Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Open 3D Engine 23.05 Released With Many New Features

It's been just under two years since Amazon's Lumberyard game engine was spun into the Open 3D Engine and the Open 3D Foundation established under the Linux Foundation. Today the project is celebrating its newest open-source game engine update with Open 3D Engine 23.05.

X.Org Foundation To Become Part Of The SFC

X.Org members have approved of the X.Org Foundation letting the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) become its fiscal sponsor.

AMD SoundWire Merged For Linux 6.4

Going back to 2016 Intel began working on MIPI SoundWire support for Linux and now in 2023, AMD has joined the party with their initial AMD SoundWire support driver landing in the mainline kernel.

Printk Changes For Linux 6.4 Are Light With Still Waiting For Threaded/Atomic Console

The printk code changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window and it's notable not for what is in the pull request but rather what is still outstanding.

GPUOpen's Render Pipeline Shaders 1.1 Released With Linux Support

At the end of last year AMD's GPUOpen group released the Render Pipeline Shaders "RPS" SDK for graphics applications and engines leveraging Direct3D 12 or Vulkasn as an open-source render graph framework. On Wednesday the Render Pipeline Shaders SDK 1.1 was released and is complemented by Linux support.

Chrome 114 Beta Brings CSS Headline Balancing, CHIPS, Popover API

Following this week's release of the Chrome 113 web browser with faster AV1 encoding, Google engineers have promoted Chrome 114 to their beta channel.

Vulkan 1.3.250 Released With Another New Extension From Valve

Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.

Microsoft's Linux Distribution Finally Adds Support For XFS Root File-Systems

While many Linux distributions look at Btrfs or F2FS when evaluating new root file-system options or even something like OpenZFS, in the case of Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution only this month have they even gotten to supporting XFS as a root file-system option.

Mesa 23.1 Inches Closer To Release With RC4 Released

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

Mesa Vulkan KHR_present_wait Support Extended To Wayland

VK_KHR_present_wait is an extension originally started by Keith Packard working for Valve on improving the Linux graphics stack. The VK_KHR_present_wait extension allows for waiting for present operations to complete and can be used for monitoring/pacing the application by managing the number of images not yet presented. This Vulkan extension had been supported by Mesa Vulkan drivers under X.Org and now is being enabled for Wayland environments too.

Framework Provides New Details On Its Upgradeable/DIY AMD Ryzen Laptop

Back in March Framework Laptop announced an AMD Ryzen upgradeable laptop model but were initially light on details. Today they've revealed more information on this forthcoming product as well as opening up pre-orders.

Raspberry Pi OS Updated - Now Powered By Linux 6.1 LTS, Updated libcamera

Raspberry Pi has released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS as their Debian Linux based distribution currently built atop the Debian 11 "Bullseye" base.

Watch: AMD openSIL For How AMD Is Working On Open-Source Firmware

One of the most exciting open-source software announcements so far this year has been around AMD openSIL for providing open-source CPU silicon initialization that works with the likes of Coreboot. The video from the AMD openSIL announcement in Prague is now available for those interested in learning more about this AMD open-source firmware effort.

Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" Opens For Development

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 23.04, the "Lunar Lobster", Ubuntu 23.10 development is now officially opened under the "Mantic Minotaur" codename.

Linux 6.4 Lands XPad Driver Support For Turtle Beach & Qanba Gaming Controllers

The input driver updates were merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window.

Rust Null Block Driver Published To Begin Experimenting With Rust For Linux Storage

To help facilitate the exploration of the Rust programming language for Linux storage purposes within the kernel, Samsung engineer Andreas Hindborg has published a null block driver written in this memory-safe programming language.

Debian's APT 2.7 Packaging Tool Begins Rolling Out "Snapshots" Support

Debian's APT packaging tool that is also used by downstreams like Ubuntu has begun seeing initial support for "snapshots" introduced.

OBS Studio 29.1 Released With AV1/HEVC Streaming Over Enhanced RTMP

OBS Studio 29.1 is shipping today and it features AV1 and HEVC RTMP streaming support.

Chrome 113 Released With Faster AV1 Video Encoding, WebGPU By Default

Google has rolled out Chrome 113 to its stable channel that includes faster AV1 video encoding for video conference calls, WebGPU is finally rolling out to everyone, and other enhancements.

Proton 8.0-2 Brings More Fixes For Windows Games On Steam Play

Less than a month has passed since Proton 8.0-1 shipped as the software that powers Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Already out today is the Proton 8.0-2.

Intel Progress On The IPU6 Linux Driver To Enable Web Camera Support With Newer Laptops

You may recall last year how several prominent upstream kernel developers recommended avoiding Intel's latest laptops for Linux use that bear their IPU6 MIPI camera over the lack of upstream open-source support. It's taken some months but the initial IPU6 Linux kernel driver patches are out for review and will hopefully make it to the mainline Linux kernel in the months ahead.

Ubuntu 23.10 Looks Like It Will Switch To Using Dbus-Broker

While distributions like Fedora Linux have been using Dbus-Broker for years already as their high performance D-Bus compatible implementation to, for Ubuntu 23.10 later this year is finally where it looks like Ubuntu will be transitioning to this better alternative to dbus-daemon.

"Guilty" API Proposed For Better Communicating Why Radeon GPUs Hang/Reset

A set of patches to the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver would allow more easily relaying information about the reasons why a GPU hang/reset occur so that the user-space software can be more informed about any issues.

Linux 6.4 Spring Cleaning: Ditching Two Old USB Drivers

The USB/Thunderbolt changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel and it ended up being a net reduction in the number of lines of code as a result of ditching two outdated USB drivers.

AMD ROCm 5.5 Released With RDNA3 Improvements, Many Changes

As expected following yesterday's AMD Git activity, ROCm 5.5 was officially released overnight as AMD's latest version of their open-source GPU compute stack that is their alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA or Intel's oneAPI / Level Zero.

Linux 6.4 Lands Concurrent I/O Performance Optimizations For Device Mapper

The Device Mapper "DM" subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel and it includes some notable performance optimizations.

System76-Scheduler 2.0.1: "Significant" Reduction In CPU/RAM Use, Gamescope Detection

Last week System76 released System76-Scheduler 2.0 as their Rust-written Linux desktop scheduler that serves as a user-space daemon to dynamically manage process priorities to favor performance and responsiveness. That's now been succeeded by a v2.0.1 update with a few more features and improvements.

OpenMoonRay 1.1 Released For DreamWorks' Open-Source Renderer

Last year DreamWorks announced they would be open-sourcing their award-winning MoonRay renderer. Back in March that dream was realized with OpenMoonRay being published for this renderer that has been used for films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other films. OpenMoonRay 1.1 is now available as the first update to this professional renderer since it was open-sourced last quarter.

After A Strange March, Valve's April Numbers Show Steam Linux Numbers Appearing Inline

At the start of April there were the Steam Survey results for March 2023 that showed a 0.54% dip to the marketshare. With that were als some strange shifts in the Windows 10 vs. 11 marketshare as well as a big boost to the Chinese marketshare. The March numbers were not revised but with the start of May comes the April numbers... Showing a boost to Linux and largely recovering from the April anomaly.

ClamAV 1.1 Released For Advancing Open-Source Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware Software

Last November ClamAV 1.0 was released for this anti-virus/anti-malware solution currently developed via Cisco and the open-source community. Following ClamAV 1.0 LTS, today marks the availability of ClamAV 1.1 as the first post-1.0 feature release.

AMD ROCm 5.5 In The Process Of Being Released

AMD has begun publishing ROCm 5.5 source packages for the Radeon Open eCosystem components making up their GPU compute stack that is also being extended to cover Xilinx products and more.

Red Hat's HDR Hackfest Sounds Like It Was A Success

Red Hat organized an HDR hackfest to bring together all the Linux desktop stakeholders around the desktop, display drivers, and related infrastructure for helping to make progress on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support. The event took place last week at Red Hat's Brno office in the Czech Republic and sounds like it was quite a success.

Linux 6.4 Fixes An Issue Where Intel USB Support Could Be Broken After Resume

Since last November has been a kernel bug report from a Canonical engineer after finding that the Intel Thunderbolt USB controller on various laptops was "dead" after resuming the system. That problem is now resolved with Linux 6.4 and this generic fix may end up helping other hardware as well.

Fedora Onyx Aims To Be A New Fedora Linux Immutable Variant

While there is already Fedora Silverblue as a Fedora Workstation variant leveraging RPM-OSTree for creating an ummutable OS image and Fedora Kinoite as a KDE-based alternative, Fedora Onyx has been proposed as a new immutable variant of Fedora Linux.

Linux 6.4 Has Many Networking Changes From A New Performance Tunable To More WiFi 7

With Linux running on everything from tiny single board computers with basic WiFi or Ethernet networking up through massive super-computer clusters, the Linux networking subsystem continues seeing immense improvements each kernel cycle. With Linux 6.4 the networking changes are heavy from new hardware support (including Apple M1 Pro/Max WiFi!) to continued work around WiFi 7 support as well as never-ending work on performance optimizations.

Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q1 Brings Improved Multi-GPU Video Acceleration Support

Intel's open-source "cartwheel-ffmpeg" project is their repository where they collect all of their FFmpeg patches prior to upstreaming. While the patches have been available in Git form, prior to the weekend Intel released their 2023Q1 queue of patches to this widely-used, open-source multimedia library.

Qualcomm Continues Working To Upstream Gunyah Hypervisor Support In Linux

Near the start of 2022 engineers out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center posted Linux driver patches for their Gunyah hypervisor. Gunyah is an open-source type-1 hypervisor developed by Qualcomm with an emphasis on security and other features. More than one year later the Gunyah drivers have yet to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel but work on them persists.

Linux 6.4 Delivers A Big Performance Boost For VDUSE

Merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel were all of the VirtIO and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (VDPA) changes. Interesting from that pull request is delivering a big performance bump for VDUSE.

Linus Torvalds Cleans Up The x86 Memory Copy Code For Linux 6.4

In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code.

30 April

Silly Open-Source Moves, AMD openSIL & Rust Happenings Made For An Interesting Month

During this month on Phoronix were 242 news articles on Phoronix with original content each and every day presented by your's truly around open-source and Linux. April was interesting with the release of Linux 6.3, all of the exciting Linux 6.4 features merged so far, AMD introducing openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization with support for Coreboot and similar firmware solutions, Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04 being released, and much more.

EROFS Receives Some Useful Improvements With Linux 6.4

It sure doesn't feel like it's already been five years since Huawei announced EROFS as a read-only file-system initially designed for Android devices but has proven useful in the mainline Linux kernel to Linux users at large with interesting use-cases also coming up around containers and more. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel are yet more improvements to this read-only file-system.

AMD IOMMU With Linux 6.4 Supports 5-Level Guest Page Tables

Back in 2021 AMD began preparing Linux kernel support for 5-level paging support with their future processors and building off the prior 5-level page table kernel support established by Intel. That was followed by AMD enabling 5-level page table support with KVM SVM in the Linux 5.15 kernel. AMD CPUs with 5-level page table support since launched in the form of 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors. One piece only now coming together though is AMD IOMMU driver support for 5-level guest page table support.

OpenRazer 3.6 Brings Support For New Razer Peripherals On Linux

While prominent gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer still is not officially supporting Linux with their vast array of products, thanks to the community-driven OpenRazer project there is unofficial open-source support and can work quite well when paired with the likes of Polychromatic as a nice user interface. Out today is OpenRazer 3.6 in enabling the latest Razer products on Linux.

Linux 6.4 Continues Bringing Up More Compute Express Link Feature Code

With the work led by Intel engineers on bringing up the Compute Express Link specification features into the open-source kernel, Linux 6.4 is another cycle seeing a lot of enablement work on the CXL front.

HID Updates Bring Apple Quirks, Nintendo Controller Rumble Turning Into Vibrator Fix

The HID subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.4 kernel that is now half-way through its merge window.

29 April

sudo & su Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety

With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software.

More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4

On Friday the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted a pull request of new Rust feature code for the Linux 6.4 kernel.

Intel Linear Address Masking "LAM" Merged Into Linux 6.4

Since 2020 Intel engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a feature similar to Arm's Top Byte Ignore (TBI) for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. This can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. The Intel LAM kernel support has finally been merged with Linux 6.4.

Debian Installer Bookworm RC2 Released

In preparing for releasing Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" in June, out this weekend is the second release candidate of the Debian Installer for this next major Debian Linux release.

KDE Ends Out April Continuing Its "Bug Slaughterfest"

KDE developers this month have been tackling many open bugs as well as seeing the early Plasma 6 development state rough yet usable. In ending out April, they continued their "bug slaughterfest" in whittling away at their open bug count.

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