Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver.

Following SLOB's removal and SLAB being deprecated and set for removal, the Linux kernel is all-in on the SLUB allocator. A new patch series posted on Friday is aiming to help prevent the possibility of cross-cache attacks with the SLUB memory allocator in the kernel.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.16 is now Wine-Staging 8.16 for this experimental blend of Wine that offers up nearly 500 additional testing/in-development patches.

The threaded / atomic console support for the Linux kernel is the last main blocker before the real-time "RT" patches can finally be mainlined.

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel.

Version 3.3.3 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available for this Java library that makes it easy to utilize native APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to OpenCL compute and other OS APIs within Java's confines. LWJGL is used for Java games and can also be used with other Java software looking for rich API support particularly around GPU integration.

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October.

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support.

KDE developers continue adding new functionality and performance optimizations for the Plasma 6.0 desktop that is aiming for its release in early February.

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default.

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS.

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries.

Wine 8.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine.

It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven't been following Ubuntu's own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file.

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, "intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half" Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the "Xe2" graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors.

AMD on Thursday released ZenDNN 4.1 as the newest release of their Zen Deep Neural Network Library for accelerating inference workloads on AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. The ZenDNN library remains API compatible with Intel's oneDNN library and helps for building out optimized AI workloads for use on AMD Zen processors.

A Red Hat engineer has published patches to optionally allow delayed module signature verification in an effort to have a secure Linux system but to allow for faster boot times.

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server.

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library.

The Linux kernel currently allows disabling support for 32-bit programs and 32-bit system calls at compile-time, but a new option expected to be introduced with Linux 6.7 this winter will provide a new "ia32_emulation" boot time option to allow unconditionally disabling support for 32-bit programs and system calls.

Back in July Intel announced AVX10 as the future of AVX-512 and how they ultimately plan to support more Advanced Vector Extensions capabilities on both future P and E cores. Since then they've begun making preparations to the open-source compiler toolchains around enabling AVX10.

The past two years AMD's AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve's Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware.

One of the nifty new features with Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors not talked about much is the In-Field Scan (IFS) functionality for allowing various tests to be carried out prior to deploy the new processors or over time in the data center for trying to spot any silicon-level issues. IFS aims to uncover any processor issues not caught by ECC, parity checks, RAS, or other safeguards when new CPUs reach the data center or as they age over time.

Red Hat multimedia expert Wim Taymans has released PipeWire 0.3.80 as the newest version of this open-source solution for efficiently handling video and audio streams on the Linux desktop.

As part of the effort for enabling UEFI support with ReactOS, an open-source operating system re-implementing binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows, a development build of ReactOS is up and running on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console.

When Canonical rolled out their new Flutter-based Ubuntu Linux desktop installer it lacked support for ZFS root file-system installations. Canonical has been quiet about their (Open)ZFS intentions after years of offering it as an Ubuntu install option with their prior installer, but for Ubuntu 23.10 this support is being restored.

Fedora developers are looking at offering KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 in next year's Fedora 40 release. With the upgrade to Plasma 6 it's also planned by the Fedora packagers to drop support for the KDE X11 session -- thereby just leaving the KDE on Wayland session.

AMD announced today that their Versal HBM adaptive SoCs have entered production for these newest wares with high bandwidth memory.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime 23.26.26690.22 was released today, which is a big update for this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero (L0) stack for Windows and Linux systems. Due to the summer holidays and Intel's current release regiment for the Compute Runtime, v23.26.26690.22 is the first new release since mid-July.

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking.

While Microsoft is known for their own set of security issues on Windows and related software, Microsoft on Patch Tuesday ended up releasing CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230904 as their open-source Linux distribution that with this update is primarily driven by security fixes.

Still not over the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel are the real-time "RT" patches but it continues inching toward that long-awaited goal. Out today is v6.6-rc1-rt1 as the real-time kernel patch series updated against the initial Linux 6.6 Git state.

During the Linux 6.6 merge window a pull request submitted the new "GenPD" subsystem. While the pull request did land for Linux 6.6, Linus Torvalds took issue with it -- not because of the code but over the lack of clarity on what "GenPD" is for those not domain experts in this area. To help clear things up, GenPD is being renamed to "pmdomain" to provide a bit more clarity.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 "LMDE 6" is now available in beta form for this desktop Linux distribution spin from the Linux Mint crew derived directly from Debian packages rather than Ubuntu.

The firmware folks at 3mdeb have released Dasharo 1.1.2 for the MSI PRO Z690-A motherboard. In case you missed it, last year 3mdeb ported Coreboot/Dasharo to select MSI desktop motherboards that are readily available in retail channels and supporting the latest Intel processors. This started with the MSI PRO Z690-A and since extended to the Z790 series. 3mdeb has released an updated Dasharo build with some new features for replacing the proprietary BIOS on these motherboards.

AOMP 18.0-0 has been released as the newest version of AMD's LLVM/Clang compiler downstream that is focused on providing the very latest patches around Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading and goes along with their ROCm compute stack.

Intel today announced Thunderbolt 5 as their next-gen Thunderbolt standard that will allow 80 Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth or a "Bandwidth Boost" mode of up to 120 Gbps.

While the Linux 6.6 merge window is over, sent out today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes that include adding a quirk so that the tablet mode switch event properly occurs with the new ASUS ROG Flow X16 laptop.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver used by Linux systems is now enabling by default the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension for their graphics processors with mesh shader support.

While Bcachefs was not merged for the Linux 6.6 cycle with one of the concerns raised by Linus Torvalds being that it hadn't been vetted via the "linux-next" staging area, that process has now begun to raise hopes of potentially seeing the new file-system driver introduced for Linux 6.7.

One of the driver additions we've been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel that didn't pan out in time for the recently closed Linux 6.6 merge window is the Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver as a modern alternative to their i915 driver. The Xe driver better supports non-x86 CPU architectures, better designed and more performant around their modern integrated and discrete GPUs, and overall is able to make better design choices and improvements in being a clean sheet driver design compared to all the code that has built up in i915 over the years. But for getting the Xe driver upstream even in experimental form, first some necessary DRM scheduler patches need to be ironed out.

One of the new Linux networking features we've been looking forward to seeing in the kernel is TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO / RFC5925) as a means of improving TCP security and authenticity. The eleventh iteration of the TCP-AO patches were posted today for the Linux kernel with it looking like work on this network addition potentially wrapping up soon.