Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

As anticipated Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.6 kernel as stable.

While KDE Plasma 6 and associated KDE software components are getting ready for their debut in February, Trinity Desktop continues loosely maintaining a KDE 3.5 fork for that aging desktop environment.

It's slightly off its usual Friday release target, but Wine 8.19 was released today as the newest bi-weekly unstable release of this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux.

From the perspective of Linux distributions trying to reduce their attack surface while still making it possible for users to run legacy software without recompiling their kernel, SUSE has spearheaded the effort for boot-time enabling/disabling of x86 32-bit support for whether 32-bit user-space programs and 32-bit system calls can be executed. That code has been submitted for the imminent Linux 6.7 merge window.

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser.

A NVIDIA compiler engineer last week laid out the company's plans for implementing OpenACC 3.3 offloading support within the LLVM Clang compiler.

One of the many early pull requests sent in for Linux 6.7 were the x86/boot changes that are headlined by a rework to the PE header generation in order to generate a modern, 4K-aligned kernel image view to ultimately aim for better system security.

While the Linux 6.6 kernel isn't set to be released until later today, over the weekend a number of early pull requests were submitted of new material for the Linux 6.7 merge window. Among those early PRs were for the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) area of the kernel.

With Linux 6.6 expected to be released tomorrow as stable, the Linux 6.7 merge window in turn will be opened. Here's a preview of some of the changes expected for this next kernel cycle.

A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR).

Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks.

Patches posted this week by SiFive for the Linux kernel provide cryptographic implementations of various functions inside the Linux kernel using the processor ISA's vector crypto extensions.

With Mesa 24.0 the developers have switched from using Doxygen and Breathe for building documentation comments from source to instead use the newer but less heard of Hawkmoth.

Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot.

AMD today announced the release of HIP RT 2.1, the newest version of its HIP ray-tracing library for use by Blender and other software.

Linux 6.6 is set to be released as stable this weekend unless Linus Torvalds has reservations and decides to extend the cycle by one week. In any case there are some last minute fixes heading in to fix-up nine different Lenovo laptops with AMD Ryzen SoCs to make the hardware more usable under Linux.

For those currently weighing between the (currently) nine different AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors for Linux use, here are fresh benchmarks of the Zen 4 desktop CPU line-up while testing with Ubuntu 23.10 and the Linux 6.5 kernel.

OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library.

Samuel Pitoiset on Valve's Linux graphics driver team has wired up VK_EXT_image_compression_control support to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) in order to workaround same game bugs being encountered with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton.

Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics.

While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November.

The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release.

Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux.

With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end.

Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support.

The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged.

Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver.

Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area.

Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year.

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series.

For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable.

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024.

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi.

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application.

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors.

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver.

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD's first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support.

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as a modern Linux storage solution that leverages the Rust programming language and built atop the proven XFS file-system and LVM. Stratis continues to strive for ZFS and Btrfs like functionality although its use in the wild still seems rather limited.

The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed.