Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases.

Over the past month on Phoronix were 223 original news articles along with 17 multi-page featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, all written by your's truly. When it came to the hardware testing in July, AMD processor tests easily dominated from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme within the new ASUS ROG Ally over to the AMD EPYC Genoa-X and Bergamo server processors to close out the month.

Back in March Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal finally released for this community-developed smartphone/tablet OS that finally migrated from an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This past weekend Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal was released as the first update this lineage of being based off the newer Ubuntu Long-Term Support state.

Intel today released Embree 4.2 as the newest feature update to this open-source and high performance ray-tracing library. While Embree has long offered fast CPU-based ray-tracing support, Embree 4.0 introduced GPU acceleration via SYCL. With the Embree 4.2 release, the GPU SYCL support is no longer being treated as beta.

Following the release this weekend of GNU Binutils 2.41, another important GNU software project just issued their latest update: the GNU C Library 2.38.

Ahead of the official announcement tomorrow, Mozilla Firefox 116 builds are available today for those wanting this latest open-source web browser.

With the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" IP block for computer vision and deep learning use-cases to provide better performance. Earlier this year with Linux 6.3 the iVPU driver was merged. Meteor Lake processors haven't even officially launched yet while already Intel's open-source engineers have begun enabling the next-gen VPU to be found with Lunar Lake processors.

One of the latest feature additions for next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release of these open-source user-space graphics driver components is adding support for the EGL explicit device extension.

Qualcomm engineers have begun rolling out a new open-source V4L2/media driver for a new Qualcomm "Iris" video accelerator hardware for video encode and decode on Qualcomm SoCs.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use.

RISC-V is now an official Debian architecture for the Debian 13 "Trixie" release to happen in about two years time. Over the weekend a brief status update was issued surrounding this newest CPU architecture to be supported by the Debian GNU/Linux team. Arguably most interesting is how they are currently building out the Debian RISC-V packages.

FreeCAD 0.21 is nearing release as this wonderful open-source CAD solution.

Just in time for the next monthly ISOs of Arch Linux, Archinstall 2.6 has been released as the latest feature update for this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux distribution installer.

Linus Torvalds released the latest weekly test candidate of the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

GNU Binutils 2.41 is out today as the latest major update to this important collection of binary utilities present on most Linux systems and other platforms.

GNU Emacs 29.1 is out this morning as the latest update to this popular and powerful text editor.

As one of the last blockers for getting real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support mainlined in the Linux kernel, this week saw a revised patch series around non-blocking consoles.

Linux 6.5 upgraded its Rust toolchain against Rust 1.68.2. This was the first upgrade of the Rust toolchain from the original v1.62 requirements when the first Rust kernel code was mainlined. A second upgrade is now planned to take it to Rust 1.71.

Last weekend I wrote about Zen 4's Automatic IBRS security feature needing STIBP enabled for protecting user-space processes. Single-Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors though haven't been enabled up to now with the Auto IBRS functionality on Linux. But the x86/urgent pull request sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc4 tagging makes that change.

LPython is the latest open-source Python implementation aiming to be a very performant version of Python among other interesting features.

A new per-application workaround/optimization to the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has sharply reduced the time required for compiling Cyberpunk 2077 game shaders for this popular title running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play.

For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation.

Going back to May I wrote about AMD's "k10temp" Linux temperature driver being updated to handle negative temperature readings and now finally merged on Friday as a fix ahead of Linux 6.5-rc4 is a change to that open-source driver for properly displaying negative temperatures.

With most developers having recovered from the recent Akademy KDE developer conference, Plasma 6 is back to seeing a lot of new development activity for what will be the next major open-source desktop release likely debuting in early 2024.

The first release candidate of LLVM 17 is now available for testing as what will be the next half-year update to this innovative open-source compiler stack.

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics drivers for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in about one month.

Vulkan 1.3.260 is out today with a handful of specification clarifications/fixes as well as two new extensions.

It appears the OpenZFS 2.2 file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems will see its release very soon while out today is the third release candidate.

Systemd 254 is out today in time for appearing in the late-2023 Linux distribution releases.

Announced in early June by Intel-owned Codeplay Software was the oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL codebases to new processor/accelerator architectures with an emphasis on AI and HPC. Today marks the release already of the oneAPI Construction Kit 3.0.

Richard Hughes is the Red Hat developer who is most prominently known for leading the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd development as well as formerly being behind the ColorHug monitor color calibration hardware effort and PackageKit, among other open-source software. He's recently been developing a new software project called Passim that today he announced to the world.

Going along with LLVM's recent additions around supporting new Intel instructions coming with future generation Core CPUs, the LLVM 18 Git development code has now landed support for actually honoring -march=arrowlake, -march=arrowlake-s, and -march=lunarlake targets.

AMD lifted the embargo this evening on the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, their first mobile processor sporting 3D V-Cache technology for boosting gaming performance and other cache-happy workloads.

This afternoon AMD announced the availability of the HIP SDK for Microsoft Windows as a portion of their ROCm computing platform with support for various professional and consumer GPUs.

For over a year Fedora / Red Hat has been planning for major package management changes with DNF5. The hope for months has been to use DNF5 by default for Fedora 39 but that is no longer going to work out... FESCo has decided to reject DNF5 for Fedora 39 and then due to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 branching with Fedora 40, this means DNF5 isn't expected by default until at least Fedora 41 in late 2024.

FreeBSD developers have published their Q2-2023 status report where they outlined various technical milestones and software accomplishments for this leading BSD operating system.

Going along with Intel adding Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support to the GCC compiler, Intel has also now contributed the new ISA extensions for these future processors to the GNU Assembler "Gas" support as part of their early compiler toolchain enablement.

Earlier this month Canonical asserted control over the LXD project. As another step in tightening up control over this container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) is now apparently limiting LXD maintainership rights to only Canonical employees.

Following the recent KDE Akademy developer conference, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has provided more insight into some of the features being removed with the in-development Plasma 6 desktop.

GNOME 46 or later will likely be seeing work to overhaul the default window management behavior of the desktop.

Released back in April was GCC 13.1 as the first stable release in the GCC 13 series that brought Modula-2 language support, more C++23/C23 features, and other new CPU targets supported from Arm to Intel. Debuting today is GCC 13.2 as the first point release in the series to ship dozens of bug fixes.