Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Following last week's Linux 6.8 power management updates, Linux PM/ACPI subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent out a secondary set of changes this morning. Most notable with this second round of power management material is allowing Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors to clock higher with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.8 kernel were the platform driver x86 updates, which include a lot of new AMD Ryzen and Intel Core platform support and new laptop functionality.

IO_uring creator and Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe spent about five minutes working on two patches to implement caching for issue-side time querying in the block layer and can yield 6% or more better I/O performance.

A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language. His early results are interesting and hopeful around the potential of a Rust-based scheduler that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time.

Merged back at the start of the Linux 6.8 merge window were the VFS mount API updates that introduce two new system calls: statmount() and listmount() for reading more detailed information about file-system mounts.

It was in 2013 a security researcher called the X.Org Server security state "worse than it looks" and quite a disaster from the security/bug perspective for the aging codebase. A decade later there's still no shortage of security vulnerabilities being uncovered within the X.Org Server.

As the first new tagged version of AMD's AOMP LLVM-based OpenMP-focused compiler for offloading to their Instinct / Radeon GPUs, AOMP 18.0-1 was released today with many changes.

Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner that is used for a variety of purposes from Azure to WSL has seen its first release of 2024. While the distribution has at times released up to a few new versions per month, there hadn't been a new release since late November given the holidays.

SQLite 3.45 was released today with the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ optimization being enabled by default that can help for apps relying on SQLite and doing a lot of reads of large BLOBs or strings deliver better read performance. There are also query planner improvements while most interesting with SQLite 3.45 is all JSON functions being rewritten to use the new JSONB format.

In addition to the GNOME triple buffering patches that still haven't been merged to Mutter's mainline branch, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upstream Debian are slated to currently carry a few extra performance optimizations.

While not as notable as the Bcachefs additions, more work on XFS online repair, and other file-system updates for Linux 6.8, the Btrfs file-system driver changes for Linux 6.8 were merged last week.

Libvirt as the virtualization API/toolkit developed by Red Hat for managing virtualization on Linux is out today with its v10.0 release.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but openSUSE today reaffirmed that openSUSE Leap 16 will succeed the current Leap 15 series. OpenSUSE Leap 16 will be based on SUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) codebase.

Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game.

Merged last week to the mainline kernel were all of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem driver updates for the Linux 6.8 cycle, which includes introducing the Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO driver.

Tom Stellard announced plans this past week for releasing the LLVM 18 compiler stack in early March.

KDE e.V. as the German legal organization behind the KDE project is hiring an employee for a new project to promote environmentally-sustainable software and long-term hardware use.

Prior to Linus Torvalds' Internet and electricity being knocked out by a snow storm and thus impacting the Linux 6.8 merge window, his weekend was already in rough shape due to encountering a performance regression with new Linux 6.8 code that was causing his Linux kernel builds to be as twice as long as with previous kernels. An AMD Linux engineer was able to reproduce the regression and with upstream developers there is now a believed fix for this issue in the latest scheduler code.

All of the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) subsystem updates were sent out this week for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel.

Following the recent release of GRUB 2.12, another prominent open-source bootloader project is also out with a new release: Limine 7.0.

Following last month's release of Fedora Asahi Remix 39 for the Asahi Linux project's new flagship distribution for running on Apple Silicon hardware, a lengthy blog post was posted this weekend outlining some of the ongoing development efforts for Apple Silicon on Linux and newly-enabled Fedora Asahi capabilities.

There seems to be two classes of people when reminiscing over Adobe Flash: those that were fond of Flash-games of the time from many years ago and those that cringe over recalling Flash ads and other content requiring that prior proprietary Macromedia/Adobe tech. For those that have good memories from Adobe Flash, the Ruffle open-source project continues working to this day on an Adobe Flash Player emulator.

Linus Torvalds just announced he's had to put the Linux 6.8 merge window on hold due to a brutal winter storm knocking the Pacific Northwest.

Lutris 0.5.15 has been released as the newest version of this open-source game manager that allows managing games from within Steam, GOG, various retro game console / emulator solutions, and other sources.

The latest open-source project eyeing the possibility of beginning to allow the Rust programming language to be used within its codebase is the Git project.

The KVM virtualization changes for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is quite heavy on the feature side.

Fedora 40 is looking at shipping the AMD ROCm 6.x GPU compute stack to offer "end-to-end open-source GPU acceleration" with ease for this Red Hat funded Linux distribution.

Intel engineer Dan Williams continues leading the charge around Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel.

After a few weeks hiatus due to the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back in the saddle with his weekly development reports around KDE.

The fifth release candidate of Wine 9.0 is now available for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, Chrome OS, and other platforms.

While most modern desktop Linux distributions have migrated over to PipeWire for the roles once handled by PulseAudio (and JACK, among others), for those still relying on the PulseAudio sound server the PulseAudio 17.0 release was made available today.

While the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.8 excitingly include the new Intel "Xe" DRM and PowerVR Imagination drivers, AMD color management properties in experimental form, Raspberry Pi 5 graphics support, and more, Linus Torvalds isn't happy with some of the new Intel Xe driver code.

Pengutronix a short time ago on the Linux kernel mailing list announced the Open ISOBUS FileServer (FS) and Client Implementation... Piquing my interest, I looked up this ISO 11783-13 standard that this file server aims to implement, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.

If you happen to be impacted by snow storms today or otherwise have extra time on your hands this weekend, GNOME 46 Alpha is now available for testing this latest desktop environment that will be going head-to-head with KDE Plasma 6.0 later this quarter.

One of the features sadly not having made it in time for the Linux v6.8 kernel merge window is the AMD P-State Preferred Core support. This is about being able to properly communicate to the kernel and scheduler about "preferred cores" such as cases of some CPU cores having higher maximum frequencies or better performance characteristics than others. This is becoming more important with AMD Ryzen processors beginning to see a combination of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores and other cases like AMD 3D V-Cache enabled processors where some cores would be preferred over others for performance sensitive work.

Linux Mint 21.3 is now available for the latest version of this easy-to-use, beginner-friendly desktop Linux distribution that is currently built atop an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS package base.

The read-only EROFS open-source file-system continues to prove quite popular for Android mobile devices as well as containerized environments. With the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel EROFS adds initial support for sub-page compressed data support.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.42 released this week as the high performance Java Virtual Machine spun out from the IBM J9 JVM.

Intel has prepared additional Trust Domain Extensions enablement code for the ongoing Linux 6.8 kernel merge window.

In addition to the Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.8, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have also been separately submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window.

This week prior to the Mesa 24.0 feature freeze / code branching, a notable merge request landed that had been worked on the past few months by one of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver developers.

The System76 crew has put out a new blog post outlining the work ahead toward their upcoming alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment and in turn the Pop!_OS 24.04 release expected to happen "over the summer".

While on Fedora and other Linux distributions it can be as easy as running "pip3 install torch" or similar for deploying the PyTorch machine learning framework, Fedora 40 is looking at packaging PyTorch on its own for enhancing the Fedora Linux user experience.

All of the ARM SoC and platform driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel that include bringing up the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, enabling various low-cost gaming handheld console devices, finally upstreaming Google Tensor G1 support, and other hardware additions.

As part of the Red Hat led effort for making XWayland's rootful mode more useful and the ability to run X11 desktop sessions within XWayland as part of RHEL 10 dropping the X.Org Server support besides XWayland, a new "-output" option was added to XWayland for better control over placement of rootful fullscreen windows.

Intel Compute Runtime 23.39.27427.23 has been released today as the newest version of this open-source GPU compute stack for Windows and Linux systems for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. The Compute Runtime works from aging Broadwell and Skylake/Gen9 graphics up through the latest DG2 discrete graphics and the recently launched Meteor Lake processors with their much improved integrated graphics.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel display/graphics driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel. As expected and to much excitement, the experimental new Xe kernel graphics driver is included for introduction in Linux 6.8 as well as the Imagination PowerVR driver for select Rogue GPUs. Plus there's new AMDGPU driver additions and other improvements with this pull, including the initial AMD color management code.

Mesa 24.0 feature development has concluded for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers most notably for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics on Linux but also an increasing number of smaller drivers, like for Apple Silicon, the NVK / Nouveau drivers, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan, and more.

Linux 6.8 is continuing the work toward allowing the sysctl sentinel to be removed, the final empty element on sysctl arrays. This ongoing effort will in turn allow for saving an extra 64 bytes on each sysctl array and will enhance the build time size of the kernel.

With it being nearly one year since the release of Qt 6.5 LTS and Qt 6.6 having debuted in October, The Qt Company has now put Qt 6.5 LTS into its commercial-only phase with today's Qt 6.5.4 release.

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year.