG Gram laptop models.

With this week marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, as part of the commemorative articles this week has been looking at the most popular Linux/open-source news over 20 years. In the piece today is looking back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles on Phoronix since 2004.

It's like magic with one line of code changed in the Linux kernel that Intel is reporting up to 19% performance improvement for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" and up to an 11% improvement in performance per Watt. Or in another EPP mode, the power consumption during video playback can be reduced by 52%!

When it comes to the RDNA 3.5 / RDNA 3+ integrated graphics found with upcoming AMD products, the graphics driver IP has been referred to as "GFX1150" and "GFX1151" of the AMD GFX 11.5 graphics IP. But now appearing today within the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler is a new GFX1152 variant.

With this week's Computex announcement by AMD of the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop processors built atop Zen 5, one of the pleasant aspects has been several laptop models being announced already to be powered by either the Ryzen AI 9 365 or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 flagship models. Some models are also already available for pre-order ahead of launch day. This is quite nice compared to in the past there was often at times quite a delay between the initial AMD Ryzen mobile announcements and being able to (pre)order any hardware. And thus I've already been looking around to coordinate near launch day Linux testing of the new AMD Zen 5 powered Ryzen AI 300 series hardware.

Microsoft has published its first tagged preview of the upcoming Azure Linux 3.0 operating system.

AMD has published a new set of AMDGPU firmware binaries for Linux users. In particular, this should benefit AMD APUs the most and these firmware improvements were focused on Valve's Steam Deck to make the device more robust against buggy applications.

This week's pull request of power management fixes for the Linux 6.10 kernel has an important change for the in-tree cpupower utility to fix P-State frequency reporting on upcoming Zen 5 (Family 1Ah) processors.

With yesterday marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, I was curious what the most popular news articles were over these past two decades. There's a lot of compiler fodder, news from the early days of AMD Ryzen, Linus Torvalds commentary, and more.

The latest funding for open-source from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is providing €300,000 over the course of the next year for improving GNU libmicrohttpd for building high performance HTTP web servers.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer is out with two important updates to the Linux input stack: libinput 1.26 has released for this input handling library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems and then secondly he has announced the "gsetwacom" CLI program as a replacement to the "xsetwacom" program.