Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window that will wrap up on Sunday. This follows earlier merges for the XFS and EXT4 drivers too.

Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users.

Today we can finally share performance benchmarks of the long-rumored AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor. This new halo product for the Ryzen 9000 series desktop line-up offers captivating performance for developers frequently compiling code, creators, technical computing workloads for students or hobbyists or those not able to afford a Threadripper / EPYC type workstation, or similar heavy computing use. With the 16 cores / 32 threads and both CCDs having 3D V-Cache, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 offers leading performance among current generation desktop processors.

At Framework Computer's next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop.

21 April 02:15 PM EDT - Hardware - Framework OCuLink Dev Kit For eGPUs

In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops.

The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act.

Coming today as a big surprise -- one week after the new NTFS file-system driver was merged for Linux 7.1 and separately the existing NTFS3 kernel driver seeing some fixes -- is a new release of the NTFS-3G driver providing a FUSE-based user-space driver for NTFS on Linux and other platforms.

The IRDMA driver as Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware.

21 April 08:24 AM EDT - Radeon - VK_EXT_host_image_copy

Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default.

21 April 06:35 AM EDT - Arm - C1-Pro Bug

Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation.

Recently sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list was the initial patches for implementing the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) as a vendor-neutral architecture for memory-to-memory data movement offload.

Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel.

20 April 08:36 PM EDT - AMD - AMD GAIA

AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today's GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support.

Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes were recently merged for the Linux 7.1 merge window for further enhancing KVM as this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack.

Last week saw the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver.

While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures.

Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions.

20 April 10:48 AM EDT - GNU - GNU Coreutils 9.11

It's not only the uutil's Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today's release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster.

Mozilla today published their Firefox 150 release binaries as the latest milestone for this open-source web browser with growing AI ambitions.

20 April 09:51 AM EDT - Intel - Intel CR 26.14.37833.4

Out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4 that now includes production support for the newly-launched Wildcat Lake cut-down Panther Lake SoCs that debuted last week as the Core Series 3.

Andrew Morton recently sent out his various "MM" related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices.

Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI).

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it's the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable.

It's pretty rare nowadays seeing any real changes to the JFS file-system on Linux when there are multiple far superior solutions available. But in any event, the JFS file-system driver has seen a few fixes in Linux 7.1.

The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others.

The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes.

Following last month's GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications.

Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader "DPL" after running unopposed in this year's elections.

A fix today for GNOME Shell's screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback.

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a wide assortment of PCI(e) changes from new to old hardware.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements for Kaveri and other GCN 1.1 era APUs. Now Timur's out with some more fixes for helping select GCN 1.0 hardware.

The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions.

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS has now rolled out the Linux 7.0 kernel to its users. But beyond re-basing against the latest upstream kernel version it is also carrying some extra patches.

In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements.

The block subsystem and IO_uring changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 in continuing to enhance Linux storage capabilities.

GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD.

18 April 02:41 PM EDT - AMD - New AMD SMCA Bank Types

The AMD Machine Check Exception "mce_amd" driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware.

For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available.

The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads.

For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements.

Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness.

18 April 06:05 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.7

KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn't published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks.

As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!

Made public today was the Floating Point Divider State Sampling bug (stylized as FP-DSS or FPDSS) affecting original AMD Zen 1 (and Zen 1+) processors. The Linux kernel is already to go with a security fix for those still relying on the very first Ryzen or EPYC processors.

For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release.

The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD's GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as "RDNA 4m".

Loongson's LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library "glibc" release.

Linux libcrypto cryptography subsystem changes for the v7.1 kernel are enabling more optimizations by default and in turn helping to achieve better crypto/hashing performance on this next kernel version.

Fedora 44 final had been aiming for an early release target of 21 April, but due to outstanding blocker bugs, it's now revised to target a release on 28 April.

17 April 06:19 AM EDT - Arm - -mcpu=armagicpu

The GCC open-source compiler has landed initial targeting support for Arm's newly-announced AGI CPU.

With the vast majority of x86/x86_64 systems supporting restarting the system using ACPi, BIOS, or even the KBD keyboard controller, with Linux 7.1 is now support in place for using custom restart handlers registered by drivers, such as in place for other CPU architectures.

All of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel.