Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 7 with improved Linux support, better performance, and many new features throughout this Microsoft platform stack.

For those working on RISC-V software development on bare metal hardware, the in-development LLVM Clang 16 compiler has added support for allowing "-mtune=native" and "-mcpu=native" to work properly on this CPU ISA.

While the VGA_Switcheroo has long been part of the Linux kernel for laptops with hybrid (dual GPU) graphics for switching between the GPUs on platforms with a hardware mux switch, this current API has been found to be ineffective for the latest laptops like those with "NVIDIA Advanced Optimus" support. Thus NVIDIA is working on and proposing a new Linux user-space API around dynamic mux switching.

The Khronos Group that is known as the standards body behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, OpenXR, and other industry APIs announced that their next API will be called Kamaros.

Linux kernel developers are looking at deprecating and ultimately removing the SLOB memory allocator.

In addition to Fedora 38 looking at creating Phosh images for mobile devices, Fedora developers now have clearance to go ahead and overhaul how their Fedora Linux live images are assembled.

Intel today published their "20221108" CPU microcode collection alongside announcing various security disclosures for the quarter. Fortunately on the CPU microcode side, the changes are all focused on functional issues.

Over the past three years one of Intel's many promising open-source software projects has been the Rust-written Cloud Hypervisor. Cloud Hypervisor started as just a modern, security-focused, cloud-centric Rust VMM hypervisor for modern hardware/software. It began as just one of many open-source software projects at Intel but last year was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella while Intel continues to be a major contributor to the project. Coming as a bit of a surprise today is AMD announcing they have joined the Cloud Hypervisor project.

It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience. Separately, a change proposal is expected for also introducing a Fedora Linux image with KDE Plasma Mobile.

Back in 2019 NVIDIA open-sourced the PhysX 4.1 SDK and was working on a PhysX 5.0 open-source code drop while we haven't heard anything more on the matter in the past two years. Coming out this morning as a surprise is the NVIDIA PhysX 5.1 SDK open-source release.

New to the upcoming Mesa 22.3 release is Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa drivers. Rusticl supports OpenCL 3.0, handles OpenCL images and other features, works with multiple drivers, and is modern and maintained. Already among Mesa developers is a discussion that has begun around removing the older "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D implementation once Rusticl has firmly hit parity with that older, unmaintained state tracker.

It's been a long time since there has been much in the way of notable Nouveau DRM driver changes merged to the Linux kernel for improving the open-source NVIDIA graphics support. Fortunately, that is changing with Linux 6.2 set to receive a rather big update.

Since the Linux 5.19 kernel there have been many reports on Twitter, Reddit, or forums, and elsewhere over open-source AMD Radeon driver users experiencing crashes that often then appear in the kernel log around fences timing out. A fix for this show-stopping bug for AMD gamers looks like it will be coming to the Linux 6.2 kernel.

Towards the end of October there finally came about a patch series fleshing out the "accel" subsystem for the Linux kernel in preparing this new subsystem/framework that builds atop the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code and is designed for all the up and coming AI accelerator drivers for the kernel. Given the number of accelerator drivers from different vendors eyeing mainline kernel adoption, this new compute accelerator framework is quickly being formed.

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that was started earlier this year and has been progressing nicely the past few months is starting to see work now on its own shader compiler where as up to this point has been relying on existing Nouveau Mesa code for code generation.

Texinfo as the GNU typesetting syntax and the project's preferred documentation format is out with a major update.

Upstream Coreboot has phased out support for older AMD 14h / 15h / 16h series processors and associated motherboards.

There has long been plans for supporting the Vulkan API with the Blender 3D modelling open-source software but there has been a lack of developers working on it. Fortunately, things are starting to (slowly) come together on Vulkan enablement for Blender.

With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX having been announced last week and set to ship on 13 December, it's down to crunch time for ensuring that the open-source Linux driver support is in shape. Unlike on the Windows side where it's just expected of the user to navigate to AMD.com and download a convenient driver installer, on Linux that's not exactly the case. AMD will likely have their Radeon Software for Linux driver package on their website but that is limited in scope to their few supported enterprise/LTS Linux distributions supported, while most gamers/enthusiasts will be left wondering about the Linux kernel and Mesa versioning requirements.

An ugly hack within the Linux kernel that has been in mainline for over three years has been called out. Due to a buggy X.Org Server / xf86-video-modesetting DDX, the Linux kernel has been imposing different behavior on whether a process starts with "X" and in turn disable the atomic mode-setting support.

With next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs the integrated graphics are set to have native HDMI 2.1 display capabilities. Intel's open-source Linux kernel driver has begun those HDMI 2.1 preparations and sent out today were early patches for enabling HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL).

Intel compiler engineers continue being very busy working to land as much of the new CPU feature support as they can into GCC 13 for what is the next annual compiler release that will debut as GCC 13.1 in the early months of 2023.

Debuting on Sunday was Meson 0.64 as the newest version of this open-source build system that is increasingly being used by a variety of software projects for its speed, good cross-platform support, and overall feature set compared to alternatives.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc4 as the latest weekly test release for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel.

Future Intel CPUs and some existing processors via a microcode update will support a new feature called the Asynchronous EXit (AEX) notification mechanism to help with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave security. Patches for the Linux kernel are pending for implementing this Intel AEX Notify support with capable processors.

Along with the likes of OBS Studio adding NVENC AV1 support for enjoying GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the widely-used FFmpeg library has merged its support for NVIDIA NVENC AV1 video encoding.

Last month Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede warned that old and "weird" laptops could see broken backlight controls with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel. He issued a call for testing and as a result was provided valuable feedback that led to some new fixes now on the way. But there still is more work ahead and he's requested further testing by Linux laptop users to ensure the reworked backlight handling is in good shape.

Made public earlier this year was Spectre-BHB / BHI as a speculative execution vulnerability similar to Spectre V2 and affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. At the time Neoverse N2 / N1 / V1 and older cores like Cortex-A15 / A57 / A72 were known to be vulnerable and required software mitigations. The upcoming AmpereOne is also vulnerable to Spectre-BHB and has a patch now on its way to the Linux kernel for mitigating this Spectre class vulnerability.

"BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY" is on the way for the Linux 6.2 kernel for dealing with some issues that originally turned up within Facebook's data centers where they were seeing routine out-of-space transaction aborts. With BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY, Btrfs will try harder to avoid aborted transactions when running out of space.

As an enhancement to the out-of-the-box Linux kernel in its default x86_64 configuration, it was being eyed to enable Indirect Branch Tracking by default. That change to enable IBT by default has been picked up by TIP's x86/core branch, thus putting it on deck as material for submitting with next month's Linux 6.2 merge window.

LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit.

AMD on Friday submitted a new round of patches for AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates they have ready for the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle.

This summer AMD began posting Linux kernel patches for Quality of Service "QoS" features with new AMD CPUs. Sent out on Friday were the newest iteration of these QoS extension patches around SMBA and BMEC with these features likely premiering on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors.

It's Saturday morning and that means there is a new weekly blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham about the prominent desktop changes that occurred this week.

A Friday patch series reveals a new security feature with Zen 4 previously not documented: Automatic IBRS.

On the same day as new GCC compiler patches for next-generation processors coming out for those wares that are more than one year out, the GNU Compiler Collection dropped a remnant from Intel's past: the Many Integrated Core "MIC" architecture support with Xeon Phi for offloading.

A patch on its way to the mainline Linux kernel tunes Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake P mobile processors to have slightly lower power consumption out-of-the-box to help with battery life and thermal characteristics.

Stemming from the recent discussion of Intel's open-source Linux driver for Arc Graphics not yet running on POWER, another rather interesting support caveat was also raised. It turns out updating the GSC firmware for Arc Graphics hardware currently requires the Intel Management Engine (ME) functionality, which basically limits the graphics card firmware updating in turn to systems with Intel CPUs. (Update: See end of article.)

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" will finally see its formal launch in January as recently revealed by Intel, it will then be succeeded down the road by Emerald Rapids. Succeeding Emerald Rapids will then be Granite Rapids to which there is now an initial GCC compiler enablement patch posted. Granite Rapids won't be out until at least well into 2024 while fortunately they have already begun their compiler enablement work to ensure that new CPU instructions and other capabilities are in place well ahead of launch.

BOLT as the Facebook/Meta-developed tech for optimizing binaries in the name of greater performance by optimizing the code layout was merged to mainline LLVM at the start of the year. Now as we approach the end of the year BOLT is getting a bit of a promotion with being flipped on by default for Linux x86_64 and AArch64 test releases.

Microsoft has issued a big update to their in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, with a few new packages introduced as well as various updates to existing packages and other OS modifications.