Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Microsoft announced today the new and now open-source OpenHCL paravisor for the virtualization stack for enabling Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with this Rust-written software stack. This effort by Microsoft has been five years in the making and is now open-source and will continue to be developed in the open.

Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads.

PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library.

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented in Montreal last week at the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2024) on the current state of Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers within Mesa.

Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack.

OGRE-Next 3.0 has debuted this week as the newest version of the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine Next Generation for serving as an open-source 3D graphics rendering engine.

Following last week's release of the LLVM/Clang-downstream AOCC 5.0 for optimized compiler support extended to Zen 5 CPUs, the GPU side of the house at AMD this week released AOMP 20.0-0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on GPU device offloading.

Qualcomm engineers have developed VCL as a new open-source OpenCL driver for use with VirtIO-GPU for providing OpenCL hardware acceleration within virtual machines.

Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Red Hat has announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2. RHEL AI was announced earlier this year as Red Hat's AI solution for a foundation model platform to develop / test / run Granite GenAI models. Not to be confused with the RHEL operating system itself, RHEL AI is all about building large language models for enterprise software with Granite LLMs and InstructLab tooling.

It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor.

A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files.

Microsoft has released Azure Linux 3.0.20241005 as the "October 2024" update to the company's in-house Linux distribution.

ISPC 1.25 has been released as the newest feature update to the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as the C language variant for "single program, multiple data" programming to target both Intel's CPUs and GPUs.

It was just last week that Python 3.13 saw its official release with many great features from a new interactive interpreter to an experimental JIT and removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental free-threaded build mode. Python 3.14 Alpha 1 is already out today in the first very early stage development milestone toward next year's big Python update.

Building off the existing Linux support for GPU Direct RDMA / Peer-To-Peer DMA functionality, a set of patches were posted by NVIDIA today enabling this P2P DMA support to also work for device-private pages.

Back in March for GDC, Microsoft excitingly announced the official releases of Direct3D 12 Work Graphs for "enabling new types of GPU autonomy" for allowing more rendering work to be offloaded to the GPU. While this greater GPU-driven rendering with Work Graphs has been talked up by Microsoft and other parties, Valve engineers working on VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12 over Vulkan have found the new Work Graphs functionality to not be as nearly captivating.

Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.10, today Canonical announced a developer preview of an Ubuntu 24.10 Linux build targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops.

LLVM's modern Fortran compiler "flang-new" has now been renamed to "flang" for next year's LLVM 20 update.

Solus 4.6 is out as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution that is known for its default Budgie desktop while also shipping with other desktop options.

Intel engineers have released the oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" version 3.6 release that serves as the building blocks for deep learning software like ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, Apache MXNet, Apache SIGNA, and optionally by PyTorch and TensorFlow with Intel's extensions.

It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.

While ARM-based SoCs with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) aren't too common, there do exist some such as select models of the Huawei Kunpeng server SoC with SMT or there HiSilicon Kirin 9000S. As such Huawei/HiSilicon engineers have been working to expose SMT controls on ARM64 for the Linux kernel.

The OpenBSD project has released LibreSSL 4.0 as the newest version of this open-source TLS implementation that was forked from OpenSSL a decade ago.

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 released last week with RAIDZ expansion, fast deduplication, and direct IO support among other changes for this ZFS file-system implementation for use on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3-rc2 is out today with a few more interesting changes.

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a GCC 15.0.0 status report for outlining the current development state of the GCC 15 open-source compiler as it works its way toward the stable GCC 15.1 release in the early months of 2025.

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

Inkscape 1.4 released on Sunday as the newest version of this cross-platform, open-source vector graphics editor.

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November.

With a number of patches queued this week into the staging tree ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel, a number of old and no longer maintained hardware drivers are set to be removed in the next kernel cycle.

As a result of user feedback and being able to reproduce some annoying ad experiences, particularly on mobile devices, I've been able to make some enhancements to hopefully improve the user ad experience when browsing Phoronix.

Building off the recent infrastructure merged for Mesa 24.3 as a build option to allow Rusticl driver support to be enabled by default, Red Hat's Karol Herbst has added the Asahi Gallium3D driver to the default list.

Adding to the growing set of features for NVK as this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa, the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate fragment shading rate extension is now supported.

While Azure Linux 3.0 has been available since the late summer, for those continuing to rely on Azure Linux 2.0 in production there is a big update out this weekend. Azure Linux 2.0.20241006 brings dozens of security fixes to this Microsoft Linux distribution.

Wayland Protocols 1.38 is out with three new staging protocols.

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly development summary to highlight advancements made to this unique OS.

With Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake systems now shipping and the Linux support largely settled, Intel open-source software engineers have begun ramping up their support for Panther Lake due out in a year.

A Friday evening job posting has confirmed and reinforced details around their future AI GPU compute stack, presumably what's been referred to as the Unified AI Software Stack.

Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 6.2, the KDE developers are busy addressing some of the initial fallout from this desktop update as well as more feature work aimed at Plasma 6.3.