Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Added to the Linux kernel back in 2020 was a community-written Corsair power supply driver for exposing various sensor data that their higher-end PSUs make available via a USB interface. This reverse-engineered "corsair-psu" driver has continued to be improved upon and adding support for newer Corsair PSUs. A new patch out this weekend extends the corsair-psu driver for handling newer 2022~2023 model power supplies.

With it having been another smooth week so far in the upstream kernel world, it's looking like Linus Torvalds is likely to promote Linux 6.4 tomorrow rather than going ahead with an extra release candidate. As such, here's a reminder about what makes Linux 6.4 a great summer-time kernel upgrade.

With the latest Mesa 23.2 code as of Friday there is now a rather significant performance optimization for Intel's graphics driver stack that really helps out Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist along with upcoming Meteor Lake graphics. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example, was found to be 11% faster now with this single driver change and other Vulkan apps/games benefiting as well.

The KDE Plasma 6 desktop is becoming more "livable" and each week new features continue to be implemented. This week was another lively phase of development toward Plasma 6.0.

Similar to LLVM Clang 17 adding -std=c++26 support as the open-source compiler begins work on the next major revision of the C++ programming language, the GCC 14 compiler code has now also added the -std=c++26 compiler option.

A new bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for enjoying Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms.

Earlier this year Intel software engineers published a blazing fast AVX-512 sorting library that was initially picked up by Numpy where it netted them 10~17x faster sorts. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 2.0 with even more AVX-512 features in place and additional sorting algorithms added.

The Firewalld open-source firewall daemon has been in development since 2011 while only two years ago did it reach the Firewalld 1.0 milestone. Thus it was a bit surprising to find Firewalld 2.0 being released today.

The Fedora Sericea and Sway spins are eyeing the possibility of shipping without the xorg-x11 packages for being the first X.Org-less desktop spins in the Fedora Linux world.

Among the early pull requests already submitted for the Linux 6.5 merge window that is expected to open next week are the Linux NFS server (NFSD) changes. Notable this cycle is the NFSD and RDMA server code having better NUMA awareness.

SDDM as the QML-based X11 and Wayland display manager commonly used on KDE systems and elsewhere is finally out with a new release.

Merged this week into the GNOME Mutter compositor codebase is what should be a beneficial optimization for those enjoying Linux gaming under the GNOME Wayland session.

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance.

FLAC 1.4.3 is out today as the first update to this Xiph.Org royalty-free, lossless audio codec since last October.

A change proposal that hopes to take place for Fedora 39 would make it easier to have an optionally GRUB-free system by instead performing a clean install with systemd-boot for booting on EFI platforms.

Wasmer is an open-source WebAssembly implementation that is focused on running sandboxed applications everywhere thanks to the power of WASM while being as performant as traditional native applications. Today marks the availability of Wasmer 4.0 as another step forward for this project.

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball.

Going back a few years there has been experimental development around a Vulkan back-end for KDE's KWin compositor while now a road-map is being formalized for actually bringing Vulkan support to fruition.

Sent in today for the mainline Linux kernel -- days ahead of the expected Linux 6.4 stable release -- is a crash fix for just-released AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops.

Xonotic 0.8.6 is out as the latest update to this long-running, open-source first person shooter game.

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 merge window expected to open up next week, a patch providing sound quirks for the ASUS ROG Ally's CS35l41 audio is now queued in the sound subsystem's for-next branch.

Following the recent AMD IOMMU v2 page table work and other IOMMU improvements as part of AMD's effort to further enhance the Linux virtualization support on EPYC server platforms, the latest patches out of AMD as of yesterday are for wokring on hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU (AMD HW-vIOMMU).

PoCL 4.0 is out as the latest major update to this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that started out as an OpenCL-on-CPU effort while with time has expanded its sights beyond just OpenCL on processors to providing OpenCL on other accelerators/devices via leveraging different LLVM target back-ends. With PoCL 4.0, there is also now an Intel oneAPI Level Zero driver for using this OpenCL stack on Intel graphics processors.

The Go 1.21 release candidate is out today and it's interesting on the performance front plus a few language additions like min / max / clear functions as well as further enhancing its standard library.

For those making use of the current Linux 6.3 stable series, Linux 6.3.9 is out today and it's particularly important if you make use of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel graphics driver.

Linux Mint as the popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu LTS releases and known for their Cinnamon desktop is out today with their 21.2 "Victoria" beta release for testing.

Red Hat announced today that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.

Introduced with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors are various new accelerators available on select SKUs or via the Intel On Demand offering. One of the initial challenges there though is the early accelerator software support limitations and many upstream open-source (or even just widespread) software not yet enabled to make use of these new accelerators. One of the improvements on that front has been Intel engineers working on an IAA crypto compression driver for the kernel so that the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator can be transparently accessible to kernel features making use of the crypto API.

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project.

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs.

The LLVM Clang 17 C/C++ compiler when shipping later this year will now use OpenMP 5.1 as the default version of this multi-processing programming API.

With today's release of SDL 2.28 it also marks the SDL2 library entering maintenance mode for this open-source software that's relied upon by Valve and many cross-platform games.

Another feature scheduled to be sent in for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window is introducing support for provisioning primitives for thinly provisioned storage with the Device Mapper (DM) code.

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is poised to add support for Qualcomm's Adreno 690 GPU to the open-source MSM kernel graphics/display driver. The A690 is notably used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) platform that in turn is what's found inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop and other hardware.

As another feature on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel cycle is the large extent counts feature of the XFS file-system no longer being treated as "experimental" but is now considered safe to deploy.

Patches being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window prepare initial support for DEXCR that is found in recent Power ISA specifications.

CPU microcode updates are commonly done in the name of security fixes and resolving functionality issues.. In recent years, CPU microcode updates have been a much more common -- and important -- occurrence. While all modern CPUs rely on microcode it's just a matter of whether the version used is baked into the hardware or an updated version loaded by the BIOS or OS at boot time, a "vocal minority" of users are unhappy with CPU microcode being included in Libreboot ROMs. Thus moving forward there will be alternative builds of Libreboot for different motherboards with the CPU microcode stripped out in the name of software freedom.

If your newer desktop motherboard has a NCT6799D Super I/O controller or one of the variants like NCT6799D-S, the Linux 6.5 kernel is set to introduce support for this ASIC in order to expose hardware sensor support under Linux.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is preparing to land async buffered write support into the Linux kernel as another performance win for this flash-optimized file-system.

Red Hat engineers are working to deal with Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) being too costly for mitigating Spectre V2 and Retbleed on older Intel Xeon Scalable processors. A new patch has been floated to disable IBRS when idle and is working out well at least for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 while isn't clear yet if it will be accepted into the upstream kernel.

SVT-AV1 1.6 is now available as the latest version for this leading CPU-based AV1 encoder that is now enjoying 30~40% faster performance with high quality presets.

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code.

While the Linux 6.5 merge window isn't opening for another week, Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the pull request of the new Rust kernel code destined for this next kernel cycle.

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors.