Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Friedrich Vock with Valve presented yesterday at XDC 2023 on the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance. Last year at XDC 2022 it was dubbed "the world's slowest raytracer" but thanks to the work done by Valve and others, the RADV ray-tracing performance is now quite capable and also enabled by default since Mesa 23.2. The RADV ray-tracing performance also continues inching closer to the AMDVLK Vulkan performance for that official open-source AMD Vulkan driver.

Multi-grain(ed) timestamps had been submitted for Linux 6.6 to better deal with NFS where the once-per-jiffy coarse-grained timestamps aren't enough for (in)validating caches. Multi-grained timestamps sought to address that by optionally allowing for the more fine-grained timestamps when desired but not using that finer granularity everywhere due to the greater overhead costs. This feature though ended up being reverted weeks later due to subtle bugs being uncovered. Now though a new redux patch series has been posted for providing another attempt at multi-grained timestamps.

Following other Intel oneAPI components like Embree and OpenVKL introducing GPU acceleration via SYCL, today Intel released the open-source OSPRay 3.0 that rolls out initial GPU support for this portable ray-tracing engine.

Merged last week to the X.Org Server is support in the 2D-acceleration-via-OpenGL GLAMOR code for allowing OpenGL ES 3.0 (GLES3) shaders.

Kicking off XDC 2023 yesterday in Spain was Igalia's Melissa Wen talking about her work on color management with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack to empower Valve's Linux work on the Steam Deck. That was followed by Joshua Ashton of Valve talking about their work on HDR and color management from the Steam OS / Gamescope side for the Steam Deck.

Adding to the list of vendors exposing ACPI Platform Profile controls under Linux so the user can easily set their power/performance preference for the system is major Chinese hardware company Inspur.

Mold 2.3 was released today by Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high-speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

It's already that time of the Qt 6.5 long-term support (LTS) cycle where The Qt Company has shifted it over to being focused on access only to their commercial customers.

AMD today posted a set of interesting patches for enabling better integration of their AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver, what is their compute kernel driver) memory management with Linux's DRM GEM ioctl API. In turn the code allows managing virtual address (VA) mappings in compute VMs with the GEM_VA ioctl interface for greater control of buffers imported via DMA-BUF.

The GNOME Foundation has named a new Executive Director for overseeing the foundation responsible for this leading open-source desktop environment.

NVIDIA today published their first R545 Linux driver beta series with a number of shiny new features.

Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged "/usr" file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed.

Both AMD and Intel engineers have experienced a lengthy journey getting their latest virtualization security features into the mainline Linux kernel -- and one that is still ongoing.

In addition to Intel putting the finishing touches on Meteor Lake graphics support for the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle, Intel's Habana Labs AI accelerator driver also has some notable changes for this next kernel version.

Google is proposing a new mseal() memory sealing system call for the Linux kernel. Google intends for this architecture independent system call to be initially used by the Google Chrome web browser on Chrome OS while experiments are underway for use by Glibc in the dynamic linker to seal all non-writable segments at startup.

Weston 13.0 Alpha was released today as the next iteration of this reference Wayland compositor.

Hours after Ubuntu 23.10 was released last Thursday it was discovered Ubuntu 23.10 ISOs contained malicious user translations for those using the Ukrainian translations within the Ubuntu Linux desktop installer. Canonical suspended the desktop ISOs until the translations could be fixed and ISOs re-spun. That's now happened and this afternoon Ubuntu 23.10 images are back online.

While Friday's release of ROCm 5.7.1 hadn't mentioned any Radeon family GPU support besides the aging Radeon VII, it turns out AMD's newest open-source GPU compute stack is ready to go now with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and is complete with working PyTorch support.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.4 today as the open-source BSD operating system project's 55th release.

A set of patches to the community-developed MSI-EC Linux kernel driver would allow toggling MSI's Cooler Boost functionality under Linux for enhancing laptop cooling performance.

Intel engineers are proposing that full support for the SYCL programming model be added to upstream LLVM. This is part of their broader oneAPI effort and embracing Khronos' SYCL standard for single-source C++ heterogeneous programming from CPUs to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.

Intel continues to do a splendid job at ensuring the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang upstream compilers have support for their new processor cores well in advance of products shipping. Beyond already having Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support already in upstream GCC, today one of the Intel compiler engineers sent out patches for enabling the Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake cores.

The USB I2C / SPI / GPIO drivers for Intel's La Jolla Cove Adapter (LCJA) are set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel merge window opening at the end of the month.

Released on Sunday was uutils 0.0.22 as the open-source software aiming to be a drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils while being written in the Rust programming language for memory safety, better performance, and a modernized codebase.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc6 and expressed his intention of releasing Linux 6.6 stable in two weeks unless anything wild happens as we approach the end of this kernel cycle.

Queued up this week as part of the HID subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel test release has been a rather embarrassing bug: unplugging Logitech USB receivers has for the past several months been causing the Linux kernel to crash. After a number of bug reports around this issue from unplugging Logitech keyboard/mice receivers to simply switching away on a USB switch with the device(s) attached, the Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel is carrying the fix and it's also marked for back-porting to existing stable Linux kernel series.

Over the past two weeks there has been a pleasant uptick in new commits to Coreboot as part of enabling EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series platform support.

Next week in DRM-Next will hopefully see the patch promoting Intel Meteor Lake graphics to stable in time for the upcoming Linux 6.7 merge window. Ahead of that an i915 drm-intel-next pull request on Friday sent out more Meteor Lake patches while concurrently working on more driver enablement code for Lunar Lake.

While Python 3.12 was just released earlier this month, already the first alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for early-stage testing and evaluation.

On Friday AMD sent in another batch of feature patches that are ready for DRM-Next to in turn be upstreamed with the quickly approaching Linux 6.7 merge window. Most notable with this latest round of feature patches is enabling more next-generation graphics processor IP.

Released on Friday was Wine 8.18 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Now available is Wine-Staging 8.18 as the more experimental blend of Wine that integrates just shy of 500 extra patches atop Wine.

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.