Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

A release plan has been drafted for the upcoming GNU C Library "glibc" 2.39 release as well as some possible last minute changes.

The AMD Address Translation Library (ATL) is cleaning up and centralizing existing code within the Linux kernel for Zen-based systems. After being reviewed on the kernel mailing list, the AMD ATL is set to be introduced as part of the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Given the pace of hardware support and improvements these days, it's rather sad Linux Mint 21.3 continues to default to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel that is the non-HWE default of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for which the operating system is based. But at least Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are being rolled out to make Linux 6.2 easily available for those with newer hardware support requirements.

While years ago it was hard envisioning Microsoft contributing significantly to the Linux kernel or Mesa 3D graphics driver stack, maintaining its own in-house Linux distribution, or publishing so much open-source software, these days it's par for the course thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Linux dominating Azure instances, etc. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft continued investing in various Linux/open-source efforts that benefit their cause.

When it comes to new BSD milestones to look forward to in 2024, one of the big releases on deck is that of NetBSD 10.0 that has been in development since 2019. Now available for testing is the second release candidate of NetBSD 10.

Not only is Canonical exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds for targeting Intel and AMD processors with AVX/AVX2 support, but Red Hat has publicly confirmed now they are exploring a possible x86-64-v3 requirement for next year's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

Intel along with investment firm DigitalBridge Group announced the formation today of Articul8, an independent company to focus on turn-key Generative AI "GenAI" for enterprise customers and focused on enterprise workflows.

Last month LVFS/Fwupd celebrated serving more than 100 million firmware updates to Linux users while today Fwupd 1.9.11 has shipped as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating solution.

While Wine (and downstreams like Valve's Proton) allow many newer Windows games and applications to run very well on modern Linux systems even when it comes to recent Direct3D 12 games and the like, sometimes it's the older games/apps that can be more of a headache to workaround bugs in the software and other aging relics. One of the latest issues leading to an upstream Linux kernel discussion is over the game Nuclear Strike first published in 1997 for Microsoft Windows 98 in trying to get it running with Wine on Linux.

With Linux 6.6, the mainline kernel finally landed support for Shadow Stack on Intel/AMD CPUs that was originally rolled out as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for better fending off ROP attacks. The GNU C Library "glibc" was recently updated with some changes around the CET / Shadow Stack support.

Overnight Intel released their newest quarterly updates to their Intel Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux systems as well as their updated oneVPL video processing library that is part of their oneAPI software stack and leveraging the Intel Media Driver.

An important Linux kernel patch series has been updated for the new year that in synthetic tests has yielded a ~12x throughput improvement on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system.

Out today in kicking off the new year is a new release of Vim, the powerful screen-based text editor.

A patch for the HP-WMI Linux kernel driver sent out on New Year's Eve aims to allow for better HP OMEN 17 laptop Linux performance by altering the thermal profile behavior so that the OMEN "8BAD" laptop can run at a higher TDP than what's otherwise permitted by the system's embedded controller (EC) without throttling.

Following the 2023 highlights for Intel and AMD on Linux, here's a look back at the most popular Linux-related NVIDIA news for the past calendar year.

While we are now into 2024, AMDVLK 2023.Q4.3 was released today as a final EOY2023 update to this open-source AMD Vulkan driver that was supposed to be out last week but presumably got delayed due to the holidays.

Queued in the kernel's crypto subsystem development tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window is introducing support for next-gen Intel QAT accelerators. The Intel QAT 420xx devices will support more acceleration engines as well as additional algorithms for next-generation QuickAssist Technology.

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular systemd stories on Phoronix for the past year.

The third merge request in the series addressing ongoing TGSI to NIR intermediate representation conversions has landed in Mesa 24.0-devel for the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Ahead of Linux 6.7 releasing next weekend, there's another set of Bcachefs file-system driver fixes on their way to the mainline kernel.

The Steam Survey results are out for December 2023 and the Linux gaming marketshare is at nearly 2%.

The SDL3 library commonly used by cross-platform games and heavily relied upon by Steam continues to be under heavy development at the start of 2024.

After looking earlier today at the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source stories of 2023, here's a look at the other side of the table with the most popular Intel content on Phoronix for the past year with my daily open-source and Linux focused coverage.

The Wayland ecosystem had a phenomenal year from much better NVIDIA proprietary driver support, Firefox ending out the year shipping with Wayland support enabled by default, KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland following many improvements on the KDE side, the Wine Wayland driver upstreamed in its initial form, XWayland continuing to be enhanced, and a lot of other software from desktop environments to apps continuing to embrace Wayland.

As part of the various end-of-year Phoronix articles, here's a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news stories and reviews of 2023.

While the Linux 6.8 merge window isn't opening for another week, the Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have already been mailed in to Linus Torvalds for this next merge window.

Picked up this week by the Linux sound subsystem's "next" development branch is a number of additions to the Scarlett USB audio mixer driver for supporting this audio hardware under Linux.

Over the course of 2023 on Phoronix were more than 2,780 original news articles and more than 180 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. In the month of December alone were 211 original news articles and 20 featured articles/reviews. Here's a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source crowd over the final month of 2023.

For this New Year's Eve the decision was made to release Linux 6.7-rc8 to allow for an extra week of testing -- and pushing back the Linux 6.8 merge window further past the holidays -- rather than releasing Linux 6.7 stable today. As such, Linux 6.7-rc8 is out for a final week of testing this new kernel.

OpenCV 4.9 released on Friday as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library.

The GNU Boot project has been in the works as a Coreboot/Libreboot fork focused on "freedom respecting boot firmware" that is free from closed-source and proprietary components. But in working towards its inaugural v0.1 release, they discovered that they had inadvertently been shipping some non-free software around AMD CPU microcode updates and some motherboard ports with non-open-source code.

This New Year's weekend brought the latest AMD patches working on plumbing the mainline Linux kernel with the hypervisor support around AMD Secure Nested Paging (SNP) as part of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). SEV-SNP has been supported since EPYC 7003 series and while some elements of the support have been upstreamed for securing VMs, some bits remain.

With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator.

The Xiph.Org project Rav1e to provide the fastest and safest AV1 encoder by leveraging the Rust programming language is ending out 2023 with a new feature release.

Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics.

In addition to Ubuntu exploring the possibility of x86_64-v3 builds/packages, a proposal has been raised for Fedora Linux with its current Fedora 40 cycle to provide the ability to offer optimized x86_64 (AMD64) binaries based upon the CPU's x86_64 micro-architecture feature level.

ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles.

Added last year to the open-source compilers were Intel RAO-INT instructions for upcoming Intel CPUs. RAO-INT as new atomic ADD / AND / OR / XOR instructions were to debut with Intel's Grand Ridge SoC but now that is apparently no longer the case.

Merged on Friday for Mesa 24.0-devel in Q1 is support for the VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix extension with Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.

LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 Focal is out today as the UBport's latest release of this Ubuntu mobile adaptation for smartphones and tablets. This is the third release to be based on their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, which is quite aging at this point but still better off than their earlier 16.04 LTS foundation.

The Gentoo Linux project's Portage package manager has long supported the ability to deal with binary packages while moving forward they are finally leveraging that to offer binary packages for download and direct installation.