Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, Linux 6.9 stable should release later today. In turn the Linux 6.10 merge window will then open for the next two weeks and already some early pull requests have been submitted for this next kernel version. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the Linux 6.10 kernel.

The recent AMD P-State Linux driver patches for heterogeneous core CPU topology, Fast CPPC, and Core Performance Boost haven't made it to the Linux power management's "-next" branch ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 cycle. Thus it looks like those features won't be ready to make it for v6.10 unless by chance being deemed ready in the coming days and then sent in as part of a secondary set of merge window changes. However, some other AMD P-State fixes/improvements are queued up.

With the new Intel "Xe" Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver that's been in development one of the touted benefits of the clean sheet driver design is that it would enable using Intel discrete GPUs on non-x86 CPU architectures. The long-used "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver has many x86'isms in the code-base built up over the many years of Intel integrated graphics that were only ever found within their x86/x86_64 processors. But now in the era of Intel discrete graphics, there's been issues in trying to run Intel Arc Graphics on say ARM, POWER9, and RISC-V, among others. The experimental Intel Xe driver was recently successfully demonstrated in running on ARM using an Ampere Altra workstation.

Following all of the GFX12 code and related IP landing within the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver as well as the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and other code in enabling the next-generation of AMD Radeon graphics, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for RDNA4 (GFX12) was merged this Sunday into Mesa.

Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.

The Linux 6.9 kernel should debut as stable later today unless Linus Torvalds has second thoughts and decides to delay it by issuing a v6.9-rc8 kernel instead that would then push out the official release by an extra week. In any event, as a last-minute "x86/urgent" pull request is another Zen 5 PCI ID being added.

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.

For those interested in some insightful Linux kernel mailing list reading this weekend, there's been a vibrant discussion on the ability for the Linux kernel to mitigate unexpected arithmetic overflows/underflows/wraparounds.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor.

Two years ago Cloudflare outlined how they began replacing Nginx with their own in-house creation, Pingora. Back in February of this year Cloudflare open-sourced Pingora and in April issued the maiden release of Pingora. Out today is Pingora 0.2 as the second release of this Rust framework that is already used in production by Cloudflare.

Rustls is the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with a large emphasis on memory safety and security. Rustls is backed by Google, AWS, and others as well as being a recipient of Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. The latest exciting milestone for the open-source project is that Rustls can now work with Nginx.

Wasmer 4.3 is out as the newest version of this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX, WASI, and EmScript execution. This cross-platform WASM runtime continues to be focused on driving lightweight containers that can run anywhere in a very secure manner.

KDE developers had another busy week as more features were merged ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 release.

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.

AMD last week sent out a set of patches to enhance the open-source FFmpeg multimedia library with integration around the AMD Advanced Media Framework (AMF). The AMF SDK allows for "optimal" access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing but this patch series questioned the need in an era of Vulkan Video APIs beginning to see adoption.

Linux 6.10 is introducing support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) encryption and integrity protections to prevent active/passive interposers from compromising them. This follows a recent security demonstration of TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker being demonstrated. TPM sniffing attacks have also been demonstrated against Linux systems too, thus the additional protections be made with Linux 6.10 to better secure TPM2 modules.

While Intel can be praised for their dozens (or likely by now, hundreds) of open-source projects they maintain and countless other existing open-source software projects they actively contribute to and are covered by Phoronix on a near-daily basis, not everything there is open-source. Intel is a wonderful and leading open-source promoter but occasionally there are closed-source blobs or questionable moves such as today: Intel is taking their Hyperscan library development from BSD-licensed open-source software to now the Intel Proprietary License moving forward.

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.9 kernel should be released as stable on Sunday. It's been a fairly quiet week so Linux 6.9 stable will likely happen as opposed to going through an extra week with a 6.9-rc8 candidate. With this spring 2024 kernel there are many great features and improvements, especially for modern Intel and AMD platforms.

The Vulkan API 1.3.285 spec revision is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications and another new extension developed by Valve engineering.

Building off last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (RHEL 9.4) has been AlmaLinux 9.4 and now the other notable community-focused downstream: Rocky Linux 9.4.

Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support.

Intel has released their Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.3 to succeed their earlier v2.1 derived extension. With this updated extension targeting PyTorch 2.3, Intel is rolling out more optimizations around Large Language Models (LLMs).

Valve tonight released a SteamOS 3.6 Preview as the latest version of their Arch Linux derived operating system that powers the Steam Deck and can be installed on other devices as well.

One of the interesting innovations out of Mozilla Ocho as the browser company's innovation and experiments group is Llamafile, a easy way to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file. Out this evening is Llamafile 0.8.2 is the newest release with an updated Llama.cpp and most excitingly are some AVX2 performance optimizations.

Recently there was an LLVM bug report of "Worse runtime performance on Zen CPU when optimizing for Zen." Well, that's not good... Fortunately, that bug is now fixed with the latest LLVM Clang compiler code but other deficiencies in the AMD CPU optimization targeting remain.

If all goes well the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will be released on Sunday and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window. In hoping for an on-time release, some Linux kernel subsystem maintainers have been already submitting early pull requests of their feature material for v6.10. Among those early pulls are the SLAB (SLUB) updates.

A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express.

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack.

In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux.

The Intel iVPU accelerator driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window have been submitted for advancing the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) support found since the launch of Meteor Lake with Intel Core Ultra notebook CPUs. For this iVPU/NPU driver in Linux 6.10 are a few notable new features.

The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP.

For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux's IO_uring for async I/O.

The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year.

The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort.

Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack.

Ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom continues carrying out a splendid job with the on-time releases of new bi-weekly Mesa point releases and the weekly release candidates heading toward the next feature release of these open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together.

Since last year Intel's open-source software engineers have been working on a PCIe bandwidth controller driver for the Linux kernel to avoid thermal issues by being able to automatically reduce the PCIe link speed when needed. This driver still isn't over the finish line but today brought the fifth iteration of these patches.

Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that's optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems.

SHIFTphone 8 is the upcoming modular and easy-to-repair smartphone from Germany's SHIFT GmbH. This is the first major SHIFTphone update in four years and there are pending patches providing mainline Linux kernel support for this forthcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon powered modular/upgradeable smartphone.

AMD Linux engineers have introduced a new perf tool called "schedstat" that aims to be less resource intensive and convenient than the existing "perf sched" tool for profiling kernel scheduler behavior.

With GCC 14 stable released and GCC 15 now in development on trunk, new feature code is landing for the GNU Compiler Collection. Among the early features is Microsoft contributing the "Windows on ARM64" target with aarch64-w64-mingw32. The start of the new cycle also brings code removal for features deprecated in prior cycles. Among the old code being cleared out in GCC 15 is saying goodbye to Oracle Solaris 11.3.

As noted recently, EROFS has been exploring Zstd compression support for this open-source read-only Linux file-system. Today the patch was posted for enabling Zstandard use.

Two different merges today for Mesa 24.2 are worth calling out for the open-source Linux graphics stack.

The GNOME Foundation today published their 2023 annual report that outlines their accomplishments as well as a look at the finances.

Microsoft engineers have contributed Windows On ARM64 support to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the new "aarch64-w64-mingw32" target.

While rolling out the new iPad Pro tablets today, Apple announced the M4 as their newest in-house silicon design.

Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado... Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the beta availability of Raspberry Pi Connect as a means of securely having remote GUI access to your Remote Pi from a web browser.

Vulkan 1.3.284 was published on Monday with only a few changes but bearing one notable new extension.

AMD engineers posted a new set of Linux driver patches on Tuesday that "addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types" while using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

In addition to approving -O3 optimized Python builds, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESC)) this week unanimously approved a Fedora 41 change proposal for making RPM package builds more reproducible.

Over the past year there's been much work happening within the Linux kernel's sysctl code for clearing up ~64 bytes of bloat per array throughout the kernel by dropping the last sysctl "sentinel" entry at the end of each array. This also helps in reducing the build time of the kernel and is a nice improvement. With Linux 6.10, the sysctl sentinel clearing throughout different subsystems is set to happen.

For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis.

GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions.