Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Qualcomm and their partners at Linaro have been busy working on the Linux support for the Snapdragon X Elite as the high-end Arm SoC beginning to roll-out for laptops. The latest Snapdragon X Elite upstreaming is Embedded DisplayPort and DisplayPort support for the Snapdragon X Elite.

There's a lot of file-system activity going on for the Linux 6.10 merge window: Bcachefs safety improvements, better OCFS2 write performance, continued XFS online repair, and even a "mail-in merge request" from prison for ReiserFS. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has also seen some new feature work this cycle and has now been merged.

André Zwing continues hacking on the Hangover project as a means of running Windows applications on AArch64 Linux by leveraging Wine and pairing it with emulators like QEMU, FEX, or Box64. Besides the initial AArch64/ARM64 focus, Hangover can be important for bring Windows game/application on Linux support eventually to other architectures like POWER and RISC-V.

While GCC 14 recently debuted as stable in the form of GCC 14.1, for those relying on the GCC 13 compiler that debuted last year there is now a new point release available with many bug fixes.

In addition to the CXL updates for Linux 6.10 that were sent in last week, the PCI subsystem updates this week bring a notable addition for Compute Express Link (CXL) devices.

The Qt Company today released Qt 6.7.1 as the first point release for the cross-platform Qt 6.7.1 toolkit. Since releasing Qt 6.7 just under two months ago, they have fixed more than 400 bugs.

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Nova as a new, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver as the eventual successor to the Nouveau kernel driver and is designed around NVIDIA's GPU System Processor (GSP) thus making the driver relevant for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer. Today they posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series of the Nova driver and Rust DRM abstractions.

Intel previously indicated that Lunar Lake processors would launch by the end of 2024 and leading to anticipation of a Q4 launch... Intel today announced that Lunar Lake will actually launch in Q3.

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window. The platform-drivers-x86 changes continue to primarily revolve around x86 Intel/AMD laptops but also some other desktop/platform drivers. Now in Linux 6.10 there is also a new "ARM64" sub-section of the platform drivers.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of the newest Fedora desktop ISO spin: Fedora Miracle.

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed.

It was just earlier this month that AMD Linux kernel graphics driver patches appeared for introducing a new ISP hardware block for Image Signal Processing with new AMD APUs. Already the AMDGPU ISP firmware has appeared in linux-firmware.git indicating that this "ISP" block may be coming in hardware quite soon if not already quietly found within some products.

It's not often having anything to write about on the Oracle Cluster File-System v2 (OCFS2), but with Linux 6.10 it's seeing a rather significant performance optimization.

As a small information heads up, the Linux 6.10 kernel will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time to the kernel log as a little helper.

Intel Compute Runtime 24.17.29377.6 is now available as the latest routine update to this open-source GPU compute stack used by the company's integrated and discrete graphics products for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute capabilities.

While Fwupd developers are working toward the Fwupd 2.0 release, out this morning is Fwupd 1.9.20 as the newest point release for this open-source solution for firmware updating on Linux that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet today sent out his feature pull request of all the new file-system code that is ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result.

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems.

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR.

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior.

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

SUSE/openSUSE has been busy crafting a next-gen Linux installer that is a web-based installer and originally known as D-Installer but now going by the name Agama.

The Linux Network File System (NFS) server code (NFSD) is seeing a new Netlink protocol introduced in Linux 6.10 as part of laying the groundwork for the new "nfsdctl" utility.

Niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM and heavy on the animations/effects. Out this morning is Niri 0.1.6 as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues providing the resources for various new GNOME desktop development initiatives. There are various efforts underway for new features and refinements with GNOME 47 in September and a renewed emphasis around GNOME OS.

The performance events updates were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. This pull adds support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and other new Intel CPU instructions to the x86 instruction decoder.

While machine check exception (MCE) events tend to be uncommon, a change made by Intel engineers is accommodating the ability in the Linux kernel to store more machine check records for "when things go seriously wrong" on increasingly high core count servers.

KDE development remains very busy ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 desktop release.

Wine 9.9 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms.

Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware.

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience.

OpenSUSE is the first major Linux distribution to package up and offer Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit within its package repository.

FSCRYPT is the file-system encryption framework within the Linux kernel for supporting optional encryption on file-systems like EXT4, F2FS, and others. With Linux 6.10 an optimization is coming for enhancing the performance of opening files on file-systems supporting FSCRYPT-based encryption but when the files are unencrypted.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem development continues to be led by Intel engineers and with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel there are yet more features in tow.

For the GCC 14 compiler release is the deprecation of the Xeon Phi targets. With Intel Knights Landing and Knights Mill being end-of-life at Intel, they are working to do away with the GNU Compiler Collection support. A patch has been posted to drop the Xeon Phi ISAs with GCC 15.

The EROFS and Btrfs file-systems saw their feature patches merged as part of the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window.

The year-long effort to removal the sysctl sentinel for clearing bloat from the kernel and allowing faster build times should be crossing the finish line in Linux 6.10.

The GNOME project has now solidified their release schedule for the current GNOME 47 development cycle: GNOME 47.0 should be out on 18 September.

Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government.

A patch has been posted by Samsung engineers for implementing Flexible Data Placement (FDP) support within the Linux kernel's NVMe driver code. NVMe FDP allows for the host system to have more control over the placement of logical blocks on the storage device.

As more positive indications around AMD's OpenSIL effort for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA, both AMD and Supermicro are now collaborating with the Open-Source Firmware Foundation. Supermicro has also publicly shown off a platform with OpenSIL+Coreboot and is said to be exploring OpenBMC for future hardware.

Following last year's release of PipeWire 1.0 for managing audio and video streams on the Linux desktop and proving itself a capable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, among other uses, PipeWire 1.2 is nearing release. Out today is the first release candidate of the upcoming PipeWire 1.2.

Coming as a surprise, longtime Linux developer Oded Gabbay announced he's left Intel / Habana Labs and is therefore stepping down from the maintainer role of the Linux kernel drivers for the Intel Xe DRM driver and more notably the Habana Labs accelerator driver that he's maintained from the start.

The open-source Mesa driver developers employed by Valve for working on the Linux graphics stack have begun preparing the RADV Vulkan driver and the ACO compiler back-end for the upcoming "GFX12" graphics IP for next-generation RDNA4.

Intel's Image Processing Unit (IPU) IP has been a cause for concern in recent years as the lack of proper upstream open-source driver support has led Linux users running into troubles making use of MIPI camera sensors on modern laptops. Finally with Linux 6.10 the Intel IPU6 driver is being upstreamed into the media subsystem.

While most of you have not thought about or used Firewire (IEEE-1394) in years, there still are some legacy digital video cameras and some professional audio devices relying on the interface. Last year saw a new Firewire maintainer step-up for the Linux kernel after the code had fallen dormant. The plans by that new maintainer, Takashi Sakamoto, are to maintain Linux's Firewire support through 2029. He's continuing to do a good job with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel bringing the latest batch of Firewire enhancements.

Besides Linus Torvalds examining various elements of code he's merging and build testing it on his AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation and now also testing more on ARM64 with Ampere Altra, he does these days still believe in "dogfooding" and is in fact running the leading-edge Linux kernel code even during the merge window.