Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

For processors supporting CPU performance boosting with higher performance states available beyond the base states, Linux allows toggling the boosting on a per-CPU basis. However, a new patch proposed this week would allow per-policy performance boosting where capable.

As part of AMD's recent Linux graphics driver development approach of enabling new GPU support gradually on a IP block-by-block basis rather than big monolithic patch series marked by colorful fishy codenames, it's worked out well for getting new hardware support rolling into the kernel early and without revealing any combined details on yet-to-be-released graphics processors. This week has seen some new IP block patches surface.

Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Loongson Binary Translation aims to help speed-up and handle ARM / x86 / MIPS binary translation on LoongArch more efficiently with capable LoongArch processors.

While the EROFS Linux read-only file-system already supports LZ4 and microLZMA support, Zlib DEFLATE support is also being worked on and could be introduced in the next Linux kernel cycle.

The first beta is out of FreeRDP 3.0, the open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation of that proprietary Microsoft protocol for remote desktop/GUI handling.

Along with detailing Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Intel as effectively a footnote to that also disclosed another exciting addition to find with future Intel CPUs: AVX10. Most notably for consumer use is that AVX10 will enable AVX-512 capabilities across both Performance and Efficient core designs with hybrid processors.

Following Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and more recently Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for furthering the x86_64 CPU compute potential, Intel has now published initial details on APX: Advanced Performance Extensions.

It looks like the updated Family 17h microcode this morning isin relation to a new Zen 2 CPU security vulnerability being disclosed. The Linux kernel has also just received a patch for this "Zenbleed" vulnerability for older AMD CPUs.

Both new AMD Zen CPU and Radeon GPU microcode/firmware have been published today to the linux-firmware.git tree.

Qiang Yu continues leading the charge on integrating the ACO compiler back-end into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as an optional alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end.

Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 code to help with Linux gaming needs particularly around Steam Play. There were plans to further extend FUTEX2 and now two years later there's been recent patches working out more enhancements to this interface.

The most popular topic among the emails I received this weekend weren't of direct technical nature but the number of people pointing out Twitter's new "X" logo and the similarities to the X.Org logo.

Inkscape 1.3 is now available as the newest feature release ot this open-source software focused on being a vector graphics editor that can rival the likes of Adobe Illustrator.

Within the very latest OpenBSD "current" code is now support for being able to apply AMD CPU microcode updates.

Linus Torvalds just published Linux 6.5-rc3 as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 6.5 kernel.

MPV 0.36 is out today as the newest version of this open-source media player that was originally forked from the MPlayer/mplayer2 code and leveraging the FFmpeg library.

Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture.

Automatic IBRS is a new feature with AMD Zen 4 processors akin to Intel's Enhanced IBRS functionality. Linux 6.3 added Auto IBRS support but it turns out when that was being enabled an oversight was made.

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra's EEVDF CPU scheduler code to replace the existing Completely Fair Scheduler "CFS" code looks like it will attempt to land with the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.13, Wine-Staging 8.13 is out today with 504 patches atop that upstream code-base.

Building off last month's release of Debian 12.0, Debian 12.1 is out today to ship dozens of bug fixes.

Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver is now exposing system Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support with the necessary API bits being in place for the modern Rusticl OpenCL driver as well as the older Clover code. Plus with being a CPU-based driver there isn't any added work or complications around shared virtual memory.

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.