Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Linus Torvalds just declared the first release candidate of Linux 6.5 that also marks the end of new feature code being introduced for this cycle.

GIMP 2.99.16 is out this Sunday as the GIMP 3.0 release candidate finally nears.

The Hangover open-source project has been working on supporting Windows apps and games on other CPU architectures like AArch64 running Linux. RISC-V and POWER9 are other CPU architectures of interest for enabling Hangover support. Besides leveraging the Wine software, Hangover to date has relied on the QEMU emulator as part of the implementation while now they have begun integrating FEX support too.

The latest iteration of Intel's cluster scheduling support for x86 hybrid P/E-core CPUs were posted on Friday in seeking to enhance the performance of some workloads under Linux when running on recent Intel Core processors.

Today the Linux 6.5 merge window is expected to be closed and one of the lingering issues has been whether the BCacheFS file-system driver will be merged following its pull request having been finally sent in.

HarfBuzz 8.0 was released on Saturday as the newest feature release for this text shaping library used by many open-source software projects from GUI toolkits to desktop environments and other prominent applications.

Last month The RADV ray-tracing pipelines support was enabled by default but then later disabled for VanGogh APUs, notably the Steam Deck. Now though with the latest ray-tracing code in Mesa 23.2-devel the RADV driver is no longer blocking the support for VanGogh.

Last week all of the x86 platform driver feature updates were merged for the Linux 6.5 merge window which is wrapping up tomorrow.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has done a remarkable job on Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation written in Rust for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has another achievement under his belt: OpenCL subgroups are now in place for Mesa.

The Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel has received a fix to an issue that could lead to inadequate CPU frequency scaling behavior when running on a hybrid processor with E cores disable.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software has submitted the NTFS(3) file-system driver updates for the nearly-closed Linux 6.5 merge window.

KDE developers remain quite busy working on the Plasma 6.0 desktop development as well as making other enhancements and fixes to their open-source desktop stack.

While Solus is still working toward its new approach based on Serpent OS and other significant fundamental changes to the Linux distribution, shipping today is Solus 4.4 as the latest incremental update to this Linux distro popular with enthusiasts.

Wine 8.12 is available today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Meta has published the Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL) as a new cross-platform library to provide a single low-level interface that works atop native graphics APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to Apple's Metal.

A new system call found in Linux 6.5 is "cachestat" that allows user-space to query page cache statistics for a file in order to make more informed decisions.

In addition to Fedora 39 aiming to use the Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Workstation, shipping the latest and greatest open-source compiler toolchain components, enhance Linux gaming compatibility, eliminate Flathub filtering, and dozens of other improvements, there are also plans for a more mundane change: a colored bash prompt.

Ubuntu's NVIDIA Unified Device Architecture (UDA) driver package intended for GPU compute acceleration has enabled the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel driver support in their packages since the end of last year. Now with the new NVIDIA Enterprise Ready Driver "ERD" Ubuntu package hitting Ubuntu LTS users, they are also supporting the NVIDIA open GPU kernel driver option there.

As was anticipated, UEFI Unaccepted Memory support was successfully merged for Linux 6.5 to support this standard that's important with the likes of Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Page (SEV-SNP) backed virtual machines.

Hopefully by now all of you have moved off PS/2 mice and keyboards, but should you still have some old systems chugging along with PS/2 hardware, there are some improvements to find with the Linux 6.5 kernel currently under development.

AMD's GPUOpen team on Thursday released the newest version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" SDK for Linux and Windows developers.

The Linux 6.5 media subsystem updates were merged this week for the merge window that is wrapping up this weekend.

For those on the three-year-old GCC 10 compiler series, it's really time to move to a newer GNU Compiler Collection release for enjoying the latest language support, new hardware features, various optimizations, enhanced diagnostics, and more. But for those still bound to GCC 10 for whatever reason, GCC 10.5 was released today as one final update in the branch.

Out today is the first release candidate of systemd 254. This systemd update is another big feature release with new settings, new components, and many additions to existing systemd components. Plus there is some deprecations and breakage ahead for future releases.

If there wasn't enough Red Hat drama happening in recent weeks, the Red Hat Display Systems Team is now considering to implement privacy-preserving telemetry beginning with Fedora Workstation 40.

It looks like the first patches have dropped today for early AMD bring-up around their next-generation "Zen 5" processors.

We've known since last year when Imagination published their open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver that they'd be focusing on a Vulkan hardware driver only and using the likes of the Zink compatibility layer for OpenGL support. Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink.

Following the release of Godot 4.0 earlier this year, Godot 4.1 has been released today as an incremental update to this incredibly powerful, open-source game engine.

Going back to last year Intel added Granite Rapids support to GCC 13 as part of their usual early bring-up of new product families into the GNU Compiler Collection. That initial Granite Rapids target premiered in the since-released GCC 13.1 alongside Emerald Rapids and Sierra Forest too. Hitting the GCC developers' mailing list today is initial support for Intel Granite Rapids D.

For Linux gamers running the lightweight Openbox X11 window manager, the newest Steam beta update brings a new option to fix problems with Steam's dropdown menus being unclickable.

It's now more clear why last week Linus Torvalds personally took to improving the Linux kernel's user-mode stack expansion code: it's necessary to address a now disclosed security vulnerability dubbed StackRot.

Tow-Boot has been a "user-friendly" distribution of U-Boot that was seeing regular updates but for nearly one year has been on hiatus without any new releases. That changed overnight with Tow-Boot 2022.07-006 being released and a call for new developers.

CodeWeavers developer Zebediah Figura opened up the initial merge request yesterday that is the first step of a multi-part effort for reorganizing and cleaning up the Wine Direct3D "WineD3D" code.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is tacking on a few new features for the Linux 6.5 kernel.

It's already time for the first alpha release of the in-development GNOME 45 desktop.

There's been a lot of AMD-Xilinx code going upstream in the Linux kernel over the past few months to benefit AMD's embedded efforts from the QDMA driver to CDX bus to XDMA and more. The latest hitting the kernel is an AMD-Xilinx Versal watchdog driver.

As I've written about a few times in recent months, AMD has been enhancing GPU support for use under Xen virtualization. Their interests in Xen weren't clear to this point given that KVM virtualization tends to be the dominant solution these days when it comes to open-source Linux virtualization. Now it's been revealed that the AMD GPU interests in Xen stem from an in-vehicle infotainment play.

UDisks 2.10 was released last week for this set abstraction layer providing a daemon and tooling around the manipulation of disks and storage devices under Linux.

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming.

In addition to Lunar Lake sound driver support in Linux 6.5 and the recent SOF update for Sound Open Firmware for Lunar Lake, Linux 6.5 is also bringing initial SoundWire Intel ACE2.x support that is part of the Lunar Lake audio capabilities.

Released yesterday was a new version of UPower, the FreeDesktop.org software known long ago as DeviceKit-Power and used as an abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux and other platforms. The new UPower 1.90.1 release is the first update to this software in just shy of one year.