Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system.

Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they've released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork.

It's been three weeks since the Plasma 6.0.3 point release while today KDE has shipped Plasma 6.0.4 as its April bug-fix release.

At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org.

In addition to Vulkan explicit sync under X11, another merge request hitting Mesa 24.1 overnight that's worth mentioning is the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver now supporting VK_EXT_image_compression_control.

With the new security mitigation for the "Native BHI" Spectre vulnerability affecting even the recent Intel processors, a number of Phoronix readers have been curious about the performance impact of the mitigation. Over the past week I've been running some benchmarks on recent Intel CPUs to better look into any performance implications.

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices.

The Bcachefs fixes continue to come in on the heavier side for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta is out today for this popular community-oriented Linux distribution derived from upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Besides pulling in the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux 9.4 also restores hardware support for some devices that was deprecated by upstream RHEL.

openSUSE's Leap Micro OS that caters to containerized and virtualized workloads by providing a lightweight and reliable foundation is embarking on its next major release. The openSUSE Leap Micro 6.0 operating system is now available in alpha form.

Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format.

Continuing a trend worked on in recent Fedora Linux releases and more broadly in the open-source ecosystem at large for securing the software supply chain and ensuring unaltered binaries, Fedora 41 is aiming to ensure more reproducible package builds.

Ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement, the Firefox 125.0 release binaries have been uploaded to the Mozilla mirror this morning. Firefox 125.0 brings a number of new features and developer additions -- more so than we've seen recently from the monthly Firefox releases.

The Rust-based Servo web layout engine started by Mozilla that is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation and worked on by several different organizations is eyeing modularity support for its JavaScript integration. Currently Servo is closely tied to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine but with a modularity push could see other options supported.

Xiph.Org has released RNNoise 0.2 as the recurrent neural network for audio noise reduction. This library leverages a neural network model for enhancing real-time noise suppression.

Archinstall 2.8 is out today as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it much faster deploying this popular Linux distribution.

FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines.

For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory "XDG_BASE_DIR" specification.

As expected the Linux 6.9-rc4 test kernel is out today as Linux 6.9 works its way toward release by mid-May.

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux.

AMD on Saturday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics driver feature patches ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

The OpenJPH project that provides an open-source implementation of JPEG-2000 Part 15 for High Throughput J2K (HTJ2K) / JPH support is working on extending its abilities to handle low-latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 images and other capabilities.

Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce "LibGodot" to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps.

OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux.

The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week's "x86/urgent" material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes.

In addition to a SLUB optimization for extreme scenarios, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, and other performance optimizations on the way for Linux 6.10, another minor one was queued up this week.

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.

KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction.

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter.

The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments.

KDE Frameworks 6.1 is out today as the first monthly update since the release of KDE Frameworks 6.0 alongside KDE Plasma 6.0.

A patch to the Linux kernel's SLUB allocator has been queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window to help reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios.

David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems.

As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing "the best possible performance" especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages.

For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire.

While TUXEDO Computers has already been offering powerful AMD Zen 4 laptops such as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC, today the Bavarian company announced their first Ryzen 8000 series mobile laptop.

Intel's software team is today sharing their newest innovation for achieving greater performance on Linux systems: the Thin Layout Optimizer. Intel's Thin Layout Optimizer is inspired by the likes of the Meta/LLVM BOLT optimizer and Google's Propeller but aims to be much easier to use while still delivering measurable performance gains for optimized binaries.

For those trying to use the X.Org Server's GLAMOR accelerated 2D rendering on legacy/obsolete GPUs, there's now a fallback in place to allow software rendering to work when encountering crippled hardware.

While GNU Hurd continues having a tough time on x86 support and GNU Hurd x86_64 is being worked toward, the GCC 14 compiler has been working on compiler toolchain support for GNU Hurd AArch64.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta release is now available for testing ahead of the official release later this month for this new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265.

Wayland 1.22 released at the start of April 2023 while now Wayland 1.23 is taking shape as the next version of this core Wayland code.

Last week Bcachefs' repair code was largely completed and in good shape for merging with the Linux 6.9-rc3 kernel. Bcachefs patches last week amounted to about one third of the kernel changes for the week. This week is a new round of fixes to further stabilize the experimental file-system.