Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.

There's been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47.

In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.

Following yesterday's Wine 9.8 release that fixes a nearly 20 year old bug for installing Microsoft Office 97, Wine-Staging 9.8 is out today as the even more experimental blend of Wine that carries hundreds of extra patches that are going through a testing period toward upstreaming into the main codebase.

KDE developers have been busy the first few days of May with all eyes shifting to the upcoming Plasma 6.1 desktop.

Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.

Google Summer of Code 2024 (GSoC '24) accepted projects have been announced with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing seven student developers engaging this summer with several of them focused on enhancing GCC's Rust front-end.

The FreeBSD project has published its Q1'2024 status report to outline various advancements over the past few months.

FEX as the open-source project to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems is out with its newest monthly release. With FEX 2405, they are close to having the game Far Cry (2004) running on ARM Linux devices.

Rui Ueyama announced the release of Mold 2.31 today as the newest version of this high speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.9.19 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

Intel software engineer Victor Rodriguez presented at the Open-Source Summit North America last month on their open-source compiler toolchain work for enabling ISA capabilities of upcoming Intel CPUs as well as using simulation tools for helping to test compiler enhancements/optimizations moving forward.

OpenZFS 2.2.4 was released on Thursday evening to provide the latest ZFS file-system support on Linux and FreeBSD platforms.

A patch recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is working on implementing ACPI Platform Profile support for modern Dell laptops to allow users to have more control over their balanced / cool / quiet / performance behavior of the laptop and its resulting impact on the fan noise / cooling performance.

Valve and CodeWeavers have announced the availability of Proton 9.0-1 as their Wine downstream that pulls in DXVK and VKD3D-Proton along with other changes and powers Steam Play for Linux desktop gaming and on the Steam Deck.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan announced today the second release candidate of the upcoming XWayland 24.1.

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation today is announcing they are establishing a special interest group (SIG) to advance interests around high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) for this RHEL-derived operating system.

Eric Engestrom has published Mesa 24.1-rc2 as the latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 24.1 as we work toward the stable release likely in the next week or two.

With the recently released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I've shown various benchmarks how it can deliver nice performance gains over both Ubuntu 23.10 and the existing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on different platforms. Those benchmarks have tended to focus on the latest-generation processors/platforms given that's where the excitement is these days. But for those on older platforms like AMD 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan" servers, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrade.

Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 was an NZXT Kraken hardware monitoring "HWMON" driver to support sensor monitoring of these all-in-one liquid cooling products from NZXT. Over time more NZXT Kraken AIO coolers have been supported by the Linux kernel and with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel the latest NZXT Kraken CPU coolers will be supported.

In addition to recently working out AES-XTS implementations for AVX2, AVX-512, and other versions for speeding up disk/file encryption, Google's Eric Biggers has additionally been working on some nice performance improvements for the Linux kernel's DM-Verity code.

For those that were hoping Steam on Linux numbers would crack the 2% marketshare for April, unfortunately, that didn't happen.

Some that crave the absolute best possible performance sometimes build their software with the "-Ofast" optimization level that is a step above "-O3" but comes with the risk of potentially unsafe math. LLVM developers are now weighing whether to deprecate -Ofast to either remove it or have it just be an alias for the -O3 optimizations.

The newest SDL3 development release is out today with PipeWire preferred over PulseAudio and other changes.

Kicking off a new month of open-source releases is the release of the GNU Nano 8.0 text editor.

Serpent OS lead developer Ikey Doherty published a monthly status update for this original Linux distribution, which points to having a working OS installer soon so users can begin trying out this creation on real hardware.

Last November the PCI-SIG announced CopprLink as the PCI Express cable name for both internal and external cabling. Today the embargo has lifted on the CopprLink cable specifications for both PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0.

For now Fedora / Red Hat is not making any immediate changes, but the ever increasing sizes of required GPU firmware files is causing Linux distribution vendors to re-think including GPU kernel graphics drivers as part of the initramfs.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical has now rolled out Landscape 24.04 LTS as the first long-term support version of this commercial software for managing a fleet of Ubuntu systems from a web-based portal. Landscape is part of the Ubuntu Pro subscription package and from the web-based environment makes it easier to manage Ubuntu systems in the enterprise.

Queued up as part of the DeviceMapper dm-crypt changes for Linux 6.10 is adding a new "high priority" option.

Sent in to DRM-Next as part of last week's drm-misc-next changes is implementing support for tracking cleared free memory and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

April 2024 is now in the books after writing 257 original Linux/open-source-related news articles and another 13 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look back at the most exciting (popular) content from April.

Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel's more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It's been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23.

Redox OS as the from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system had a successful April with now having USB keyboards and mice now working with their USB HID driver.

Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic.

NVIDIA today released RTX Remix v0.5 as the newest version of this software for remastering old/classic games with path tracing. RTX Remix builds off DXVK and leverages NVIDIA Omniverse and other tech from the green giant like DLSS to enhance older games.

Prominent open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged a new tantalizing set of patches that boost the 3D texturing performance for those using RDNA1 GPUs and older.

The release candidate of the GCC 14 compiler is available for testing as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

TUXEDO Computers a few weeks ago announced the first Linux laptop shipping with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840 series SoC and now they've announced another one powered by the latest Ryzen 7 8845HS.

Plans to have official support for the Arm-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS sadly didn't pan out. But there is semi-working support available for running Ubuntu 24.04 on this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 powered laptop.

Given the upstream Redis software licensing changes, Fedora is evaluating replacing Redis with the new Valkey project.

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.

TornadoVM 1.0.4 is out today as the newest version of this solution for Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. TornadoVM allows for nice Java heterogeneous hardware support and with the TornadoVM 1.0.4 brings yet more features.

Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

Git 2.45 is out today as an important step forward for this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system.

The openSUSE Leap 15.6 based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 has graduated out of its beta phase and is onto the release candidate period. Notable with openSUSE Leap 15.6 is now having nice support for the Cockpit web-based server management solution.

Merged last week to Mesa 24.2-devel was an important merge request for the Broadcom V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.

While GNOME landed experimental Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support in GNOME 46 that is used by the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical isn't yet encouraging users to test out this option.

An upcoming AMD micro-architecture (presumably Zen 5 given the timing and history around AMD's Linux hardware enablement...) is introducing Bus Lock Trap as a feature matching Intel's existing split/bus lock detection functionality.

Linux driver support is forthcoming for the ASUS ROG Raikiri gaming controller.

Longtime X.Org maintainer Alan Coopersmith with Oracle released a new version of xconsole, the program that displays an X11 window containing the messages sent to /dev/console. This xconsole 1.1 release comes 18 years after the xconsole 1.0 release.

For those keeping track of Ubuntu's animal-themed codenames, Ubuntu 24.10 is now confirmed to be the Oracular Oriole.