Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs.

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems.

As what's likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift.

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the IAA crypto compression driver for allowing users of the Linux kernel's compression API to make use of the Intel Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found with Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids Xeon server processors.

While much of the focus by Linux desktops as we roll into 2024 is polishing off their Wayland support, there does exist a rather innovative display server out there that's been in the works for years: Arcan. Arcan is the open-source project built atop a game engine and provides a display server paired with a real-time multimedia framework for audio and video. Arcan can be used from embedded purposes through full desktop solutions and can also interact with Wayland and X11 as well as embracing VR. Arcan 0.6.3 was released today along with the announcement that they've taken on some funding.

By now you've likely heard how Intel's Gaudi2 accelerator hardware is standing up very well against the NVIDIA competition especially in value. There's nothing new there but an important part to keep in mind -- and where Intel is the hands-down winner -- is the open-source ecosystem with having a fully open-source and upstream Linux kernel accelerator driver as well as their SynapseAI open-source components in user-space. The Gaudi2 open-source kernel driver support is now considered "very stable at this point" with the upstream state fairing well.

Yesterday the initial code for supporting the Alliance For Open Media's Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) was merged for the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.

The Nintendo HID open-source driver is being extended with the Linux 6.8 kernel to support the Nintendo Switch Online "NSO" controllers.

Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!

Shotcut 23.12 debuted this weekend as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editing solution for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems.

All the pieces have been aligned that the mainline Linux 6.8 kernel should be able to boot on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC without any out-of-tree patches being necessary.

While Intel Meteor Lake processors only launched last week, Intel Linux engineers have already been busy for some time enabling next-generation Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors.

A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is "gigabyte_waterforce" as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers.

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV's Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won't be too much longer before being upstreamed.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared a status update on the current state of HDR support for the KDE Plasma desktop.

Linux 6.7-rc6 was released today while the final release of Linux 6.7 is likely to come New Year's weekend and complicating the opening of the Linux 6.8 merge window around the end-of-year holidays.

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced.

While not talked about as much as the AMD open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux, AMD's multimedia stack on Linux continues to be improved upon for supporting new use-cases with AMD-based Linux deployments continuing to come up in the embedded space for all different applications like in-vehicle infotainment systems. The newest AMD video acceleration feature to now be wired up to their open-source Mesa code is enabling region of interest (ROI) encoding functionality.

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver.

A new Long-Term Support version of Cloud Hypervisor was released this week, which is the open-source project originally started by Intel as a cloud-focused and Rust-written VMM that now has wide industry backing including from multiple other CPU vendors.

Back in October the Milk-V Oasis mITX board was announced with this RISC-V board being powered by a 16-core Sophgo SG2380 SoC featuring SiFive-designed cores: 12 P cores and four E cores. While that Milk-V Oasis board isn't expected to ship until Q3'2024, Milk-V shared this week that the SG2380 RISC-V SoC has been revised with additional capabilities.

As part of Intel's ongoing quest for maximizing the compute performance of their GPUs/accelerators, their compiler engineers have proposed introducing a XeGPU dialect for LLVM's MLIR.

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward.

A change merged to the X.Org Server Git for the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver is helping conserve some power consumption at least for Intel graphics by determining the optimal hardware cursor size.

On Friday in addition to Intel submitting their new Xe kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.8, the red team sent in their latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes ahead of this next kernel cycle. Exciting on the AMD side is landing the AMD color management properties support! But on the downside, it's compile-time disabled for the time being.

Manjaro 23.1 was released overnight as the newest version of this popular Arch Linux based desktop Linux distribution.

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems.

KDE developers remain very busy working toward the release of the Plasma 6 desktop in late February.

As I wrote about last week that Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it's indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer -- both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators.

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024.

Earlier this month at AMD's AI event in San Francisco they announced ROCm 6.0 while launching the MI300X and MI300A accelerators. While announced back on the 6th, today marks the actual availability of ROCm 6.0 with the source code and binaries now publicly available.

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment.

A quirk has been discovered with the AMD-powered Framework 13 inch laptop where if a user closes the laptop's lid on an already-suspended system, the system will wake up. A set of Linux kernel patches are on the way to workaround this issue.

Intel's VC Intrinsics software package that provides a set of intrinsics atop the LLVM IR instructions to represent SIMD semantics for programs targeting Intel GPUs has been updated for new hardware support.

Tim Holmes-Mitra with Canonical has shared some roadmap highlights for the Ubuntu desktop with the in-development Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

While some at Intel were busy launching the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids", other Linux engineers at the company were pushing ahead on their new hardware enablement quest for future platforms. Sent out on the same day as Emerald Rapids being announced were continued patches for enabling Grand Ridge.

In addition to Fedora 40 applying systemd hardening settings to bolster system security, another security enhancement now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is on having the linker error out on encountering possible security issues.

It's been two weeks since Mesa 23.3 was punctually released and this week has been succeeded by the Mesa 23.3.1 point release with the first batch of bug/regression fixes.

Fedora 40 is planning to provide more hardened system security by leveraging some high level security features provided by systemd.

Back in September AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) and at the time they noted the open-source code would be made available "soon". As a nice Christmas present, the FSR3 source code is public as of today.

While Intel's AI Everywhere event today was primarily focused on Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptop processors and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors, Intel also briefly announced their newest Xeon D and Xeon E series processors.

There's been nothing new on the BUS1 front this year for capability-based IPC within the Linux kernel... In fact, the BUS1 out-of-tree kernel module has gone untouched for years now. But out of the BUS1 project has been Dbus-Broker for a high performance D-Bus message broker in user-space that doesn't break existing D-Bus compatibility. Out today is the newest version of that project closely tied to systemd developers.

The unofficial "ALHP" repositories for Arch Linux have begun offering an x86-64-v4 tuned repository for packages built against this current highest x86-64 micro-architecture feature level for the latest Intel and AMD processors with AVX-512 support.

While there has been much talk this year about KDE Plasma 6.0 on the desktop as it gears up for release at the end of February, there's been less talk about the Plasma Mobile work for having the KDE stack on smartphones. But it turns out some progress is quietly being made on KDE Plasma Mobile for bringing it aligned with the "6" platform.

For those that were interested in the openSUSE logo contest, the voting wrapped up on Tuesday and the results of this logo contest for new openSUSE branding have been selected.