Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD has issued a formal announcement now for the ROCm 5.6 compute stack release that was already covered on Phoronix earlier today. In AMD's announcement of ROCm 5.6 though there is a tease of what's to come later this year...

For those that have been fans of System76's Thelio desktop computer cases but prefer building your own systems, System76 today officially launched their "Nebula" line of PC cases.

There's been hopes of seeing the GIMP 3.0 release in 2023 or at least release candidates. GIMP developers recently finished a week-long meet-up and it's looking like they may be on track for at least beginning the GIMP 3.0 release candidate phase this year. GIMP 3.0 has remained quite elusive and in the works for the past decade as the much anticipated port to GTK3 and a host of other enhancements to this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Linaro engineers have been working out support for the latest-generation Qualcomm Adreno 700 series graphics processors found in the newest Snapdragon SoCs. Published on Wednesday were the initial MSM DRM kernel driver patches for bringing up the A700 series open-source graphics support.

It was just one month ago that ROCm 5.5.1 debuted while overnight AMD has promoted ROCm 5.6 to stable with more improvements and a particular focus on enhancing the AI capabilities for Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators. The ROCm 5.6 release also arrives just two weeks after AMD CEO Lisa Su re-affirmed their support for ROCm and working with the community to further enhance it.

DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has sent out the big batch of feature updates to this collection of open-source graphics/display drivers for Linux 6.5.

OpenCV 4.8 was released yesterday as the newest feature update to this leading open-source computer vision (CV) library.

Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window with new hardware support and some crypto API enhancements.

For months there have been rumors whether Intel would cancel Meteor Lake-S desktop processors and leave next-generation Core desktop CPUs solely to a Raptor Lake Refresh or rumors as well Meteor Lake-S would be just for lower-end Core i3 and Core i5 level processors. Whatever Intel ends up doing, their Linux engineers continue pushing Meteor Lake-S related code into the Linux kernel.

NVIDIA CUDA 12.2 is out today and while it's just an update to the CUDA 12 series, it's actually quite an exciting release.

While Intel Xeon server processors have supported sub-NUMA clustering (SNC) for a while, HPE SGI UV servers with SNC enabled haven't worked under Linux... But with Linux 6.5 that is changing.

The sound subsystem updates were sent in today for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel merge window.

Nearly a decade ago when there was more hope for the MIPS open-source ecosystem and the initial growth of lower-cost single board computers the MIPS Creator CI20 was launched by Imagination Tech. It wasn't too successful and MIPS development has since reached the end of the road, but finally with Linux 6.5 is the Bluetooth and WiFi on this MIPS single board computer going to finally be supported by the mainline kernel.

Well, here is something nifty being worked on by Oracle. Oracle engineers have been developing "bpftune" as a new always-on, automatic tuning of Linux systems -- in particular, the many different Linux kernel tunables available and this tuning system leverages the kernel's Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) observability features to carry out its work.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window. Most notable is NVIDIA contributing a Linux kernel driver six years late for their SHIELD controller.

Microsoft's latest contribution to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack is enhancing their Direct3D 12 driver to support AV1 video encoding with the VA-API interface.

Ted Ts'o has submitted all the EXT4 feature changes for the Linux 6.5 merge window. EXT4 this round is seeing various clean-ups, bug fixes, and other enhancements but there is one performance optimization worth calling attention to.

The in-development Linux 6.5 kernel is shifting to initializing the x86 floating-point unit (FPU) initialization later in the boot process as part of a broader effort for trying to clean-up the Linux kernel boot process at least on x86/x86_64 systems.

"Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline [Assembly code]," as a nice quote of the day as Linus Torvalds explained after he took on improving upon a performance optimization patch that was proposed for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window.

The power management and ACPI feature changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel. As usual, it's most interesting on the Intel and AMD fronts with the power management changes for this kernel that will be released as stable in August.

Ingo Molnar submitted today the scheduler updates destined for the Linux 6.5 kernel. Most noticeable with the CPU scheduler changes are enhancing SMP (Hyper Threading) load balancing for Intel Core CPUs of a hybrid design with a mix of P and E cores.

Blender 3.6 is out today as the latest exciting update for this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software. Exciting with Blender 3.6 is adding Intel hardware ray-tracing support when making use of Arc Graphics. AMD graphics cards on Windows can also enjoy HIP ray-tracing but sadly isn't supported yet for Linux.

Processing the vmlinux.o object with objtool has been the most memory intensive step of the Linux kernel build process. Prior patches have already worked to reduce this objtool memory use while compiling the Linux kernel and a big patch series now set for Linux 6.5 is set to sharply reduce the maximum heap use.

Bcachefs hopes to finally merge in Linux 6.5 while for those wanting a mature Linux file-system with all the bells and whistles, Btrfs is a good candidate worth considering. With Linux 6.5 there is a continuation of the recent Btrfs trend around performance improvements.

ReactOS is the open-source OS that's striving for Microsoft Windows software and driver binary compatibility that is 25 years in the making. ReactOS has been making steady progress while still considered in alpha form. Most of the ReactOS successes and user tinkering has been with the 32-bit build of the OS while they have been making steady progress recently on the x86_64 (x64) port.

In addition to yesterday bringing EDAC support for AMD Zen 4 client CPUs, the set of RAS "Reliability, Availability and Serviceability" updates for the Linux 6.5 kernel have separately brought initial GPU/accelerator support.

The work originating in late 2021 for bringing up secondary CPU cores in parallel at boot-time to help shorten boot/reboot times for large core count servers has finally landed with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture code has seen some clean-ups and support for new Arm ISA features with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

If your dream is to work for Valve Software, getting experienced with the open-source Linux graphics driver development niche seems to be a decent pathway. Besides Valve, all the big hardware companies are routinely looking for more Linux graphics driver developers as well.

Capping off an exciting first day of the Linux 6.5 merge window is a pull request seeking to land the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system into this next kernel version.

Upsetting many in the open-source community was Red Hat's announcement last week that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and publicly would be limited to the CentOS Stream sources. In turn this causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux moving forward. Red Hat today issued another blog post trying to address some of the criticism.

Faith Ekstrand today published a blog post outlining recent efforts around NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware developed namely by the Nouveau development community. Some recent highlights include:

For the past year and a half Red Hat engineers have been developing a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer and with the Fedora Workstation 39 release later this year they are looking at possibly switching to it by default.

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has merged support for VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, which is a highly sought after extension by game emulators and also important for DirectX over Vulkan layering efforts and more.

Back in April was the release of Slint 1.0 for this open-source, Rust-focused graphical toolkit formerly known as SixtyFPS. Today marks the release of Slint 1.1 as the first significant feature update after crossing the 1.0 milestone.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been submitted today on this first day of the Linux 6.5 merge window. Headlining the EDAC changes this cycle is bringing AMD Zen 4 client support.

Following yesterday's release of Linux 6.4, the FSFLA team has released GNU Linux-libre 6.4-gnu as the newest version of this downstream kernel that aims for "100% freedom" with removing any kernel remnants that depend upon non-free-software microcode/firmware or other binary blobs as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules.

Another exciting milestone has been reached on Mozilla's long journey of improving the native Wayland support for the Firefox web browser on Linux.

Among the early pull requests for the now-open Linux 6.5 merge window is the FS-VERITY pull for that support layer enabling file-systems to leverage transparent integrity and authenticity protections fr read-only files. The FS-VERITY updates for Linux 6.5 are helping to ease the upcoming XFS file-system support.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware without binary blobs has been quite active recently. There have been several new systems added recently, introducing support for shipping ROMs without CPU microcode included, and other changes. This latest wor has culminated into the Libreboot 20230625 release.

Vulkan 1.3.255 was quietly released prior to the weekend and brings with it a new cooperative matrix extension.

As expected Linux 6.4 is out today as stable as an on-time release following a relatively quiet cycle the past two months.

Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL implementation Rusticl for Gallium3D drivers has now added experimental FP16 to its feature set.

With Linux 6.4 expected for release today the Linux 6.5 merge window will then open. From my close monitoring of the many "-next" Git development branches along with some early pull requests already submitted, here is a look at some of the features that will likely be found in Linux 6.5 barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds himself.

Earlier this month I ran some fresh benchmarks of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan against RadeonSI. While Zink in general is already quite speedy and in good shape for most workloads, those tests uncovered some troubled spots and Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve has been diving into some of those issues with fixes. Another merge request is pending to deal with inefficiencies in the Mesa Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.11, Wine-Staging 8.11 is out this Sunday morning with 502 patches atop the upstream Wine code.

While the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler has been building the AArch64 and x86_64 mainline Linux kernel builds for quite some time, for those interested in China's LoongArch CPU architecture it's the latest target seeing work to enable compiling the Linux kernel under Clang.

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.