Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Merged to Mesa 23.3 this weekend is initial support in the V3D Gallium3D (OpenGL) and V3DV Vulkan drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore 7.1.x graphics IP that is found within the new Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

Similar to the Radeon RADV driver recently implementing software-based decoding for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has also now wired up ASTC LDR emulation.

AMD on Friday released ROCm 5.7.1 as their latest tagged release to this open-source GPU compute stack that continues progressing to better take on NVIDIA CUDA and Intel oneAPI.

Merged for this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release is the ability to have the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver running atop Zink, the Gallium3D driver known for OpenGL-on-Vulkan. With Rusticl on Zink this now means getting this OpenCL 3.0 driver working atop Vulkan hardware drivers.

The release candidate is out this weekend for FreeBSD 14.0 as the developers work toward releasing FreeBSD 14 stable in early November.

It was another exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 space with a number of notable new features being merged.

The PXN V900 gaming racing wheel is supported now by the mainline Linux kernel as of last night with the latest merged changes for the v6.6 kernel.

Wine 8.18 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source program for running Windows applications and games on Linux. Wine 8.18 is another step closer to Wine 9.0 stable that is due out in early 2024.

OpenZFS 2.2 was promoted to stable today as the latest major update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.2 comes many exciting new features, performance improvements, and other enhancements for this evolution of open-source ZFS.

While the Linux kernel tends to keep around drivers for even very old hardware, once there are no known users left that would still be updating to new Linux kernel versions or the drivers pose a significant maintenance burden, it's eventually time to let them go. We've seen the WiMAX wireless code removed and now the latest on the Linux wireless networking side inching close to the chopping block are old WiFi drivers.

The newest Blender alpha builds of the past week have enabled Vulkan API support as an experimental option on Windows and Linux.

OpenWrt 23.05 has been released as the newest feature release for this embedded Linux distribution that is popular for use on networking devices.

AMD has published the Advanced Media Acceleration (AMA) v1.0 SDK as a software stack aimed for hardware video acceleration and capable of high density real-time transcoding. The AMD AMA SDK integrates with the likes of the open-source FFmpeg and GStreamer projects for fitting nicely in the Linux software ecosystem as well as sporting its own C-based API.

Following last week's PipeWire 1.0 release candidate, today a second release candidate was published as part of the project's plan for reaching v1.0 before the end of the year for this widely-used Linux audio/video streams server that is a viable replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK.

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.

Following this week's release of Qt 6.6, the Qt Creator 12 beta has been released for this Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE).

OpenSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 is now available as the latest community version of SUSE Linux's Enterprise Micro. openSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 is a great choice for a lightweight Linux OS particularly for VMs and containers.

Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech.

It was a busy day for the GCC 14 (GNU Compiler Collection) development with Intel landing three separate noteworthy contributions just today for this next major open-source compiler release.

Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" is now officially available for download as the latest (non-LTS) Ubuntu Linux release with a wealth of updated packages, continued desktop installer improvements, and other refinements ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle.

For those making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with the latest AMD Radeon graphics hardware on Linux, the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release will support the high-quality AV1 preset for offering higher quality encodes.

With today's release of Ubuntu 23.10 not only is the performance improved nicely for modern AMD Ryzen systems, but as usual the open-source graphics performance has enjoyed some nice performance improvements, new Vulkan extensions, and more particularly when it comes to the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics drivers.

Roman Gilg who is known for his work on the KWinFT compositor project has spent the past few years quietly developing FDBuild as a new tool for developers to easily pull, configure, and build multiple software projects via a single command. This week he released FDBuild 0.1 as the first public release of this handy utility.

While one month ago a Linux kernel patch was floated for advertising Meteor Lake graphics support by default to effectively mark it as stable and remove it from behind the "i915.force_probe" block, that has yet to be queued for the mainline kernel. Today another set of patches were submitted of new Intel kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.7 with this patch still missing -- but it might squeeze in next week to still make it for the v6.7 cycle.

Released back in May was Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise 2.0 that brought GPU support via SYCL for this denoising library intended for use with ray-tracing applications. Following that big release as part of the broader effort to make Intel's oneAPI suite more supportive on GPUs/accelerators, OIDn 2.1 released on Wednesday with fixes and performance improvements to the GPU support.

System76 has announced their latest design improvements to their in-house manufactured, Linux-loaded Thelio desktop computers.

Intel has enabled a fast clear optimization "FCV" for their Gen12.5 graphics and newer under Linux with the open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver. This can help games like F1 22 with improving performance as much as 45%.

Intel submitted a new i915 DRM Linux kernel driver patch for adding four additional device PCI IDs for DG2/Alchemist graphics processors.

For going along with the recently announced Raspberry Pi 5 speedy single board computer, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is now available that has re-based against Debian 12 "Bookworm".

Merged today to Linux 6.6 Git is a new patch for fixing an AMD erratum CPU bug affecting Zen 4 based processors like the Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 8004/9004 series.

Red Hat continues hiring for additional help on their open-source Linux graphics driver team that does stellar work for enabling open-source graphics hardware support in cases like NVIDIA hardware with Nouveau, optimizing performance of existing drivers, and making other infrastructure improvements.

In addition to the recent PreSonus Studio One 6.5 debut for Linux, the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation software this week released its big "8.0" milestone.

Following the news from a few days ago that Curl was prepping for its worst security flaw in a long time affecting the project, Curl 8.4 is now available and with new light on this issue.

Back in July of last year the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) engine launched as part of the Open 3D Foundation and initially was a spin-out of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine. Out this week is O3DE 23.10 as the newest half-year update to this project.

Intel has formally announced the Arc Graphics A580 as their latest graphics processor to fit between the low-end A380 and higher-end A750/A770 graphics cards.

It was just a few weeks ago that AMD acquired AI software company Mipsology to help their AI software efforts on FPGAs. Today AMD announced another notable AI software acquisition: open-source AI software vendor Nod.ai.

Google, Cloudflare and AWS today disclosed a new zero-day vulnerability called the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack. This attack that is being seen in the real-world relies on a weakness in the HTTP2 protocol for carrying out "hyper volumetric" Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

The Qt 6.6 toolkit has been released as the newest six-month update to this open-source, cross-platform toolkit.

Daniel van Vugt of Canonical's desktop team for Ubuntu Linux has been on a spree recently tackling various GNOME bugs -- often performance issues -- while also continuing to work on the dynamic triple buffering support and other GNOME desktop enhancements. His latest discovery is around finding another performance bottleneck for multi-GPU setups.

Plans have been drafted to release the Weston 13.0 reference compositor for Wayland next month.

While the AMD P-State driver is working quite well for Ryzen systems already with the default on Linux 6.5, one of the additions we are still waiting to land is the AMD "Preferred Core" functionality. An eighth version of those patches were posted on Monday for inching this feature closer to the mainline kernel.

Following the release last month of TuxClocker 1.0 as a GUI overclocking solution currently for NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux, this years-in-development open-source utility is up to version 1.1 and with some new capabilities.

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be busy working on enabling next-generation graphics processors with their upstream open-source driver.

The widely-used Curl project as a command-line tool and library for transferring data via a variety of protocols is preparing to roll-out Curl 8.4 early in order to address a particularly nasty vulnerability.

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.

In addition to Intel's compiler engineers pushing a lot of code into GCC -- and other open-source compiler components -- around AVX10, over the weekend code began hitting the GCC 14 Git codebase for the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) functionality.

Hangover 8.17 was released this weekend as the newest feature release for this open-source Wine-based software that aims to make it easy to run Windows x86/x64 binaries on 64-bit Arm Linux systems as well as potentially other architectures too like RISC-V and POWER.

Libva 2.20 was released today as the newest update to this common Video Acceleration API (VA-API) library that sits in front of the various hardware-specific VA-API driver implementations.