Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

There's a lovely new Linux kernel patch series out that's big in working on a major clean-up of the x86 APIC code (or "decrapification" as it's called in the patches) and also bringing up for discussion the idea of killing off x86 32-bit support. It's unlikely the x86 32-bit support will be removed right now, which is "just museum pieces", but as an alternative would be making it SMP-only to at least remove the uni-processor code paths.

While Intel Arc Graphics continue enjoying performance optimizations with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the major limitation facing Arc Graphics on Linux right now for gamers is the lack of sparse residency support that is needed for running many newer games on Linux with Intel graphics -- particularly newer Windows D3D12 titles running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. It's been a long known limitation and will hopefully be addressed once the Intel Xe kernel driver is introduced, but at least as an interim solution there is now "fake" sparse support being implemented.

A set of 35 patches were posted on Sunday for introducing ARM64 Guarded Control Stack (GCS) support to the Linux kernel. This is akin to x86 Shadow Stack support for hardware-protected stacks of return addresses to help fend off ROP attacks.

CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230630 is now shipping as Microsoft's newest in-house Linux distribution release.

GNU Shepherd is the Guile-written service manager for handling daemons that is most notably used by the GNU Guix project as an alternative to the likes of SysV and systemd. With today's GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 some long-standing issues have finally been resolved.

Merged for Linux 6.5 was initial MIDI 2.0 support for the necessary USB audio and raw MIDI drivers to support this major MIDI update. Being worked on now for merging into a future kernel release is the USB gadget driver support around MIDI 2.0.

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU's TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code.

New AMDGPU targets seeing the initial plumbing merged today for LLVM 17 are GFX1150 and GFX1151 as upcoming AMD APU products.

GNU Boot 20230717 has been released as the fork of Libreboot that in turn is a downstream of Coreboot focused on providing system firmware support only where they are fully free software. With GNU Boot the game is upped further by removing select motherboard ports and documentation where they do not comply with the GNU System Distribution Guidelines.

For two years now Arch Linux's official install media has been shipping with archinstall as a nice, text-based installer for more quickly setting up an Arch Linux environment. In preparation for release now is Archinstall 2.6 as the next feature release while available for testing today is the release candidate.

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions.

The newest weekly test version of the Linux 6.5 kernel is now available for evaluation and looking out for any bugs/regressions.

Linux Mint 21.2 has been released today as the newest update to this Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based Linux distribution known for its Cinnamon desktop environment and other Linux desktop focused refinements.

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake "RPL" code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot.

Back in April I pointed out some new AMD patches at the time for enabling a new "Dynamic Boost Control" feature that hasn't been widely talked about by AMD yet for allowing more frequency/power controls around Ryzen SoCs. But making this power/performance feature controversial is that it requires authentication with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) for activation with user-space blobs for tapping this greater control of the hardware. This AMD Dynamic Boost Control feature now looks like it is ready for merging into Linux 6.6.

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers.

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range.

Btrfs has long provided a built-in integrity checker tool into the file-system driver. However, slated for Linux 6.6 is deprecating of this integrity checker.

Ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc2 release tomorrow there was a set of x86/x86_64 kernel changes merged overnight to deal with some weaknesses in the kernel's Control Flow Integrity (kCFI) / FineIBT (Indirect Branch Tracking) code.

With all the news in recent weeks following Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources that in turn lead to changes for AlmaLinux, finding new ways to obtain sources at Rocky Linux, interesting statements from Oracle, and even SUSE forking RHEL. The public RHEL sources now will basically be the upstream CentOS Stream code for which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions are ultimately based. The CentOS Project issued a new statement on Friday.

Earlier this month brought the release of systemd 254-rc1 with a new soft-reboot mechanism, officially deprecating System V scripts, a new systemd-battery-check process that runs at boot to check any system battery level status, and various other changes. On Friday systemd 254-rc2 was released with a few more changes.

The uutils project continues advancing as a modern, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils utilities that is written in the Rust programming language.

Imagination Technologies today published their fourth iteration of their in-development PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver targeting their Rogue architecture and future graphics IP. This open-source kernel driver ultimately will go along with their PowerVR Vulkan driver they continue developing within the Mesa code-base.

While IO_uring has been one of the most interesting kernel innovations of recent years and can allow for great speed-ups to async I/O, there have been some security concerns and with the Linux 6.6 kernel it will be easier for Linux administrators to disable it system-wide if so desired.

AMD Linux engineers are working on extending the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem used by their GPUs/accelerators to allow up to 128 DRM devices per system.

System76 developers working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop have recently been improving a number of areas of this open-source desktop.

The GTK toolkit and GLib support for Apple's macOS may be taking a back-seat to other platforms moving forward and would fall into a "best effort" category.

Yesterday Intel engineers sent out early compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake with adding the new instructions of AVX-VNNI-INT16, SM3, SHA512, and SM4. Today that new instruction support was complemented by a new patch out of Intel for actually adding the new Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Arrow Lake S targets to GCC.

Consulting firm 9elements sent out a set of patches this week to the peci-cputemp and dimmtemp drivers for supporting Intel Sapphire Rapids platforms, including for the up to eight socket configuration capable this generation.

Mesa's Rusticl OpenGL implementation written in Rust it turns out can already run the Tinygrad open-source software with its OpenCL back-end for running the LLaMA model.

With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do.

Intel's Linux software engineers understand the annual GCC compiler release cadence well and acknowledge the importance of having tuned compiler support available at launch. Intel for years has tended to get their new CPU support and new ISA features upstreamed into GCC as well as LLVM/Clang well ahead of product launch so that by the time their new consumer and server CPUs are shipping, there tends to be support within compilers just not at their stable versions but already found in the likes of Ubuntu. With that said, today Intel engineers posted initial compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors.

While less than one week has passed since the Linux 6.5 merge window ended and 6.5-rc1 being issued, there is already the first set of drm-misc-next changes submitted to DRM-Next of early open-source graphics/display driver changes geared for Linux 6.6 later this year.

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series.

Intel this morning released their open-source Compute Runtime 23.22.26516.18 as their newest monthly update to this open-source compute stack used on Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero usage.