Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

On this last day of the Linux 6.3 kernel merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the patch dropping support for Intel (ICC) compiler support. Specifically this is Intel's long-standing ICC compiler now known as the "Intel C++ Compiler Classic" prior to its transition to being LLVM/Clang-based with the modern Intel DPC++ compiler.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76.

Ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc1 release later today, a set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out Sunday morning that include the change to allow Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) to be used in the presence of legacy Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for security reasons.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.3 is a new release of Wine-Staging, the experimental/testing blend of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine-Staging 8.3 carries more than 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

While GNOME 3.32 saw initial work on fractional scaling support for the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor, the upcoming GNOME 44 release is bringing support for Wayland's fractional_scale_v1 protocol.

AMD in February quietly released version 1.1 of their in-development Unified Inference Front-end "UIF" that aims to be their catch-all solution for AI inference from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and other IP from their recent Xilinx acquisition.

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a set of patches to fix a glaring performance issue affecting Skylake/Gen9 era graphics with the cross-platform GravityMark benchmark.

Yesterday saw GNOME Shell and Mutter drop the last of their GTK3 dependence while today there is another interesting change to mention on the Mutter compositor side... An experimental option for enabling some HDR modes with supported high dynamic range displays.

This week KDE Plasma's development branched to Qt6-only and a lot of other development happenings around Plasma 6.0 occurred.

Wine 8.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Intel announced today it has cancelled Rialto Bridge and Lancaster Sound development while shifting its Max Series focus to their Falcon Shores XPU that is now set to ship in 2025.

The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3.

If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support.

There should be "slight improvements for I/O performance" coming to Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids servers on a future kernel release with a patch having surfaced to remove a check that led to these newer processors not seeing HWP I/O boosting enabled.

Merged last cycle was a big Zstd update for Linux 6.2 that took the kernel's Zstandard compression/decompression implementation to match that of upstream v1.5 after being stuck in the v1.4 series for more than a year. Following that, Zstd 1.5.4 was released last month. The hope was Zstd 1.5.4 would quickly follow into the mainline kernel while that is now delayed to Linux 6.4 and for the 6.3 kernel cycle seeing just a few fixes.

A set of patches sent out this morning lay out the initial foundation for RISC-V auto-vectorization support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Posted today was the "v1" patch series implementing threaded/atomic console infrastructure for printk. This is one of the last steps needed before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined into the Linux kernel.

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed package has begun rolling out a new "patterns-glibc-hwcaps-x86_64_v3" package that is automatically installed on supported systems and allows for automatically installing "recommended" x86-64-v3 optimized packages where available in the name of enjoying greater performance.

For those doing large Linux kernel builds such as with the "allyesconfig" build option for including as many of the available drivers as possible into the assembled Linux kernel image, objtool improvements ready to go with Linux 6.3 should cut down on the RAM usage and also speed-up the kernel build time. These improvements were motivated by Linux kernel developers beginning to run out of memory when trying to carry out the "allyesconfig" kernel builds on desktops with 32GB of RAM.

Going back to 2016 Intel began work on the SoundWire support for Linux, the MIPI standard started in 2014 to help consolidate audio interfaces between PC and mobile hardware. In preparation for seemingly new AMD hardware coming to market with SoundWire support, AMD engineers recently began working on an AMD SoundWire driver.

While the open-source Mesa 3D drivers are most well known for use on Linux, they are used by other platforms too like Haiku, the BSDs, and even Microsoft Windows with WSL and the like. For those making use of the Mesa 3D drivers on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system to enjoy OpenGL support, merged for Mesa 23.1 is an improved EGL implementation for that platform.

A lot of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates were merged for the Linux 6.3 cycle to further enhance the open-source virtualization stack.

Following last week's SoC and platform updates that included mainlining of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 support, new Qualcomm 5G RAN platform support, and many more Arm boards being enabled, this week saw the SoC driver updates now submitted.

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for the month prior and it points to Steam on Linux as a percentage dropping as well as a similar pullback in the Steam Deck hardware usage.

Earlier this week Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.3 kernel merge window.

Following a three month lull, last week Intel got back to releasing Compute-Runtime and IGC compiler updates. They have been working to shift to a monthly release cadence while during this transition period they needed extra time as it also rolled out some compiler/runtime interface changes. Now back into their swing of things, for kicking off the new month they have the Compute Runtime 22.53.25242.13 release.

The Godot engine developers are starting off March with a bang... The much anticipated Godot 4.0 engine that has been in development for years has been released as stable!

An updated scheduler model for Intel Alder Lake P processors has been merged into the LLVM compiler after finding some differences compared to Intel's documentation/guidance.

In addition to the in-development Apple M1/M2 DRM kernel graphics/display driver being written in Rust, there is now a second graphics-related kernel driver seeing early work in Rust. The existing VGEM driver is being rewritten in the Rust programming language.

Microsoft engineers continue to work heavily on enhancing the Linux support for Hyper-V considering that in the Azure public cloud at last report was more than 50% of their VMs running Linux. Microsoft has continued implementing more Hyper-V features within the Linux kernel and their latest is working on Virtual Trust Level (VTL) integration as part of Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) handling.

A few months back the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver added TearFree page-flipping support. The option eliminates screen tearing without the use of a compositor and was seen as a win by many for this generic DDX driver that works atop the modern DRM/KMS kernel drivers. But a rather annoying issue was discovered that could lead to audio/video synchronization problems was uncovered and is now fixed in the latest driver code.

Loongson engineers continue working to improve their MIPS64-derived, RISC-V-inspired LoongArch CPU architecture code. With the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel are yet more improvements, including now supporting Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for better security.

The BFQ I/O scheduler has long been suited well for MMC/SD card storage devices with a single queue now finally with Linux 6.3 the Kconfig setup will suggest/imply that I/O scheduler to help ensure it gets built.

While a short month there still were 243 original news articles on Phoronix written by your's truly about various open-source and Linux topics. There were also nine additional Linux hardware reviews looking at the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, the long-awaited NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance results, and more. Here is a look back at what excited open-source/Linux enthusiasts in February.

With the Fedora Linux change completion deadline passed, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has been eyeing up their approved list to see what didn't make the cut for Fedora 38 that is due out in April.

After publishing their initial Quantum software development kit beta last year, Intel today released the Quantum SDK 1.0 version to help grow the developer ecosystem for quantum computing.

NVIDIA today released their first beta driver in the R530 driver series for Linux users.

While in recent days there has been much talk around the new, experimental and currently out-of-tree SSDFS file-system for NVMe ZNS drives, when it comes to a modern flash-optimized Linux file-system today, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues handling that space well and has been battle-tested via deployment on Android devices and more. With Linux 6.3, F2FS continues to be refined with more fixes and other minor enhancements.

The HP Dev One Linux laptop is now sold-out and the production on it has ended. The HP Dev One that launched last year was the very interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for coming out with a Linux laptop catering to developers and running Pop!_OS.

With the EXT4 file-system being quite mature at this stage, with many kernel cycles these days this widely-used file-system just sees bug fixes and other minor work. But for the newly-opened Linux 6.3 cycle, EXT4 is seeing a nice performance boost under certain conditions with direct I/O.

As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release.

Making its debut today as their latest open-source project receiving optimizations for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Intel has rolled out ISPC 1.19 as their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler.