Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel today sent out more than one hundred new feature patches to DRM-Next of new "Xe" kernel graphics driver material they have readied for the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.

The folks behind the very popular Framework upgradeable/modular laptops announced today $18M in new funding and a few other interesting details.

It's Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution.

Adding to the impressive number of features to be found in this quarter's Mesa 24.1 release is now the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver supporting implicit pipeline caching.

The latest Compute Express Link (CXL) feature work being pursued for the mainline Linux kernel is a driver to create CXL block devices for storage. On Monday a "request for comments" patch series sent out the initial code for setting up CXL shared memory to be used as Linux block devices.

Another week, another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes for the mainline Linux kernel.

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver.

NetBSD 10.0 debuted last month with a long list of improvements and other enhancements that built up over the past several years. For those not yet taking the leap to this big NetBSD update, NetBSD 9.4 is out today for those relying on the stable NetBSD 9 series.

With tonight's Steam client beta update they have reduced the default scaling factor for those running it on Linux with a 4K display.

LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has announced the released of Fwupd 1.9.17, the newest update to this open-source solution for system and device firmware updating under Linux that is paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a streamlined user experience.

Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features.

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out today with a big feature update in the form of Audacity 3.5.

A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist.

After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend.

AMD's upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision.

Right now for buggy HID hardware or other input devices not exactly aligning to specs or having known hardware workarounds required, a new Linux kernel driver tends to be needed or at least quirks to be added to existing kernel driver code. There's no shortage of wonky HID hardware/drivers out there to deal with such odd cases. Due to the lengthy kernel cycles and other factors involved, leveraging (e)BPF has long been talked about as one of the areas where it may make sense for being able to more quickly send out hardware support fixes in the form of eBPF programs. The Rust-written udev-hid-bpf project is ready to help in that enabling effort.

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company's modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware.

The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May.

This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs.

GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series.

The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation.

The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will feature "almost full" support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered laptop. The downside though it's now a three year old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to the market this year.

The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week's batch of "x86/urgent" fixes were sent out this morning.

Niri as an innovative, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor is out today with its newest feature release.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines ongoing exciting work to the desktop thanks to the additional funding from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund plus a variety of other ongoing desktop/app enhancements.

A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors.

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows.

Following last week's AMDGPU pull to DRM-Next preparing more next-gen GPU support and other updates for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window, another batch of feature changes were sent out on Friday ahead of this next kernel cycle.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week.

Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms.

While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change.

Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories.

The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users.

Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management.

While systemd 255 last year introduced a "blue screen of death" inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it's not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set to be introduced now with Linux 6.10 is a parallel "blue screen of death" like error presenting experience with the introduction of the DRM panic handler.

As the first new release to Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes.

It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader.

It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.

Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection.

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.

While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds.

On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel's open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality.

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."

There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities.

With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we're beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just "RHEL clones". It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that's been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels.