Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The first week of the Linux 6.7 merge window began with the surprise of the Bcachefs file-system being merged and now capping off the first week is another surprise... Nouveau GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware integration that allows making use of NVIDIA's binary GSP firmware on RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs for having improved support. In turn this GSP route also provides initial support for GeForce RTX 40 series support.

The Linux kernel's subsystem for Compute Express Link that is playing a vital role in servers moving forward continues picking up new features and evolving the code-base as more CXL hardware enters the world.

As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues to be improved upon in the mainline Linux kernel and with the ongoing v6.7 merge window has received some additional enhancements.

Blosc (c-blosc2) is a high performance compressor focused on binary data for efficient storage of large binary data-sets in-memory or on-disk and helping to speed-up memory-bound computations.

Linux 6.6 saw EEVDF merged and Intel hybrid cluster scheduling re-introduced. The core scheduler improvements merged this past week for the in-development Linux 6.7 isn't quite as exciting but still there are some healthy scheduler improvements this round.

Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" has added initial support for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for working on OpenGL and OpenCL interoperability.

The Linux 6.7 sound subsystem changes submitted this week by maintainer Takashi Iwai include support for a number of new audio devices/platforms.

Recently there was some tuning in Mesa Git for helping with higher quality Radeon video encoding on Linux for GPUs using Video Core Next (VCN). Similar tuning has now been back-ported for older Radeon GPUs using the VCE encode engine and UVD video decoding.

The crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel includes the usual churn like various crypto acceleration updates for different SoCs and other routine changes plus is also limiting the role of some insecure and/or obsolete crypto hashing algorithms.

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time.

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15.

Last year Intel made available a packaged "Arc Graphics Driver" for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later Ubuntu 23.04 to provide a DKMS-backported kernel driver and packaged Mesa driver to make it easier to use Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) during the phase when the upstream kernel support was still stabilizing and not yet found out-of-the-box on Linux distributions at the time. This week marked another rare update for this packaged driver.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Thursday for the Linux 6.7 merge window.

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported.

The AppArmor Linux security system has picked up a few improvements and new features with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

One of the great open-source achievements for 2023 was DreamWorks Animation open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer as the OpenMoonRay project. Since then DreamWorks along with other open-source stakeholders have continued advancing this open-source renderer and today marks the release of OpenMoonRay 1.4.

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support.

While confidential computing is a hot area right now, there's been a limited amount of cross-vendor cooperation with AMD having their own route with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel designing the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) that is still available in limited form. As one improvement coming with Linux 6.7, "configfs-tsm" has been submitted for pulling as a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports.

Following some release delays the past few weeks, it's been decided today that Fedora Linux 39 is now ready to ship next week.

One of the last major blockers before the remaining real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches can be upstreamed is sorting out threaded / atomic console printing. With the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel, there's been more work upstreamed in that endeavor.

Last week with the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver, AMD removed support for Polaris and Vega GPUs from this official open-source Vulkan driver. But as mentioned this doesn't impact the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by Valve, Red Hat, and other open-source developers. In fact, this week another optimization for Vega/GFX9 was merged for Mesa 24.0-devel.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available.

Following Red Hat's decision to limit access to the RHEL source code to their customers, various RHEL-based Linux distributions were caught in a tailspin. CIQ (Rocky Linux), SUSE, and Oracle decided to form the Open Enterprise Linux association (OpenELA) to collaborate around the development of distributions with compatibility against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensuring open and free access to EL source code. Today they are announcing initial source available for their EL8 and EL9 packages.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial "request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C.

There is some interesting new Arm and RISC-V SoC support to be found in the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Overnight the mainline Linux kernel has retired support for Intel Itanium (IA-64) processors.

XWayland has added a new "-glamor" command-line argument to allow specifically choosing between OpenGL or OpenGL ES use for acceleration.

More Linux kernel code around Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) has landed with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Valve just published their October 2023 stats for the monthly Steam Survey and they point to a nearly quarter point drop in the Linux usage after previously hitting its own highs.

OpenRazer as the community-driven, open-source project providing driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux is out with a new feature release.

Since Linux 6.6 we've been seeing work upstreamed for sysctl working to remove its sentinel, the final empty element on each sysctl array. This will cut-down on around 64 bytes of bloat per array, help with kernel build times, and an all-around improvement. With Linux 6.7 more of the sysctl changes are ready and hopefully for the v6.8 kernel cycle next year the effort will be completed.

Eric Engestrom has put out another on-time Mesa release candidate for what's culminating with the Mesa 23.3 release in the coming weeks.

Following Google's plans for removing Theora codec format support from the Chrome/Chromium browser, Mozilla is also eyeing a similar move for retiring Theora from Firefox.

Bcachefs was merged for Linux 6.7 and Btrfs is seeing some shiny new features with this next kernel version. But Linux 6.7 isn't just about leading-edge file-system fun: the three decade old IBM Journaled File-System (JFS) is even seeing some minor changes.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released Fwupd 1.9.7 as the newest version of this open-source software for applying firmware updates on Linux for system firmware to various peripherals and other components.

The MMC memory card updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel have been submitted for Linux 6.7 that includes new hardware support as well as a core MMC optimization to enhance the performance in some scenarios.

Xaver Hugl who has been leading much of the KDE KWin feature development in recent years has opened up a preliminary merge request for allowing high dynamic range (HDR) enabled games to work on KDE.

Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can handle running the Diablo IV game via Valve's Steam Play but only when it hides the fact that it's Intel graphics in use via a game-specific driver workaround.

Here is a look back at the most popular open-source and Linux news and featured articles/reviews for the month prior.

All of the power management related updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Earlier this year Intel published x86-simd-sort as a very speedy sorting library that initially leveraged AVX-512 instructions for 10x to 17x faster sorts. Numpy was one of the first major projects to adopt x86-simd-sort and OpenJDK more recently adopted it. Since the initial release we've seen more features and performance optimizations added. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 4.0 and it's delivering even greater performance while also adding an AVX2 code path to help those without AVX-512.

Sent out this morning was the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature pull request of updated graphics/display drivers for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel. Notable this round is Intel Meteor Lake integrated graphics now being considered stable / enabled out-of-the-box, Intel Lunar Lake graphics support has started to get underway, and AMD continues working on their upcoming hardware platforms.

Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.

Lennart Poettering has been working on a new systemd feature called systemd-storagetm that is inspired by the Apple macOS "Target Disk Mode" feature.

The GCC 14 compiler has merged support for the Zhaoxin Yongfeng processors via the new -march=yongfeng and -mtune=yongfeng compiler options.

Merged one year ago was the initial Rust code for the Linux kernel back in Linux 6.1. We're now up to the Linux 6.7 development cycle and the enabling of more kernel functionality so it can be used/accessed from Rust code remains ongoing along with continuing to bump the base toolchain requirements and other functionality to make it more practical to write future Linux device drivers within this memory safe programming language.

Less than twenty-four hours after Bcachefs was submitted for Linux 6.7, this new open-source file-system has been successfully merged for this next kernel version.

The x86/cpu changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel have been merged and is highlighted by a small but useful change for propagating of the AMD SVM virtualization feature flag to /proc/cpuinfo.