
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 35 min ago
Bcachefs Lands More Fixes Ahead Of Linux 6.16-rc7
As we await to see what Linus Torvalds will end up doing about the Bcachefs file-system come Linux 6.17, for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle he continues to honor the Bcachefs pull requests containing fixes...
Ubuntu 25.10 Raspberry Pi Images Will Be Much Leaner
The Ubuntu 25.10 images geared for the Raspberry Pi will be much more lean than current Ubuntu Linux releases for the Raspberry Pi thanks to changes merged this week...
AMD Announces ROCm-LS, hipCIM As Port Of NVIDIA's cuCIM
Back in May was the announcement by AMD of ROCm-DS as a new toolkit geared for real-world data science problems with various helpers to accelerate data processing on Instinct accelerators. AMD today is complementing ROCm-DS by announcing ROCm-LS and hipCIM...
Intel Compute Runtime 25.27.34303.5 Brings Support For Wildcat Lake & BMG G31
Intel is out today with its monthly feature update to the Compute Runtime as their open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL API support on Windows and Linux systems. This month there is new hardware support, more performance optimizations, and some new features...
Imagination Kernel Graphics Driver Being Extended To AM62P/AM67A/J722S SoCs
The open-source and upstream Imagination Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver for supporting their modern graphics IP and pairing with their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa is now being extended to work on the TI AM62P, AM67A, and J722S SoCs...
Servo Web Engine Further Tuning Performance, Screen Reader & Other New Features
The Servo open-source web layout engine continues advancing with its demo Servoshell and continued work around making it suitable for embedding into other software. The Servo project this morning published their latest monthly status update to inform the community what they have been up to the past several weeks...
Intel QATlib 25.08 Brings Hugepages Support & Other Improvements
Intel engineers yesterday released QATlib 25.08 as the first new update in nearly one year for this QuickAssist Technology library. Intel QuickAssist allows hardware-accelerated offloading of various security authentication and compression operations from the CPU onto dedicated accelerator IP found in recent Xeon processors. Intel's QATlib is the open-source library for enabling that magic to happen from the user-space side...
AMD Bringing SmartMux Support To Linux 6.17 For Better Hybrid GPU Laptop Support
For the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle AMD already queued fixes for GPU compute on some older AMD hardware, improved debugging support for AMDGPU, and other enhancements. Sent out today was a final batch of feature changes for AMDGPU/AMDKFD expected for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. Most notable is AMD SmartMux support coming to Linux...
LLVM 21.1-rc1 Released For Testing: Better RISC-V Support, AMD GFX1250 & NVIDIA GB10
The first release candidate of LLVM 21.1 is now available for testing, which under their modern versioning scheme will represent the first stable version of the LLVM 21 compiler stack...
Linux Receiving Fix For AMD Radeon Polaris GPUs Producing Lots Of Log Spam
For those using an AMD Radeon RX 500 "Polaris" graphics card on Linux and routinely suspend/resume your system, going into the Linux 6.16 kernel and then to be back-ported to the stable series is a fix where the AMDGPU driver could end up producing a lot of spam in the kernel log...
New FFmpeg AVX-512 Optimizations Hit Up To 36x The Performance Of Plain C Code
Some commits merged today to FFmpeg Git provide additional hand-tuned Assembly code for AVX-512 with capable Intel and AMD processors...
Google Continues Working On "Magma" For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface
Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn't ready for merging in this quarter's release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it's written in Rust...
Single RunQueue Proxy Execution Appears Ready For Linux 6.17
The long in development work around proxy execution for the Linux kernel appears to be ready for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window with the Single RunQueue Proxy Execution patches queued into a TIP branch after going through 19 rounds of patch review/revisions...
Linux 6.17 To Upstream Support For The Decade Old Marvell PXA1908 SoC
Launched back in 2014 was the Marvell PXA1908 SoC intended for 4G LTE smartphones and featured four Arm Cortex-A53 cores. Not too impressive for its time and far less so today. Though after a decade of not seeing mainline Linux kernel support and some vendor kernels stuck in the Linux 3.14 era, the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle is expected to upstream support for this old smartphone SoC...
Linux 6.17 To Fix AMDGPU Hibernation So It Doesn't Take ~50 Minutes On Large GPU Servers
While late in the Linux 6.16 cycle and hitting the cut-off for when the period to queue new DRM driver feature material for Linux 6.17 ends, an additional drm-misc-next pull request was sent out today with some last minute kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle. Motivating this extra pull were the recent AMDGPU system hibernation patches...
Mesa 25.1.6 Released With Intel Xe3 Panther Lake Graphics Enabled By Default
In addition to releasing Mesa 25.2-rc1 with its many new features to test, Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.1.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for last quarter's series...
8-Way Linux OS Comparison On The Framework 12: Squeezing More Performance Out Of Raptor Lake
Earlier this year when the Framework 13 was updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series I ran benchmarks looking at the performance gains across different Linux distributions with Debian 13, Clear Linux, and CachyOS being the outstanding performers for that Strix Point hardware. With the recent launch of the Framework 12 2-in-1 laptop powered by Intel Raptor Lake you may be wondering what Linux distributions have the edge there. Here is an eight-way comparison of different Linux operating systems on the Framework 12 with Intel Core i5 1334U with the likes of Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
Mesa 25.2-rc1 Released: Faster RADV Ray-Tracing, NVK Blackwell & More Optimizations
Mesa 25.2 is now branched and thus under a feature freeze and with Mesa 25.2-rc1 having just been released. This marks the start of weekly release candidates until the Mesa 25.2 stable release is ready to ship sometime in August...
12k Lines Of NVIDIA Blackwell 3D Class Header Files Open-Sourced
Similar to the 3D class header files previously open-sourced by NVIDIA for prior generation GPUs, yesterday NVIDIA carried out a similar open-source move to publish all the 3D class header files for their newest Blackwell graphics processors...
More AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 Improvements Land For Open-Source Driver
It's a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 "FSR 4" improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver...