Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.

The RISC-V CPU port updates have been sent out for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.

The SoundWire subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This cycle brings new AMD driver support as well as supporting the MIPI DisCo 2.0 specification.

Sent out on Tuesday was the modules pull request for Linux 6.13 that have some low-level improvements but it noted that the biggest kernel modules highlight wasn't in that pull request itself but had been added by way of the memory management pull. This was a change by a Microsoft engineer around caching of kernel modules into huge pages.

MIPS has begun working on the open-source compiler toolchain support for their P8700 RISC-V based processors. Initial patches posted today bring-up the MIPS P8700 RISC-V support for the LLVM compiler stack.

Days after announcing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W for $7, Raspberry Pi today announced the Compute Module 5 at the $45 price point.

Merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel was the long-awaited real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support and allowing it to be enabled across x86/x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V CPU architectures. With the Linux 6.13 kernel, LoongArch is joining the RT party.

While the end of year holidays are fast approaching, my commitment to Linux hardware and open-source software remains and there still is a lot of interesting content to come this year still -- each and every day, without change for roughly a decade. Unfortunately though due to the (sad) state of the ad industry, many major companies focusing on the likes of Facebook/Meta ads, and the frequent use of ad-blockers by Linux/FLOSS readers make ongoing operations increasingly difficult. But if you'd like to show some love this holiday season, the Multicoreinfo Premium "Cyber Week" / "Black Friday" special is now taking place so you can enjoy the site ad-free, native dark mode support, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while hopefully allowing the site to continue for years to come.

In prior years the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an Ethical Tech Giving Guide for holiday shopping where they recommend products like old AMD Opteron motherboards and USB to parallel printer cables that "respect your freedoms" and meet their strict free software definitions. Out today is their newest annual FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide.

There are some new open-source/Linux details to note when it comes to the AMD accelerators in the Instinct "CDNA" land.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates were sent out on Monday for Linux 6.13 and include one very interesting new feature for this file-system: device aliasing as a means of being able to temporarily carve out a portion of the partition for other purposes.

Google engineer Ricardo Ribalda has proposed a set of patches for the common "uvcvideo" kernel driver that supports UVC-compliant web cameras and the like to provide granular power saving support.

With GIMP 3.0-RC1 out for testing since earlier this month, the hope is that GIMP 3.0 stable will in fact ship in time for the release of Ubuntu 25.04 next April. The current GIMP 3.0 release candidate is working its way to Debian Unstable and in turn soon should be available via the Ubuntu 25.04 archive.

The I3C subsystem updates were submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel on Monday and include support for another I3C HCI controller used on AMD systems.

Overnight the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted the big set of Rust infrastructure/toolchain updates for the Linux 6.13 holiday kernel.

In between managing all of the pull requests being submitted during this two week long merge window for the Linux 6.13 kernel, Linus Torvalds has merged some of his own code this cycle.

The RDMA subsystem updates were sent out last Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel cycle. Most notable with the RDMA updates is the NVIDIA Mellanox "MLX5" network driver introducing a new Data Direct Placement (DDP) feature to further help with performance.

Either due to a mistimed blog post or other factors, a big feature article is out talking up the new ROCm 6.3 features... But the updated ROCm 6.3 open-source GPU compute software doesn't appear to actually be released yet at all their usual sources. In any event there are new features and big performance gains being talked up for ROCm 6.3.

Sent out today were the big set of PCI subsystem updates ready to be merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. Most notable of the PCI updates is PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) with that kernel support worked on by AMD engineers as part of one of the new hardware features found with the AMD EPYC 9005 server processors. Over on the Intel side is the new PCIe cooling driver and other changes.

The KVM changes were merged yesterday for Linux 6.13 in further enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

The GCC 15 code compiler that is releasing as stable in the early months of 2025 has removed all support for the Altera Nios II CPU target.

The FUSE feature enhancements were submitted today for the Linux 6.13 kernel as part of improving the file-system in user-space capabilities.

Huawei engineer Zhang Yi posted a set of nine patches today for enabling large folio support for regular files with the EXT4 file-system. These patches enable large folios for EXT4 on regular files except when using FSVERITY, FSCRYPT, or the journaled data mode. Long story short, these large folio patches can deliver some nice performance gains for both reads and writes.

Sent out last night for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window were all of the perf tool changes for the wonderful "perf" subsystem for performance profiling and the like. In addition to adding the HWMON PMU to "perf stat", leader sampling for inherited task events, and various other tooling improvements, there are also vendor event updates. Most notable with the updated CPU vendor events are new AMD Zen 5 processor events.

Complementing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that launched this summer, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W was announced today for $7 as the wireless-enabled variant of this small microcontroller board.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released Fwupd 2.0.2 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future.

Earlier this week was the main power management updates for Linux 6.13 that included switching AMD EPYC Turin to using the amd_pstate driver on supported systems. Sent out this weekend was another set of power management updates that also includes a notable addition: the virtual CPUFreq driver.

Following all of the MM patches earlier this week sent in by Andrew Morton, on Sunday morning he sent out all of the non-MM patches that he manages for the Linux kernel. Notable for Linux 6.13 with this pull request is presenting the hung task counter as well as finishing off the folio conversion in the NILFS2 code.

Ahead of FreeBSD 14.2 hopefully releasing in just over one week, FreeBSD 14.2-RC1 is out this weekend as the last planned development release for testing ahead of that much anticipated point release.

A Microsoft Research project that was quietly announced a few years ago to some fanfare but not hearing much about since has been Demikernel as their library OS architecture for kernel-bypass I/O. A Multicoreinfo reader brought up Demikernel this week and while it hasn't been talked about much in recent years it does remain under active development with the most recent commits as of hours ago.

IBM isn't formally releasing Power11 processors until next year, but their software engineers continue being quite busy preparing the Linux kernel and other open-source software for Power11. The newest on the kernel side is enabling support for KVM nested guests on IBM Power11 platforms.

For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements.

Wine 9.22 is out this weekend ahead of the Wine 10.0-rc1 in two weeks.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly development recap that highlights all of the interesting work taking place within the KDE desktop space.

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week for the in-development Linux 6.13 and include some nice refinements, especially for those using AMD Ryzen on Linux.

There are some new improvements in Linux 6.13 for the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions in providing hardware-based security protections for virtual machines on recent Xeon processors.

Following the Linux 6.13 DRM feature pull this week that brought many new open-source kernel graphics driver features, it's now time to further stabilize that new feature code with fixes. Sent out today were a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver code targeting the early Linux 6.13 state. In addition to fixes though is also allowing the AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code to build properly on LoongArch hardware for allowing recent AMD Radeon GPUs to work on these Chinese systems.

Going back to early in the year AMD Linux engineers began preparing support for a new Bus Lock Trap feature with Zen 5 CPUs. With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel that support is being merged.

One of the most prominent new features in Linux 6.12 was the merging of sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler innovations by altering the scheduling behavior through (e)BPF programs. With the Linux 6.13 kernel there are some nice refinements to this extensible scheduler class.

The XFS file-system updates were merged yesterday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window.

Version 1.4 of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library was released today as the Python library for use on Windows and Linux for interacting with the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI offloading on recent Intel Core Ultra processors.

SUSE engineer and sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has submitted all of the sound driver updates for the Linux 6.13 kernel.