Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Andrew Morton on Monday submitted all the memory management "MM" related patches for the Linux 6.13 merge window. As usual there's a lot of interesting performance optimizations and other low-level refinements.

The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements.

Following the initial Raspberry Pi 5 upstream support in Linux 6.12 providing basic support, an exciting Raspberry Pi addition with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is introducing a Raspberry Pi Camera Front-End "CFE" driver.

The in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is bringing a lot of exciting improvements for AMD Linux customers.

Intel's open-source software developers released today OpenVINO 2024.5 as the newest major feature release for this cross-platform AI toolkit.

The crypto subsystem updates were merged yesterday for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel. Among other crypto improvements are new optimizations for some algorithms when running on Intel and AMD x86_64 processors.

Merged last year for Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps to address the current coarse-grained timestamps when updating creation time and modification time that a lot of I/O activity can happen in the once-per-jiffy timestamp. Just a few weeks in the Linux 6.6 kernel, multi-grain timestamps were removed due to bugs. The multigrain code went back to be reworked and now just over one year later the code has been re-merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

All of the scheduler feature changes were merged today for the Linux 6.13 kernel, including the introduction of the lazy preemption model.

FLTK 1.4 is out as the newest version of the Fast Light Toolkit that has been around since the late 90's.

While most users frown upon the increasing number of CPU security mitigations in part due to the additional overhead commonly introduced, a new Linux kernel patch by a Google engineer would allow users/developers to opt-in to forcing CPU bugs and their mitigations even if the system in use isn't known to be vulnerable.

Blender 4.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

FreeCAD 1.0 was just released as a major update to this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D parametric modeler software.

The power management subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly opened Linux 6.13 merge window. As covered within individual articles over the past few weeks, the Linux 6.13 power management updates include some notable changes for both AMD and Intel systems.

The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.

The Debian 13 "Trixie" release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching.

WayVNC 0.9 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server catering to wlroots-based Wayland compositors. WayVNC makes it easy to get a VNC server up and running on Sway and other wlroots-based compositors while with today's update is much more capable.

Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD's in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization.

A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Arch Linux package sources with its PKGBUILD files and similar have lacked carrying a clear license. Arch Linux developers have been working to come together to allow all Arch Linux package sources to be licensed under a BSD zero-clause "BSD0" license.

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year's LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for "GFX950", the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators.

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.

All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.

Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.

DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.

Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.

The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.

As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 -- and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions -- is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted.

As part of the SLAB (SLUB) allocator updates pending for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is a new "slab_strict_numa" option that is reported to further help ARM Linux performance such as for Ampere Computing servers.

Archinstall is the convenient text/CLI-based installer for Arch Linux that allows getting the Linux distribution easily installed in a matter of minutes. Released today is Archinstall 3.0 that overhauls the Arch Linux installer with now using the curses library for rendering of the text interface.

Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 "uutils" has been released for this implementation of the GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better memory safety and greater robustness. With the Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 there is increased GNU compatibility as well as better performance.

Bcachefs has now joined the party of various kernel components sending in preemptive pull requests ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window that is expected to open following the expected Linux 6.12 release on Sunday.

Google software engineer Pasha Tatashin has proposed Page Detective as a new kernel debugging tool that is able to provide greater insight around the usage and mapping of physical memory pages.

Following the proposed patches this week to adjust the Linux kernel's module loader to treat the TUXEDO Computers drivers as proprietary due to being GPLv3 licensed rather than GPLv2 to jive with the rest of the upstream kernel code, some of the TUXEDO drivers have now been re-licensed.

Rustls 0.23.17 is out today as the newest version of this modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and a great alternative to the likes of OpenSSL.

The GCC 15 compiler on Friday switched its default C language version from the GNU dialect of C17 to the current C23 standard.

Alongside the VFS pull requests on Friday for case insensitive Tmpfs support and atomic writes for EXT4 and XFS, Christian Brauner also submitted a pull request for introducing some new file abstractions for the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.

While Plasma 6.3 feature development is continuing, KDE developers this week spent more time fixing bugs and polishing up existing code for ensuring a solid foundation to this open-source desktop.

Released last week was systemd 257-rc1 while succeeding that already is systemd 257-rc2 and it comes with a new tool: systemd-keyutil.

In commemorating twenty years since the release of the highly acclaimed Half-Life 2 game, Valve today released the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary update with various fixes and other refinements. Half-Life 2 is also being made free-to-own through November 18th for those that never experienced this legendary game.

In addition to the EXT4 and XFS atomic write support, another interesting pull request sent in today by Microsoft's Christian Brauner is adding case-insensitive file/folder support for the Tmpfs file-system to benefit use-cases like Wine / Steam Play compatibility layers and sandboxing/container facilities like Flatpak.

Prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner with Microsoft has begun sending out various pull requests of VFS feature changes for the imminent Linux 6.13 merge window. One of the interesting early pull requests is the VFS untorn writes series with getting atomic writes support enabled for the EXT4 and XFS file-system.

While Linux 6.12 should be out this weekend with its many exciting features, following that will mark the start of the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle with what will be the first stable kernel release of 2025... Already there is a lot of exciting feature work expected to land during the Linux 6.13 merge window.

The GNOME Mutter compositor has switched its KMS thread priority from a real-time value over to high priority to workaround a situation where the GNOME Shell / Mutter could crash or see its process killed.

The Linux 6.12 kernel is expected to be released this coming Sunday, 17 November, barring any last minute issues that would force the stable kernel to be diverted to the following Sunday. Linux 6.12 is delivering many exciting new features and beyond that it's all the more exciting with it expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

Google engineer Saravana Kannan has posted a set of patches to better optimize async device suspend and resume handling within the Linux kernel. With these patches there are "significant improvements" to async device suspend/resume with testing being done on a Google Pixel 6 smartphone but other devices stand to benefit too.

AMD ZenDNN 5.0 was rolled out this morning as the newest version of this deep neural network library that is compatible with Intel's oneDNN APIs and infrastructure. ZenDNN 5.0 is now optimized for AMD Zen 5 processors such as the EPYC 9005 series. ZenDNN 5.0 also ships performance enhancements for generative large language models (LLMs) with its PyTorch plug-in.

GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality.

Patches posted on Thursday for the Linux kernel add support for the newest hotkey being found on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops... The "Phone Link" hotkey for launching the Microsoft Phone Link software for linking your Android/iOS smartphone to your laptop. This hotkey can be adapted for similar purposes on Linux.

A number of Steam Controller improvements have been merged for SDL, this widely-used hardware/software abstraction layer that is common to cross platform games. Among the latest Steam Controller improvements in SDL are enabling the support by default.