Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

One of the recent change proposals for the in-development Fedora 39 is to ship systemd's mkosi-initrd as a modern and superior alternative to Dracut for constructing initrds.

In development for several years now has been TrenchBoot as a framework for creating security engines to perform system launch integrity actions. This boot-time integrity framework continues advancing and this past week Oracle engineers posted their latest patches for the Linux kernel in providing dynamic launch support.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc1 that also marks the end of the merge window for the exciting Linux 6.4 cycle.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used, open-source bootable RAM testing software. In February marked memtest86+ 6.10 with UEFI Secure Boot signing and other new features. Out today is now memtest86+ 6.20 where a driving focus for this release is on improving support for older hardware.

FEX-Emu 2305 has been released, the open-source project continuing to work on x86_64 atop 64-bit ARM (AArch64) emulation support for being able to enjoy more games on ARM Linux and other software not otherwise natively available.

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors.

Going back years there has been patches for allowing the Linux x86_64 kernel to build as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code to further enhance the system security. Antgroup engineers most recently have been tackling the Linux x86_64 PIE support and last week sent out a new patch series.

Intel Shaodw Stack support was submitted for Linux 6.4 at the start of the merge window but now with this two-week merge window drawing to a close, it hasn't been pulled yet and Linus Torvalds raised technical issues with the proposed patches that now jeopardize its arrival this cycle.

While the Linux 6.4 merge window is closing this weekend, today on the last full day of the period is Jens Axboe submitting pipe FMODE_NOWAIT support as what he's described as a big performance and efficiency improvement.

One of the missing RISC-V features now in place for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is system hibernation / suspend-to-disk support.

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs.

While these days Linus Torvalds is mostly dealing with herding new code into the Linux kernel and being a gate keeper rather than actively developing new kernel code himself, for the in-development Linux 6.4 he's found himself doing a bit of coding.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham shared that key KDE developers are currently in Germany for an in-person Plasma 6.0 development sprint.

Today's Steam client beta will be a delight for some Linux gamers with the Steam client finally recognizing the GNOME and KDE desktop global scaling factor for text sizing.

For those that haven't yet watched the AMD openSIL presentation from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague from April, the most interesting takeaway was deserving of its own article... AMD openSIL is planned to eventually replace the well known AGESA and that it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack -- just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned but will support all AMD processors.

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward.

Going back to mid-2022 AMD engineers have been working on Virtual NMI support with SVM for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an efficiency optimization. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the AMD VNMI support has been merged.

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support.

Chinese tech company Loongson continues working on improving the upstream Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired domestic CPU architecture. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is another batch of optimizations and implementing more kernel functionality for the LoongArch CPU architecture.

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media.

Dav1d as the open-source AV1 video decoder developed as part of the VideoLAN project is out with a new minor feature release.

A new set of patches were posted today to enable cluster scheduling for x86 hybrid CPUs. In turn thos latest attempt at cluster scheduling for modern Core CPUs of Alder Lake and newer is yielding some small performance benefits over the current code.

Merged today to LLVM 17 Git is now recognizing -std=c++23 rather than just -std=c++2b for the Clang compiler now that C++23 has been deemed technically complete.

It's been just under two years since Amazon's Lumberyard game engine was spun into the Open 3D Engine and the Open 3D Foundation established under the Linux Foundation. Today the project is celebrating its newest open-source game engine update with Open 3D Engine 23.05.

X.Org members have approved of the X.Org Foundation letting the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) become its fiscal sponsor.

Going back to 2016 Intel began working on MIPI SoundWire support for Linux and now in 2023, AMD has joined the party with their initial AMD SoundWire support driver landing in the mainline kernel.

The printk code changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window and it's notable not for what is in the pull request but rather what is still outstanding.

At the end of last year AMD's GPUOpen group released the Render Pipeline Shaders "RPS" SDK for graphics applications and engines leveraging Direct3D 12 or Vulkasn as an open-source render graph framework. On Wednesday the Render Pipeline Shaders SDK 1.1 was released and is complemented by Linux support.

Following this week's release of the Chrome 113 web browser with faster AV1 encoding, Google engineers have promoted Chrome 114 to their beta channel.

Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.

While many Linux distributions look at Btrfs or F2FS when evaluating new root file-system options or even something like OpenZFS, in the case of Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution only this month have they even gotten to supporting XFS as a root file-system option.

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

VK_KHR_present_wait is an extension originally started by Keith Packard working for Valve on improving the Linux graphics stack. The VK_KHR_present_wait extension allows for waiting for present operations to complete and can be used for monitoring/pacing the application by managing the number of images not yet presented. This Vulkan extension had been supported by Mesa Vulkan drivers under X.Org and now is being enabled for Wayland environments too.

Back in March Framework Laptop announced an AMD Ryzen upgradeable laptop model but were initially light on details. Today they've revealed more information on this forthcoming product as well as opening up pre-orders.

Raspberry Pi has released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS as their Debian Linux based distribution currently built atop the Debian 11 "Bullseye" base.

One of the most exciting open-source software announcements so far this year has been around AMD openSIL for providing open-source CPU silicon initialization that works with the likes of Coreboot. The video from the AMD openSIL announcement in Prague is now available for those interested in learning more about this AMD open-source firmware effort.

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 23.04, the "Lunar Lobster", Ubuntu 23.10 development is now officially opened under the "Mantic Minotaur" codename.

The input driver updates were merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window.

To help facilitate the exploration of the Rust programming language for Linux storage purposes within the kernel, Samsung engineer Andreas Hindborg has published a null block driver written in this memory-safe programming language.

Debian's APT packaging tool that is also used by downstreams like Ubuntu has begun seeing initial support for "snapshots" introduced.