Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Red Hat engineers are looking at making it more evident on Fedora IoT, CoreOS, and Server editions when firmware updates become available for the hardware in use.

WineConf as what had been the regularly hosted Wine developer conference for this open-source project devoted to running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms is likely over. Due to dwindling attendance and no one stepping up to organize the next WineConf, the developer conference is on hiatus but in place there may end up being something like a Proton conference in the future.

Last month saw the first release candidate of OpenZFS 2.2 that introduces Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksums, and block cloning capabilities. Out this weekend is a second release candidate as OpenZFS 2.2 nears release.

Following the annual Akademy KDE developer conference, more Plasma 6.0 changes have been landing for this major desktop environment release that will likely come in H1'2024.

In addition to Proton 8.0-3 being released today for Steam Play, Wine 8.13 is out today as the latest bi-weekly release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Proton 8.0-3 is rolling out on Steam that powers Steam Play to enjoy the latest Windows games on Linux. Proton 8.0-3 brings many fixes and gets more Windows games now running gracefully on Linux desktop systems as well as the Steam Deck.

The DRM subsystem is slated to pickup a GPU Virtual Address "VA" Manager with the Linux 6.6 kernel that is motivated by work around Vulkan sparse memory binding requirements.

Vulkan 1.3.258 was published today as the newest revision to this high performance graphics and compute API. There's many fixes with the last Vulkan spec update having been in early July but making this release more notable are two new extensions.

First up the belated Mesa 23.1.4 is now available as the latest stable point release in the Mesa 23.1 series.

Future AMD CPUs will be having larger microcode patches and thus the Linux kernel is now being adapted to better handle that increased microcode payload.

Prior to LLVM/Clang becoming so popular within organizations and it maturing well on x86_64, AArch64, and other architectures, Open64 was once quite popular in areas now dominated by LLVM and GCC. Open64 had been popular with academic researchers, AMD even maintained their Open64 optimized compiler a decade prior to the LLVM-based AOCC, and was quite popular in the HPC space. Surprisingly there's been some recent activity on the Open64 compiler code.

New patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list prepare the AMD Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver for the upcoming AMD Instinct MI300 APUs.

The release candidate for Mageia 9 is now available for this Linux distribution that's an offshoot long ago from Mandrake/Mandriva lineage.

Linux has supported Quick Assist Technology (QAT) devices from the start whether it be QAT PCIe adapters or QAT support found within select Atom and Xeon CPUs as well as the latest-generation Sapphire Rapids CPUs. Only now though with the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel is it adding a heartbeat feature for determining if a QAT device becomes unresponsive so that it can be acted upon.

While Intel is well known -- and well regarded -- as being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel as well as being a significant player in many other open-source projects with their countless open-source software contributions over the years, Arm is now trying to better promote their open-source support and open contributions.

Qt Creator 11 is out today as the Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment.

Following a recent Intel Mesa driver improvement to yield ~10% better performance, another change is on the way that has the ability to boost the performance for at least one game by 12% and other games by smaller yields.

There is a phenomenon where running a multi-threaded workload inside a virtual machine (VM) with Simultaneously Multi-Threading (SMT / Intel Hyper Threading) that a sibling thread could find itself busy while the CPU core is idle. A new Linux CFS patch series aims to make the scheduler better adapt to the QEMU topology.

For those on Linux running a multi-monitor setup with a mix of resolutions or screen sizes between the different displays, Google Chrome (and Chromium) will soon be able to better cope with this arrangement by allowing per-display scaling factors.

Following GCC recently adding new x86 instructions for Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, the LLVM 17 open-source compiler has now received similar treatment.

The release candidate is out today for XWayland 23.2 as the next update for this code that allows for X11 clients to function within Wayland environments.

The Linux Foundation has established the Ultra Ethernet Consortium "UED" as an industry-wide effort founded by AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft for designing a new Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high performance networking.

While not too useful as limited to OpenGL-only and will perform extremely slowly until the NVIDIA GSP firmware support is sorted out for the Nouveau DRM kernel driver, merged today for Mesa 23.3-devel and marked for back-porting to Mesa 23.2 is initial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPU support.

As part of AMD's interest in improving graphics around Xen virtualization for in-vehicle infotainment systems and other customer uses, AMD engineers have expanded the video acceleration capabilities provided by Mesa's Virgl code.

Just days after System76 upstreamed Intel Raptor Lake HX and their new Adder WS 3 laptop into Coreboot, three more of their laptops have now made their way to upstream Coreboot.

Intel has published their 2023Q2 release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel repository that holds the many different patches around Intel integrated/discrete video acceleration for use with the popular FFmpeg multimedia library. Intel engineers continue working on upstreaming their various patches to FFmpeg proper while "cartwheel-ffmpeg" is their staging area where they continue to have the latest and greatest patches available for easy consumption.

Intel announced this evening they agreed to a term sheet with ASUS for manufacturing, selling, and supporting the Next Unit of Compute (more commonly known as NUCs) from 10th to 13th generation systems and to develop future NUC system designs.

In addition to Intel engineers being responsible for much of the Linux kernel driver work around USB4 and Thunderbolt, they have now published thunderbolt-utils as a collection of user-space utilities for managing USB4/Thunderbolt on Linux environments.

A new version of Canonical's Mir display server was released today that these days serves as a library for building Wayland-based shells.

NVIDIA today published their latest stable point release in the R535 Linux driver series to fix a variety of outstanding issues.

MySQL 8.1 is available today with the community server builds now available for this latest major update to this popular SQL database server.

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.