Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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.

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 stable, the AlmaLinux crew today announced AlmaLinux 9.4.

In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the "-O3" compiler optimization level rather than the "-O2" default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance.

The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier.

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November's FreeBSD 14.0 release.

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs.

Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015... Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine.

GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the "possibly last" GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it's looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday.

Intel's power management lead Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches recently for working out asymmetic CPU capacity on hybrid Core x86 systems.

Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics.

Mesa's Venus Vulkan driver has made cross-device functionality optional in order to enable QEMU support for this open-source driver for virtualized environments.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc7 kernel being released later today, some last minute pull requests for the week have enabled some new bits of hardware support where only new device IDs are necessary and thus safe to add at this late stage of Linux 6.9 development.

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.