Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD is hiring engineers to work on build and packaging of their "AMD Unified Linux Driver" to enhance the experience of deploying their packaged graphics driver stack -- including ROCm -- across different Linux distributions.

The Rust-written Redox OS operating system issued their May monthly status report to highlight the various improvements made to this original open-source OS.

Debian developer Luca Boccassi has begun working on systemd-boot support for using it as an alternative to the GRUB bootloader.

The Linux Mint project is out with its monthly newsletter that highlights recent progress made on this Ubuntu (and Debian) derived, desktop-focused Linux distribution. In May they worked out enhancements to Linux Mint's software manager and also continued working on optimizing their package archive hosting.

With the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel Eric Biggers of Google landed new AES-XTS implementations for much faster performance for Intel/AMD processors via new AES-NI + AVX, VAES + AVX2, VAES + AVX10/256, and VAES + AVX10/512 code paths. Biggers has since begun tackling even better AES-GCM encryption/decryption performance by leveraging a new code path to utilize AVX-512/AVX10 and/or VAES.

The latest feature work around Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) that is merged for the in-development GCC 15 compiler is supporting APX NF functionality for suppressing the update of status flags on arithmetic operations.

OpenCV 4.10 is out today as the newest version of the Open Computer Vision Library for this widely-used library with machine learning support, object detection, segmentation and recognition, motion video tracking, gesture recognition, and a variety of other features important for today's diverse workloads.

On Wednesday, 5 June, marks 20 years since I started Phoronix.com for covering the Linux hardware ecosystem! It's sure been a long and tough journey with more remarks I'll reserve for Wednesday, but given the two decade mark, there's a Phoronix Premium special for those wishing to mark the special occasion and help ensure the site's healthy continuance into the next decade.

Arguably most exciting out of AMD's slew of Computex 2024 announcements is finally making official the Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" processors built atop the new Zen 5 cores.

In addition to all of the AMD client-side news during Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024 (see AMD Ryzen 9000 Series and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series Mobile APUs), the AMD CEO also teased the upcoming 5th Gen EPYC processors. AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors are still on the way for releasing in H2'2024.

In addition to announcing the AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors powered by Zen 5, Lisa Su at Computex 2024 also announced the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series as the next-generation mobile processors powered by Zen 5 CPU cores while sporting RDNA 3.5 (also referred to as RDNA 3+ and RDNA3 refresh) integrated graphics and an XDNA 2 NPU.

At Computex 2024, AMD confirmed the Instinct MI325X will be released in Q4'2024 as the successor to the MI300X accelerator. Next year will be the AMD Instinct MI350 series based on the new CFNA 4 architecture. AMD is committing to an annual Instinct accelerator roadmap moving forward as they further up their AI game.

While the AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) details are arguably the most exciting aspect of Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024, over on the Radeon side is the announcement of the AMD Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot graphics card intended for compact workstations and Gen AI.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc2 with a busy week's worth of fixes.

Controversial free software developer Eric S Raymond has been spending a lot of time recently on the new Autodafe project as a means of free software projects from relying on Autotools. This "De-Autoconfiscation" has now led to the release of Autodafe 1.0 with the tool now being considered production-ready.

Now past the Linux 6.10 merge window, this week brought an initial batch of drm-misc-next changes submitted to the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem's DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.11 merge window opens up in July. The changes this week include a notable addition for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver and some improvements for the Intel iVPU driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU).

Ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc2 kerne weekly test release a few "x86/urgent" patches were submitted for addressing some fallout on Intel and AMD processors.

ASUS used Computex 2024 for announcing the ROG Ally X, the latest version of their handheld gaming console. The ASUS ROG Ally X continues to be powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC but now having more storage, faster RAM, a larger battery, updated controls, and other refinements.

When Steam on Linux debuted a decade ago it maintained around a 2% marketshare before receding and then beginning its long climb back up following the debut of Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux and then with the much anticipated Steam Deck handheld game console and the modern Arch-based SteamOS. Valve just published their May 2024 numbers for the Steam Survey and they indicate the Linux marketshare is finally back above 2%.

It's been another busy week with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack with continued preparations around enabling support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics (as well as continued RDNA3+ / RDNA 3.5 tuning).

As some more exciting news for upcoming Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake integrated graphics and Battlemage discrete GPUs, the latest open-source driver activity for Linux has confirmed Xe2 supporting native 64-bit integer arithmetic.

While the Gentoo Linux project recently established an AI policy to forbid contributions to the project made using any AI tools/assistance and NetBSD also came out with a similar policy against AI-generated code, the Debian project for now has no project-wide policy regarding AI.

May 2024 is now in the books with 285 original news articles written by your's truly last month along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. It was an interesting month with some fun new hardware launches, the Linux 6.10 merge window taking place, and other open-source software progress.

It's not too common for Intel to publish new CPU microcode updates outside of their "Patch Tuesday" regiment but that happened yesterday with a Friday night release of new CPU microcode although this time is limited to the Celeron and Pentium Silver families.

Expressed last week was a "major issue" from the GNOME Foundation side with regard to the Sovereign Tech Fund partnership for funding a number of useful improvements to the GNOME software stack just as Germany's STF has been doing to a number of other prominent open-source projects. While there still aren't many clear public details on this "major issue", a Friday night update from the GNOME side seems to indicate all is well and they are also embarking on additional development funding initiatives.

Vulkan 1.3.286 was released today with a handful of corrections/clarifications as well as one new extension.

Wine 9.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems.

The open-source Godot game engine has worked its way up to the Godot 4.3 Beta 1 milestone with some exciting achievements.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf released Dav1d 1.4.2 as the newest version of this speedy CPU-based AV1 video decoder. With this new dav1d 1.4.2 update are yet more performance optimizations for modern systems.

Intel engineer Noah Goldstein has landed another nice performance optimization in the GNU C Library "glibc" for benefiting newer Intel processors.

Right now when dealing with quirky/buggy touchscreens a C file needs to be manually manipulated and the Linux kernel recompiled. With a new "i2c_touchscreen_props" kernel command line option on its way to the mainline kernel, the process of overriding touchscreen properties is dramatically easier for those dealing with Linux on touchscreen-enabled devices.

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet sent in a batch of file-system fixes on Thursday for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. In that pull request he teased features that are set to arrive with the Linux 6.11 kernel later in the summer.

Last month we began seeing AMDGPU driver firmware files published for the rumored "RDNA3+" hardware as an RDNA3 refresh (also as "RDNA 3.5") for upcoming APUs. More firmware files have now landed public in linux-firmware.git for these forthcoming RDNA3 refresh products.

If the recent release of Flowblade 2.16 video editor wasn't of interest to you due to being GTK-based software, the Qt/KDE-aligned Kdenlive video editor is out this week with its Kdenlive 24.05 feature release.

Simon Ser today released Wayland 1.23 for this core Wayland code that brings some minor enhancements, bug fixes, and Wayland protocol clarifications.

Given Microsoft's recent BUILD conference, Microsoft has announced a number of sizable updates to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

It's been more than two years now talking about the Anaconda installer for Fedora/RHEL shifting to a web-based UI. Going back to Fedora 37 have been previews and plans for getting this modern user interface up to parity but it's been a long road. With repeated delays, there's at least one more delay: the Anaconda web UI was just shifted from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42.

Similar to the real-time kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced today the availability of their new real-time "RT" kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. But like with the existing Ubuntu RT kernels, this real-time support is limited to Ubuntu Pro subscriptions.

The Rust-written Servo web engine as a reminder was started as a Mozilla project but then abandoned and now developed by multiple organizations as part of Linux Foundation Europe. The Servo project has put out a new status update that highlights the work accomplished in recent weeks.

Yocto 5.0 LTS has been released as the newest version from the Yocto Project that is popular for organizations assembling their own embedded/IoT-minded custom Linux distributions. The Linux Foundation also announced today that Boeing has become a Platinum Member with Yocto.

It's rare for an advanced media briefing to involve representatives from both AMD and Intel, but that happened yesterday. AMD and Intel along with Broadcom have formed the Ultra Accelerator Link "UALink" as a new open standard they are hoping to use to take on NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink interface.

The Intel Battlemage discrete graphics support is beginning to come together for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack as the successor to DG2/Alchemist. In addition to all the Xe2 work for what's found with Lunar Lake, more Battlemage Linux kernel and user-space driver work has been appearing recently. The milestone crossed today is the initial Battlemage "BMG" platform support being merged for the Mesa 24.2 OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

As part of Intel's Flexible Return Event Delivery (FRED), Intel open-source software engineers are now working on improving Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) source reporting for the Linux kernel.

Building off the PowerVR kernel driver merged in Linux 6.8 and PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.0 that are both focused on Imagination's newer PowerVR Rogue architecture, Google engineers are working on enabling open-source driver support for the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 as found within the MediaTek MT8173 SoC.

Last year the KDAB consulting firm typically associated with Qt work published KDGpu as a thin Vulkan wrapper to make it easier leveraging this graphics API. Out today is KDGpu v0.5 with many improvements to this Vulkan wrapper.

While VKD3D-Proton that is bundled with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) is the most common source for mapping Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API for Windows games on Linux, Wine's VKD3D upstream continues to be developed. Out today is VKD3D 1.12 as the newest feature release for this open-source D3D12-on-Vulkan implementation.

It was two months ago today that an urgent security alert was issued over XZ being hit by malicious code that turned out to be a backdoor within liblzma added by a bad actor that worked his way into XZ co-maintainership. Longtime XZ developer Lasse Collin is back at the helm and has been auditing the prior XZ commits and today released XZ 5.6.2 with the backdoor completely removed.

A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.

Framework is out today with some exciting announcements from lowering the price of the existing Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 series SoC to announcing a new Framework Laptop 13 powered by Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and having a new 2.8K display option for this modular/upgradeable laptop shipping this summer.

Arm today announced the latest products in the Armv9 CPU portfolio: the Cortex-X925 as their "ultimate performance" processor and the Cortex-A725 as their processor option for sustained performance.

QuestDB 8.0 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source time-series database. QuestDB continues to cater to high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries so it can handle use-cases from financial data to IoT sensors. With today's QuestDB 8.0 release, it's even faster.

KDE's Eco group announced today "Opt Green" as a new initiative for sustainable software.

One of the newest open-source projects in-development by Ubuntu maker Canonical is a new C# written program called Flamenco.

The AMD shader compiler "ACO" alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has seen another batch of changes merged in preparations for next-generation Radeon RDNA4 GPUs.

Coming up on my radar today is a commit made to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adjusting the loop alignment with Intel's generic tuning path. In turn this should address "some random performance penalty in benchmarks" with coping better around cache lines.

The past year there's been a big Linux kernel patch series in the work by Intel to improve Sub-NUMA Clustering "SNC" support so it behaves well with Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel hardware. Hopefully that work will soon be ready for mainlining in the Linux kernel while this week brought the 19th revision to those patches.

Flowblade 2.16 is out today as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editor.