Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The many SoC patches have landed within the Linux 7.4 kernel providing support for dozens of new boards as well as a number of new SoCs like the Apple M4 and the A18 Pro as found in the MacBook Neo. The Google Tensor 5 was also finally mainlined along with Pixel 10 devices. Plus some unreleased Qualcomm SoC support rounds out the bunch.

The mainline Linux 7.4 kernel will be capable of running on the Steam Frame VR headset.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel. The fun work this cycle is preparing to support Dynamic Capacity Devices.

KMSCON as the user-space terminal emulator targeting Linux DRM/KMS interfaces as an alternative to the in-kernel VT now is able to individually configure monitors in multi-monitor setups. Plus a variety of other improvements with today's KMSCON 10.1 release.

The media subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable is Intel IPU8 support being introduced for the next-gen image processing unit in high-end Nova Lake laptops

Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor.

In development for a number of months now has been Kraid as a modern graphics compiler for recent Arm Mali GPUs. Kraid was merged for Mesa 26.2 back in June while in Mesa 27.0 due out in Q1 it will be switching to this new shader compiler by default.

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel and include an improvement for when the system was booted directly into the kernel on EFI-based systems without using a bootloader like GRUB or systemd-boot.

Nouveau-DKMS is in development as an out-of-tree spin-off of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver focused on providing better support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" series graphics processors and potentially other generations too pre-Turing where the modern Nova driver is in development by NVIDIA.

Core memory management patches to the Linux kernel have typically been routed to mainline via Andrew Morton's "MM" branch, which is where also a variety of broader memory management related patches are also queued like all the ongoing work to DAMON/DAMOS. Kernel maintainers have now agreed to a new "Core MM" tree as the home for all of the core memory management changes moving forward.

Merged for Linux 7.4 Git and marked for back-porting to Linux 7.2/7.3 stable is a regression fix affecting at least the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" laptop SoC when making use of Cache Aware Scheduling.

Open-source developer Mark Harmstone who is known for his work on developing a Btrfs file-system driver for Windows has spent the past few years working on a new hobby operating system. Moxnox is an NT-like, POSIX-compatible operating system.

The EXT4 file-system changes were merged Sunday night for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window. The headline feature of EXT4 in this new kernel version is opt-in support for buffered IOmap usage that can lead to "significant" performance improvements for large writes.

The Rust-based open-source operating system Redox OS had a very eventful September as they outlined in a status update published this weekend.

Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it's intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that "the AI flood continues" with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs.

Following all the HID driver updates/additions in Linux 7.4, the input subsystem changes were merged this weekend for this new kernel version.

Back in May the AV2 v1.0 specification was released for this next-generaton, royalty-free video codec. This week the Alliance For Open Media issued a press release talking up the early adoption of AV2.

After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel's staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs was deleted from the staging area. This comes as Realtek rtl8723bs was added onto the more mature RTW88 driver in the Linux networking subsystem.

With the Linux 7.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to the v7.2 and v7.3 series is finally the ability to monitor temperature sensors on AMD 600 Series chipsets that launched alongside the Ryzen 7000 series processors.

Linus Torvalds merged the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 7.4 kernel driver on Saturday. Most notable this cycle for char/misc is what's being removed: Google's C-written Binder driver has left the kernel with the Rust-based modern Binder driver ready to take for the role of being used by all future Android devices.

The Linux 7.4 block/storage and IO_uring updates were merged today for the ongoing merge window. With the breadth of Linux hardware support, the pull request varies from fixes to Linux's floppy driver to enabling support for NVMe storage on Apple M4 devices.

On Friday Valve released SteamOS 3.9.5 as their first stable release in the SteamOS 3.9 series. This brings all the great improvements previously available in preview form with many package updates and other enhancements.

Sent out today for the Linux 7.4 kernel were a set of memblock improvements. Most notable is a performance optimization within mm/memblock.c that implements the kernel's early boot-time physical memory allocator that is used prior to the bring-up of the full page allocator.

As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C.

Andrew Morton sent out the big set of memory management "MM" related patches for the Linux 7.4 merge window. This cycle it topped out at 539 total patches and a reviewed rate of 76%.

Wild 0.11 is out as the latest feature release of this very fast linker currently targeting Linux systems and focused on iterative development.

Merged overnight were all the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates consisting of many kernel graphics/display driver improvements. Arguably most exciting with these updates for Linux 7.4 is the AMD Radeon (AMDGPU) driver seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL enabled by default along with other HDMI 2.1 features.

With the wonderful KDE Plasma 6.8 having shipped just more than one week ago, KDE developers are beginning to go heavy on new features for Plasma 6.9.

OBS Studio 33.0 is out tonight as the latest major update to this popular open-source and cross-platform video recording and live streaming application.

The slab pull request was just merged for Linux 7.4. For end users nothing too incredibly exciting but there is one change that does yield a 24% throughput improvement in a benchmark exercising the kernel's memory management subsystem.

HPFS is the latest file-system driver for the Linux kernel facing possible removal. The High Performance File-System (HPFS) was developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2.

Seeing a Vulkan API driver pull request this morning for introducing a new "Borealis" driver ID caught me by surprise as it was the first time I was hearing of such a driver. It turns out to be a fork of the Asahi Linux project's HoneyKrisp driver in Mesa for Apple Silicon hardware.

The UXL Foundation announced today the release of oneDNN 3.14 as the latest feature update to this library providing optimized deep learning operations for software like PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. While oneDNN began as an Intel software project, making this version notable is beginning to see AMD Zen CPU optimizations land in oneDNN proper.

The power management subsystem updates were merged this week for Linux 7.4 along with the related ACPI and thermal control updates too.

OpenSSL 4.1 stable is out today with new AVX-512 optimizations, other performance improvements, and finally retiring Windows on Itanium and Windows CE support.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.366 is out and representing the past two weeks of specification fixes, clarifications, and one new Vulkan API extension.

The release dance is underway for FFmpeg 9.1 as the newest feature release for this widely-used open-source multimedia library.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel that included a few new drivers.

LibreSSL 4.4 released on Thursday as the newest release of this decade-old OpenSSL fork maintained by OpenBSD developers.

As a follow-up to the article in September about a Linux patch for fixing under-reported AMD Zen 5 TLB sizes, that work is now merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel.

Adding to all the exciting performance optimizations and other improvements for Linux 7.4 is an exciting workqueue improvement. It's not too often getting to talk about "10 to 100 times faster" software improvements.

Fedora 45 wasn't released this week as its ideal early release target due to not having a release candidate build in time for last week's Go/No-Go meeting. At today's Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 45 was delayed by at least one more week due to open blocker bugs.

A request for comments (RFC) was sent out last night on the Linux kernel mailing list in seeking to clean-up the AMD Zen microarchitecture detection within the kernel. This is for enhancing the kernel where there are code paths specific to a certain generation of AMD Zen processors or select generations such as Zen 3 through Zen 5 CPUs. AI was leveraged in helping to clean-up this AMD Zen code in the Linux kernel.

Back in August Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner's company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available.

The scheduler updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel to deliver several nice scheduling enhancements.

Linux user-space for several years had shadow stack support for hardware-enforced control-flow enforcement in defending against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks. Intel Tigerlake and newer CPUs or AMD Zen 3 and newer have the necessary hardware shadow stacks support. Shadow stacks have been effective for helping user-space software fend ROP attacks while now there is new work toward bringing shadow stack support for kernel space on Linux.

The Mesa 3D graphics driver project has loosened its rules laid out in their AGENTS.md for AI agents to permit AI/LLM assistance in generating code comments and commit/patch messages, as long as a human is ultimately reviewing/editing it in the end.

Myrlyn, the package manager GUI that began as YQPkg during a SUSE Hack Week and has evolved quite well, is out with version 1.1 as the first new feature update since the beginning of the year.

Valve landed a patch in Mesa 27.0 and to be back-ported to current Mesa stable series to satisfy more games running under Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton for working on AMD GFX8 GPUs like Polaris.

Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched on mainline but at least in some cases there are patches undergoing testing or queued in "-next" branches. The CVSS scores are as high as 9.0.

The x86/bugs pull request was merged this week for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable here is adjusting the CPU security mitigations for AMD Zen 6 processors.