Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues.

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core.

With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs.

AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program.

While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu.

Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release.

Intel engineers have been working on enabling NPEM for Linux: Native PCIe Enclosure Management as a means of standardized storage LED indicators.

Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof.

Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension.

The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers.

Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update.

Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago.

Last month I wrote about Intel Linux engineers working on a new Efficiency Latency Control feature for their uncore driver. This ELC option allows for adjusting the behavior of the Intel uncore for efficiency versus latency characteristics. Those Intel ELC patches to the TPMI uncore driver are now queued up for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle.

Excitement is building that the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support might finally be ready for the mainline kernel as soon as the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. It will be interesting to see if that long-awaited day finally comes this month but recently noted patches have now been queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/rt" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window.

Redox OS 0.9 has been released today as a big update to this from-scratch Rust-written open-source operating system.

Earlier this summer KDE began soliciting ideas for what their goals should be over the next 2~3 years. This weekend at their annual Akademy KDE developer conference their next round of goals were solidified.

While Intel Lunar Lake is only beginning to ship later this month, Intel Linux engineers have already begun work on enabling its successor: Panther Lake. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be more early enablement work on Intel Panther Lake, presumably what will be the Core Ultra 300 series.

Miracle-WM 0.3.5 was released this weekend as the newest step forward for this Mir-based window manager / Wayland compositor developed by a Canonical engineer. Miracle-WM continues being polished ahead of the upcoming Fedora Miracle Spin debuting as part of Fedora 41.

OpenJPH v0.16 has been released as the newest version of this open-source implementation of High-Throughput JPEG2000 (HTJK), also known as JPH / JPEG2000 Part 15. With this new release comes faster performance thanks to making use of Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to complement its existing AVX-512 code.

Hyprland 0.43 is out as the newest version of this independent, very customizable Wayland compositor focused on providing a dynamic tiling experience.

The GNOME 47 release candidate was announced a short time ago in preparing for the stable GNOME 47 stable desktop coming up.

Following recent international travels, Linus Torvalds is back to his usual late Sunday Linux kernel release regiment. Linux 6.11-rc7 was released a few minutes ago as Linux 6.11 approaches the finish line.

The work written about earlier this year on New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle as the patches have now been queued into the power management subsystem's "-next" branch. This latest Intel Core hybrid handling work is particularly focused on hybrid P/E-core processors without SMT / Hyper Threading, such as found with the upcoming Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors.

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.

While RISC-V processors don't need to worry about Meltdown and Spectre or have any other severe CPU vulnerabilities at the moment, with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the RISC-V code is set to enable the generic CPU vulnerabilities support.

Merged three years ago in Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for new use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. IDMAPPED mounts allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership such as for sharing files between multiple users or multiple systems. With time all of the major Linux file-systems have seen support added for IDMAPPED mounts while for Linux 6.12 support is on the way for FUSE file-systems.

While KDE developers this weekend are busy attending Akademy 2024 as their annual developer conference taking place in Würzburg, Germany, prior to that there were a few last minute features merged for the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop.

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.17 with its latest improvements for enjoying Windows games/apps on Linux, Hangover 9.17 is now out. Hangover as a reminder is the Wine-based effort for running Windows x86 applications under ARM64 Linux by leveraging Wine with emulators like QEMU, FEX, and Box64 for the cross CPU architecture handling.

While C tends to be the go-to launguage for microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi is promoting the prospects of using Rust on their RP2350 microcontroller.

The Slimbook crew shared on Twitter/X that they are showing off the new Slimbook 6 (Slimbook VI) laptop this weekend during the KDE Akademy conference taking place in the wonderful Würzburg, Germany. This new Slimbook laptop features an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS SoC and of course uses the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment out-of-the-box.

Ahead of GNOME 47's imminent release, Matthias Clasen has released GTK 4.16 as the newest exciting update to this toolkit powering GNOME software. Notable with GTK 4.16 is the GSK renderer defaulting to its Vulkan back-end when running on Wayland.

We are just a week or two out from the start of the Linux 6.12 merge window and AMD has submitted a final round of feature updates to DRM-Next of kernel graphics driver changes they want to round out AMDGPU/AMDKFD for this next cycle.

Cairo 1.18.2 released this week nearly one year after Cairo 1.18's debut for this cross-platform 2D vector graphics library -- in turn that was the project's first stable release in five years. Cairo is important for the GTK toolkit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, and dozens of other software projects. With Cairo 1.18.2 there are many fixes that have accumulated over the past year for bettering this graphics library.

Wine 9.17 is out today as quite an exciting update for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and other platforms.

Intel has submitted more kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. Following the pull requests to DRM-Next last week to enable Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default, some more lingering feature patches were merged today. Most exciting with this last round of patches before Linux 6.12? Intel graphics card fan speed reporting is finally wired up for their Linux driver.

Back in 2022 were a set of patches that allowed compiling the ARM64 Linux kernel from Apple macOS hosts. The intent was for developers just wanting to do some build/smoke testing from under an Apple Silicon device running macOS to see at least any kernel changes are successfully compiling on macOS with its LLVM/Clang-based toolchain. An updated form of those patches were posted today for review.

With this week's announcement of the Intel Core Ultra 200V Series "Lunar Lake" processors, I've been very eager to try out the Meteor Lake successor for Linux testing. As sadly is usually the case, for delivering Linux support details and performance benchmarks around launch-time I'm typically left buying a laptop retail for Linux testing. In this case after seeing the Lunar Lake laptops announced this week and their availability, I ended up settling on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) for the initial Core Ultra 200V series Linux review.

We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support.

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels.

It's taken until now to add FreeBSD to the X.Org Continuous Integration (CI) automated testing so that all proposed changes to the X.Org Server can now be build-tested on FreeBSD rather than just Linux.

FEX 2409 has been released for this open-source project that's known for allowing x86_64 Linux binaries -- including both games and applications -- to run rather well on AArch64. It's also been working on enabling x86_64 programs on RISC-V but there due to architectural differences it's more of a challenge than with ARM.

Back in 2018 Oracle introduced Libresource as a standardized API for accessing system resource information around memory / network / device statistics and other metrics. Libresource v2 was announced this week as largely a rewrite of the project.

Following the recently covered patches on Phoronix that enabled Intel Xe2 graphics out-of-the-box / by-default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage with the Mesa 24.3-devel Git code, Mesa 24.2.2 is out today in stable form that back-ports these Xe2 support changes.

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise.

Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year.

Ah the memories of old AGP graphics cards... But it's largely just that these days: distant memories. For anyone by chance still running an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) graphics card in production, FreeBSD is looking at deprecating its generic AGP driver and then potentially removing it in FreeBSD 15.0.

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit.

With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware.

Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support.