Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

LXD 5.17 is now available as the system container and virtual machine manager, which since last month has been reigned into control by Canonical and maintainership being limited to Canonical engineers. With this new LXD release there is ZFS delegation support as found with the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2.

Barring any last minute problems from coming up, the Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable tomorrow, 27 August. Here's a reminder about all of the great changes and new features with this next kernel version, which is especially heavy on exciting additions for Intel and AMD Linux users.

In addition to GNOME's Sysprof integrating CPU scheduler data this week for GNOME 45, this system-wide profiling tool has also added support for FlameGraphs.

Last week KDE Plasma 6 made the default change from single click to double click for opening files/folders while this week brings another notable default settings change for the desktop... Tap-to-click is finally enabled by default.

Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop.

Since 2021 among other Snap'ing efforts for converting formerly Ubuntu DEB packages to Canonical's Snap sandboxed app packaging format has been the CUPS print server. The plan was to replace the Debian-packaged CUPS with the Snap-based CUPS for Ubuntu 23.10 but now that is being pushed back to next year.

It looks like the further-tuned AMD Inception / SRSO (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) mitigation code will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window.

Coreboot 4.21 is available this week as the newest tagged release for this open-source system BIOS/firmware solution. Coreboot 4.21 brings a number of new motherboard ports as well as various core improvements.

Miguel Ojeda who leads the "Rust for Linux" effort of integrating Rust programming language support into the Linux kernel has already submitted his pull request of planned feature updates for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle.

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world.

The Vulkan 1.3.262 revision to this industry standard for high performance graphics and compute is now published. There is the usual assortment of minor changes/fixes plus four new extensions, which all happen to be new vendor extensions from Qualcomm.

Following AMD recently posting Linux graphics driver patches for enabling a GFX 11.5 graphics engine and new DCN 3.5 display block that are presumably for an RDNA3 refresh such as for the Ryzen 8000 series APUs, today AMD posted additional open-source driver patch series for enabling additional new IP.

SQLite 3.43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source embedded SQL database library that is widely used by countless applications and other software for a variety of data storage purposes.

OpenMandriva developers today formally announced the release of their rolling-release OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Linux OS installation images, which are also being treated as a release candidate for the OMLx 5.0 non-rolling distribution variant. Making OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 more exciting is that they are now offering separate install media as well that features the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in its current experimental state but is being offered by OpenMandriva as a "technical preview" around the future direction of the desktop.

Fedora with their more liberal update policies will soon be rolling out the Thunderbird 115 mail client to stable Fedora Linux users.

Upstreamed into the Coreboot Git repository this week is the ability to run on the MSI PRO Z790-P DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards for enjoying a latest-generation Intel desktop motherboard that is readily available as an alternative to using the proprietary BIOS implementations.

Mesa's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code for Wayland has added the "IMMEDIATE" present mode option that uses Wayland's tearing-control unstable extension to allow for images to be presented immediately but at the risk of visible screen tearing.

KDE Gear 23.08 is available today as the four-month update to this collection of KDE desktop applications.

While AMD has acquired a number of hardware companies in the past several years, software company acquisitions by AMD has been much more rare. This morning AMD announced the acquisition of Mipsology as an AI software company.

Seemingly for Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh processors, some new graphics PCI IDs were added today to Mesa for the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.

With Ubuntu 23.10 shipping next month one of the changes expected on the desktop side was using a GIMP 3.0 snapshot for this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative rather than sticking to the aging GIMP 2.10 series. But now it's been determined that this will not happen and GIMP 2.10 will continue to be used.

In addition to AMD sending out DCN 3.5 display patches for that next-gen display IP block presumably for their upcoming Ryzen 8000 series APUs, Intel's open-source engineers today sent out the patches enabling Lunar Lake display support for their i915 kernel driver while there is also support baking for their in-development Xe kernel driver.

Last week AMD sent out initial patches for enabling the "GFX 11.5" graphics IP under Linux for this presumed RDNA3 refresh that is likely for their next-gen Ryzen 8000 series APUs. Today AMD open-source Linux driver engineers sent out DCN 3.5 patches as an updated version of their Display Core Next IP.

Fedora Workstation has long maintained the QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt projects for applying a GNOME/GTK-like interface and styling to Qt applications in order to enhance the experience. However, to reduce the maintenance burden and the ongoing technical debt, Fedora Workstation 39 is planning to eliminate the custom Qt theming and just rely on Qt upstream.

Mir 2.15 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused Wayland compositor developed by Canonical that makes it easy for building out Wayland-based shells.

Earlier this month when the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was disclosed the initial mitigation was merged to Linux kernel right away for what there is referred to as the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Within a day of that code being published there were already efforts to clean it up and merged last week for Linux 6.5-rc7 was that AMD Inception code cleaning. This week a new set of 22 patches were published for further improving the AMD Inception/SRSO mitigation code.

Googler Rob Clark on Sunday sent out the set of MSM DRM patches prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. The MSM DRM driver is the kernel component for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics that goes along with the Freedreno Gallium3D and TURNIP Vulkan drivers in Mesa for having a nice Qualcomm Linux graphics stack.

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming.

QEMU 8.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The AGX Gallium3D driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew for providing reverse-engineered OpenGL / GLES support on Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware is now formally compliant with OpenGL ES 3.1.

Continuing to support x86 32-bit processors with the mainline Linux kernel continues to be a maintenance burden and uncovering ugly bits of code that are seldom touched. The latest work is on fixing up the 32-bit early microcode loading code so that it's more robust and actually correct.

While we are waiting on NVIDIA to roll out a beta of their next post-R535 Linux driver release stream, available today is the NVIDIA 535.104.05 Linux driver as their latest in this production driver branch.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has just released Fwupd 1.9.4 as the newest version of thus open-source software that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making it easy to deploy new firmware/BIOS updates for systems and countless peripherals under Linux.

GNOME's Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details.

One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2.

Intel is well regarded for their vast open-source contributions from being a major contributor to the Linux kernel and other areas like Mesa, GCC/glibc, and other key open-source projects to various niche projects like ConnMan and other smaller software projects. Debuting a few months ago as one of the newest open-source Intel projects catching us by surprise was Intel One Mono as a font designed for developers. Today brings a new version of that font.

New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders.

Git 2.42 is out today as the newest feature update for this dominant open-source distributed revision control system.

In recent days a number of feature patches were queued in HID-next to provide new driver features and hardware support within the Human Interface Device subsystem.

The amdfwtool utility living within the Coreboot repository for dealing with AMD platform firmware files has now added support for EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors.

On Friday AMD sent out another pull request of AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. With the Linux 6.5 release due out likely in one week and the cut-off having passed for new "feature" code for DRM-Next, this latest AMDGPU pull request was centered around bug-fixes but also with a few minor additions.

For those that have been eyeing an AMD Ryzen 7 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop for Linux use, over the coming weeks ahead there will be benchmarks and a review on the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop. With this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 4 mobile processor clocking up to 5.1GHz, 64GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and 2.8K OLED display it should be a real treat if the Linux support is all in good shape.

Melissa Wen with consulting firm Igalia continues working with AMD and Valve engineers on supporting AMD driver-specific color management properties for Linux to benefit the Steam Deck but ultimately to benefit all AMD Linux users as well.

LibreOffice 7.6 is now available as the latest major release to this leading open-source office suite that is widely used on the Linux desktop and elsewhere.

The new nvidia-drm-kmod is a FreeBSD port of Linux's nvidia-drm.ko open-source kernel module.

Following last Friday's release of Wine 8.14 following a summer holiday, Wine-Staging 8.14 is out today with its re-base for this testing/experimental flavor of Wine.