Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the Vulkan VK_EXT_device_address_binding_report extension with Mesa 24.1.

In addition to the Linux Foundation and others starting Valkey as a fork of the open-source Redis following the upstream move to dual source-available licensing, Redict is another new fork getting established.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution.

Driven by the XZ security fiasco with malicious code aimed at remote code execution, more open-source projects are re-evaluating their dependence on XZ out of an abundance of caution. The latest to take action is the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility with LVFS that will now prefer Zstd compression instead of XZ.

Sound Open Firmware 2.9 has been released for this open-source project providing audio DSP firmware infrastructure and an adjoining SDK. This effort that started out by Intel for opening up more of their audio hardware firmware has expanded into a multi-vendor project with the likes of AMD and Mediatek also participating around this sound firmware infrastructure, audio driuvers, etc.

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation.

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired.

The PCI-SIG announced today that they have published their newest revision "version 0.5" of the forthcoming PCI Express 7.0 specification.

Mesa 24.1's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for the Wayland linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for explicit synchronization support.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 8000 series processors -- their first AMD embedded chips to offer Ryzen AI with the onboard Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This AMD XDNA NPU support is similar to the existing Ryzen AI on the Ryzen 8000 series.

Following the recent upgrade to Rust 1.77, the Linux kernel Rust code is preparing to move to Rust 1.78 that will be released as stable in about one month.

Open-source developer Luke Junes continues doing a great job near single-handedly improving ASUS laptop support for Linux users. His many improvements over time to the ASUS-WMI kernel driver has enabled new features and functionality for ASUS laptops on Linux. Sent out on Monday was the newest patch series with additional feature work to this driver.

Qt 6.7 is out as the newest feature update to this cross-platform, commercial-focused toolkit.

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.

The Simple DirectMedia Layer software/hardware abstraction layer commonly used by games and other cross-platform software is out with a new SDL 2.30.2 stable release as well as a new SDL3 preview release.

No, nothing to do with April Fools' Day, but the Steam Survey results are out for March 2024 and they put the Steam on Linux use inching up -- back closer to the Linux gaming highs of around 2%.

A new round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for the Linux 6.9 kernel. This round consists of lots of fixes for dealing with "extreme file-system damage" on this experimental open-source file-system.

Intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver will act more efficiently come the Linux 6.10 kernel this summer.

In addition to looking at the open-source/Linux highlights for Q1, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix during the month of March. During the past month were 262 original news articles on Phoronix and another 13 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There's always a lot happening from new kernel developments to exciting open-source GPU driver developments, new compiler initiatives, and a bit of a mailing list drama.

CachyOS as a reminder is the Arch Linux based distribution focused on providing a very performant out-of-the-box experience and supports x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 packages along with other default changes compared to upstream Arch Linux. The April 2024 ISO release of CachyOS is now available for those wanting to enjoy a fresh spin of this rolling-release, performance-tuned platform.

In their March status update, the Linux Mint team shares more details on their forthcoming Linux Mint 22 release that will be based off Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

A patch queued in TIP.git's "x86/cpu" branch for collecting ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel cycle adds support for handling the AMD 0x80000026 leaf to correct CPU topology information reporting for some newer AMD processors.

Adding to the Linux 6.9 features one of the changes that went under my radar is that the s390 kernel builds can now be carried out using the full LLVM compiler stack.

Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution project is hoping to be able to ship their pre-Alpha ISOs in a matter of weeks as they continue bringing up the initial desktop experience and getting more of their operating system's build tools into good shape.

With Q1'2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source content on Phoronix for the past quarter. During Q1 were 754 original news articles written by your's truly along with another 43 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's what attracted the most interest from those nearly 800 articles for the past three months.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc2 as the newest test release of Linux 6.9 that will be out as stable in mid-May.

A new release of Llamafile is available this Easter Sunday from the Mozilla Ocho group. Llamafile is a means of distributing and running large language models (LLMs) from a single file, making LLMs much easier to distribute and use by developers and end-users. Llamafile remains one of the more interesting non-browser projects out of Mozilla in recent times that so far has a bright future.

Along with AMD's upcoming hardware enablement and other Q1 code contributions, Intel's open-source engineers remained very busy this quarter as well. Intel continues upstreaming a lot of new code not only for upcoming hardware but also a lot of exciting Linux kernel features in general, various optimizations and improvements to countless open-source user-space software projects, and their other great open-source efforts in general.

With the first quarter drawing to a close, here's a recap of the most exciting AMD Linux/open-source news from the quarter. During the past three months we've seen AMD finally publish their XDNA Linux driver for open-source Ryzen AI support, their open-source HDMI driver efforts were sadly rejected by the HDMI Forum, the AMD Zen 5 "znver5" compiler support was added to GCC 14, more AMD Zen 5 Linux kernel preparations made, and various other AMD Linux driver enhancements landed.

The open-source Rust-written Redox OS has enjoyed "significant" performance and correctness improvements to its kernel recently as it further shows off the capability of this from-scratch OS.

GNU Poke 4.0 has been released after a year in development for enhancing this open-source software that serves as an interactive editor for binary data accompanied by its own procedural programming language.

Released this weekend is a new version of Flowblade, an open-source video editor for Linux systems. Flowblade brings some new features while the work to upgrade against the GTK4 toolkit remains ongoing and will hopefully be ready in 2025.

After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise.

The Servo Web Engine under the stewardship of Linux Foundation Europe and with ongoing contributions by the likes of Igalia and other developers continues having a very vibrant year. The open-source developers involved remain very busy getting this Rust-written web layout engine into good shape for possible use as an embed-friendly solution for other software.

After putting their AMD GPU powered Tinybox "on hold" only to decide a few days later to offer both AMD and NVIDIA graphics options for Tinybox compute systems, George Hotz' Tiny Corp has now shared more specifications for these planned "green" and "red" Tinybox designs.

Disclosed last August was the AMD Inception vulnerability also known as SRSO for the Speculative Return Stack Overflow. The kernel-side patches for the AMD SRSO mitigation were quickly merged. Following that were more clean-ups and fixes to the SRSO mitigation code. It's been a quiet few months since while merged on Friday was fixing some of the mitigation code due to being ineffective.

With time Microsoft's Linux kernel contributions have extended beyond just the initial business focus on Hyper-V support and other needs for Azure as well as around Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to more general contributions. Microsoft has also hired more key Linux contributors along with stakes in other projects like systemd. Earlier this week were patches from a Microsoft engineer working out Rust language improvements for the Linux kernel while now in ending out the holiday weekend are patches for making the Linux kernel language more inclusive.

A new version of Flax Engine 1.8 has been released, the open-source game engine that's available for free for non-commercial and education use but with a 4% royalty for commercial games.

KDE developers have announced the first release of Marknote, a new note-taking application for the KDE Plasma desktop.

Lead Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a big sync to upstream Mesa 24.1 for this open-source Apple Silicon OpenGL graphics driver.

For the weekly "This Week In KDE" development summary, developer Nate Graham highlighted the opt-in DrKonqi crash reporting wizard. Thanks in part to that opt-in automatic crash reporting, details were gathered for fixing at least three important crashes within Plasma 6 this week.

Today's disclosure of XZ upstream release packages containing malicious code to compromise remote SSH access has certainly been an Easter weekend surprise... The situation only looks more bleak over time with how the upstream project was compromised while now the latest twist is GitHub disabling the XZ repository in its entirety.

AMD GPUOpen's Orochi project as a reminder is the effort for allowing dynamic runtime switching between the Radeon HIP and NVIDIA CUDA APIs to allow better cross-GPU portability. Today marks the availability of Orochi 2.0 for enhancing this API to target NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP hardware.

Red Hat today issued an "urgent security alert" for Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide users over XZ. Yes, the XZ tools and libraries for this compression format. Some malicious code was added to XZ 5.6.0/5.6.1 that could allow unauthorized remote system access.

Fedora 39 had hoped to use the DNF5 package manager by default as the next iteration of this package management solution for RPM-based distributions. But DNF5 wasn't ready and then delayed to Fedora 41 -- skipping over the Fedora 40 series due to the RHEL 10 branching from it and not wanting the very new DNF5 to be part of that merge. Now the change proposal has been re-filed for introducing DNF5 by default in Fedora 41.

Merged on Thursday to GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the linux-drm-syncobj-v1 Wayland protocol that is used to handle the global migration to explicit synchronization.

Intel is ending out the month and quarter with the latest update to its open-source Compute Runtime and Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code that enables OpenCL and Level Zero support on Linux systems and is also used by their Windows driver too.

CodeWeavers' Elizabeth Figura has been working on the NTSYNC driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel in order to help the performance of various Windows games running on Linux by the likes of Wine / Valve's Proton (Steam Play). The third iteration of that driver was posted overnight as it seeks to go into the mainline Linux kernel.