Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Linux 6.10-rc1 kernel was just released to top off the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Intel's open-source NPU "iVPU" Linux kernel driver for supporting their Neural Processing Unit beginning with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors is already seeing a code refactoring. The refactoring of this Intel accelerator driver is intended for allowing more versatile CPU and NPU combinations moving forward.

With the memory management "MM" updates merged for the Linux 6.10 there is now NUMA balancing support for multi-size transparent hugepages (THPs). This is yielding some nice performance results and there is also other work in this new kernel around multi-size THPs.

One of the patch series that sadly was not ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window and thus will need to wait a few months for at least the next kernel is enabling AMD Fast CPPC support for Zen 4 processors. Fast CPPC aims to allow the processor to deliver higher performance at the same power consumption.

Merged for Linux 6.10 is DRM_Panic as a kernel panic screen for situations akin to Windows' well known "Blue Screen of Death". This is a kernel-based panic screen as an alternative to systemd's recent systemd-bsod. Patches have been posted by Red Hat for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Direct Rendering Manager driver to work with DRM Panic.

While not as exciting as XFS expanding its online repair support, Bcachefs prepping for online fsck, Btrfs seeing some performance work, or F2FS improving zoned storage support, the modern NTFS driver "NTFS3" saw a set of fixes land for the Linux 6.10 kernel.

Sneaking in as a "fix" for the Linux 6.10 kernel is an enhancement to the AMDKFD kernel compute driver used by the ROCm compute stack for better supporting small Ryzen APUs like client and embedded SoCs.

A few days ago with the main RISC-V architecture pull for Linux 6.10 was enabling Rust support within the kernel for this ISA as well as other additions. A secondary set of RISC-V changes have been merged as well ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window closing this weekend.

The Mozilla Ocho group has published their newest version of Llamafile, the open-source project that makes it very easy to distribute and run large language models (LLMs) as a single file. Llamafile is an excellent solution for easily sharing and running LLMs and supporting both speedy CPU-based execution as well as GPU acceleration where available.

This Week In GNOME is out with their newest edition to outline all of the interesting developments as we approach the end of May.

Intel software engineers did a late Friday night release of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library v1.1, their Python library for tapping into the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found on the new Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. This Python library makes it easier to interface with the Intel VPU/NPU kernel driver and in turn enjoying accelerated operations for AI.

It was a busy week for KDE developers ahead of yesterday's Plasma 6.1 Beta release. KDE developer Nate Graham in his weekly development summary outlined all of the interesting changes to make it into the Plasma 6.1 desktop ahead of the feature freeze that went into effect with the beta release.

Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.

Famed open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has landed 13 more patches in Mesa 24.2-devel to provide fixes for GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics IP while also adding more GFX11 (RDNA3) APUs.

The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.

The four month old KWin merge request by Xaver Hugl to allow for triple buffering has been merged and just in time for the Plasma 6.1 code branching!

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" OpenCL implementation that originally began as a CPU-based run-time and has expanded to support a variety of GPU and accelerator targets is out with its first release candidate of the upcoming PoCL 6.0.

Last week saw the main Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.10 that delivered on some performance optimizations while today saw a secondary set of merge window changes for this CoW file-system that is now adding back the "norecovery" mount option.

The Device Mapper changes were merged last week into the Linux 6.10 kernel, including a new "high priority" option for DM-Crypt.

Following the recent PipeWire 1.2 release candidate, a second release candidate is out today that also includes the ability to stream to Snapcast servers.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel include enabling monitoring of more all-in-one liquid coolers for CPUs, a new driver for exposing monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and other new monitoring capabilities.

The Framework 13 and Framework 16 AMD Ryzen powered laptops make use of an NPCX embedded controller that rely on the ChromeOS open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware. With the Linux 6.10 kernel the Chrome OS "cros_ec_lpc" driver is being extended to support these latest Framework upgradeable laptops.

Following the HID changes last week that brought Steam Deck IMU and ASUS ROG Ally support along with other Human Interface Device additions, on Thursday the input subsystem updates were submitted for this new kernel. The Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller is now supported along with other input additions.

Following the NFS server changes from a few days ago for Linux 6.10 that brought optimizations and prepping for the new "nfsdctl" utility, the Network File System client changes have been submitted and merged for this new kernel.

The GNOME Foundation has published a draft copy of their five-year strategic plan that calls for more around the community, DEI, services, a more streamlined and inclusive annual event, and strengthening the foundation.

Coreboot 24.05 is available today as the newest stable release of this open-source system firmware solution. With Coreboot 24.05 there is support for 25 more motherboards/platforms and an assortment of other improvements.

The ACPI and power management / thermal subsystem changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This cycle there are updates to both the Intel and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel were all of the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes. There is ACPI FACS support, the ability to easily construct FIT images, and a new command-line option for disabling 32-bit application support.

In addition to the Linux 6.10 USB changes and char/misc with the new NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Wednesday also sent out the staging updates for Linux 6.10. There isn't much in the way of new code but some 19k lines of code removed thanks to removing an unused driver as well as a broken driver.

Similar to the GCC compiler dropping support for the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators a few days ago, Intel has also gone ahead and seen to the removal of Xeon Phi support for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler.

Andrew Morton sent out more patches on Wednesday that have been pulled into the Linux 6.10 kernel. Notable from this latest round of "non-MM" updates is enabling more compiler warnings by default and getting newer AMD GPUs working on the RISC-V architecture.

GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.

All of the VirtIO updates are now ready for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is closing this weekend.

It looks like systemd 256 will officially debut as stable in the near future with systemd 256-rc3 being released today and not tacking on any new features compared to the prior release candidates.

Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent in the char/misc updates for Linux 6.10 alongside the other areas of the kernel he oversees. Among the char/misc changes is adding the NTSYNC driver that exposes the /dev/ntsync character device for use by the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton). But for Linux 6.10 the driver is effectively "broken" as most of the feature patches have yet to be included.

Eric Engestrom has announced the release of Mesa 24.1 as this quarter's feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

Back in February 2022 prior to the Valve Steam Deck being released, a Steam Deck Platform Driver was posted for the Linux kernel. Sadly, more than two years later, this driver still hasn't been upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and it looks like it could still be months before it happens.

Introduced last year with the Linux 6.7 kernel was a hardening configuration to allow for "make hardening.config" as an easy way of building a security-hardened Linux kernel with sane defaults. With Linux 6.10 there are some additional security minded features now enabled.

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes this morning for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is wrapping up this weekend. Surprisingly, in 2024, a new USB to parallel printer port adapter variant is being introduced with Linux 6.10.

The FUSE updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel in supporting file-system implementations within user-space.

Alpine Linux 3.20 has been released as the newest feature release to this security-minded, lightweight Linux distribution that is popular for embedded and container use. Alpine Linux continues to set itself apart from others by making use of musl libc, Busybox, and other modifications in the name of security and small footprint.

Sent out on Tuesday were all of the perf tool changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This includes perf event support for recent Intel CPUs as well as initial AMD Zen 5 processor support.

The KVM changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel were merged a few days ago for this important piece to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.45 is now available as the newest version of this high performance JVM for Java applications.

Last week the main SoC/platform updates were sent in for Linux 6.10 that included more ARM-based handheld game consoles and other new Arm devices from ASUS wireless routers to set-top boxes to enabling various SoCs. This week a secondary set of updates were submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.

Box64 is out as the newest version of this Linux user-space x86_64 emulator for running on ARM64 Linux devices. There is also an updated version of Box86 too for that x86 32-bit version on ARM.