
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 2 min ago
Intel Loses Another Prominent Linux Engineer - Now Going To NVIDIA
In the past few months at Intel between layoffs / corporate reorganizations and some deciding to pursue job opportunities elsewhere, there have been unfortunate impacts to their Linux engineering resources. Intel over the summer lost some prominent Linux engineering talent and in turn has even led to upstream Linux drivers being orphaned along with other driver maintainers departing and various other staffing changes. Unfortunate for Intel, another notable Linux name has left the company...
Wine 10.15 Released With Initial NTSYNC Bits, Unicode 17.0 Support
Wine 10.15 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux as well as powering Valve's Proton for Steam Play...
Intel i915 vs. Xe Graphics Driver Benchmarks For Meteor Lake: Extra Performance In 2025
Last month I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc A-Series graphics between the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers for Linux systems. The aging i915 driver is the default for the Alchemist GPUs but there is "experimental" support with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver. There were some performance advantages for the Arc A-Series if switching over to that newer driver option. Similarly, there are advantages with Meteor Lake too when moving from the i915 to Xe Linux drivers. Here are benchmarks to quantify that advantage.
Intel Linux Graphics Driver Seeing 2~5% Faster Shader Compilation Times, Up To ~20%
A few days ago I wrote about Intel fixing some Panther Lake Xe3 graphics performance issues ahead of launch. The downside of those performance optimizations for Panther Lake was that they led to longer shader compilation times. The good news though is that some separate improvements were merged now for Mesa 25.3 to help enhance the Intel graphics shader compilation performance...
Linux Mint 22.3 Planned To Bring More Wayland Improvements
While Linux Mint 22.2 was just released one week ago, Linux Mint developers are planning for a Linux Mint 22.3 update before year's end...
Fish Shell 4.0.6 Released With Many Fixes
Fish 4.0.6 is out as the newest update to this shell that with Fish 4.0 was rewritten in Rust from C++...
Samba 4.23 Released With SMB3 Over QUIC, SMB3 Unix Extensions By Default
Samba 4.23 is out today as the newest version of this SMB protocol re-implementation for file and print services interoperability with the Microsoft Windows world...
Linux 6.17 Fix Lands To Address Regression With "Serious Breakage" In Hibernation
This week's round of power management fixes for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel are on the more notable side with fixes for both AMD and Intel P-State drivers plus addressing a system hibernation issue that could lead to "serious breakage" and stems from a Linux 6.16 regression...
Fwupd 2.0.16 Released With New Search Feature, Fixes For FreeBSD Firmware Updates
It was just two days ago that Fwupd 2.0.15 released with new hardware support and other improvements. That has already been replaced by Fwupd 2.0.16...
Bcachefs Outlines Plans For Shipping As A DKMS Out-Of-Tree Kernel Module
With Linus Torvalds having recently marked Bcachefs as being "externally maintained" following ongoing disagreement over the generally accepted Linux kernel development practices, the plans were laid out today for shipping Bcachefs as an out-of-tree DKMS module...
Fedora 43 Beta Being Released Next Week
Fedora 43 Beta is declared a "GO" and ready for release next Tuesday...
Linux 6.18 Will Further Complicate Non-GPL Out-Of-Tree File-Systems
Out-of-tree file-system drivers not licensed/compatible with the GPL will have a new obstacle to deal with come time for Linux 6.18 later this year...
Apache Software Foundation Unveils Its Branding Overhaul With New Logo & "The ASF" Name
The Apache Software Foundation announced last year that they would be changing its corporate logo and overhaul its branding after being criticized by American Indian activists. Today they announced the brand new Apache Software Foundation branding...
Linux Patched For New "VMSCAPE" Vulnerability Affecting Intel & AMD CPUs
The Linux kernel was just patched moments ago for a new CPU security vulnerability... VMSCAPE. VMSCAPE affects both Intel and AMD processors...
CUPS 2.4.13 Print Server Released With "Important" Security Fix
CUPS 2.4.13 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used, open-source print server. Driving this new point release is for addressing an important security vulnerability as well as a second less notable security issue...
AMD EPYC 9575F CPUs For GPU/AI Servers Show Leading Performance In Benchmarks
Since the launch of the AMD EPYC 9005 series nearly one year ago, I have performed hundreds of different benchmarks on these EPYC "Turin" processors across a wide range of workloads/disciplines to really terrific performance, power efficiency, and value. AMD EPYC 9005 performs exceptionally well compared to the competition from Intel and ARM CPU vendors. One area though I hadn't explored to this point was how well the AMD EPYC 9005 series performs for serving as the host CPU for GPU/AI servers. That changed as I recently wrapped up some benchmarks exploring that area using the AMD EPYC 9575F and it managed to accelerate past the available competition in proving capable of being the superior host processor for AI servers.
PipeWire 1.4.8 Improves Compatibility With Apple Home Pod Mini Speakers
PipeWire 1.4.8 is out today as the newest step forward for this increasingly critical Linux desktop component for managing audio and video streams...
GCC Rust Compiler Continues Quest To Compile The Linux Kernel Crate
The GCC Rust compiler "gccrs" compiler developers have been keeping at it toward their goal of being able to compile the Linux kernel's Rust kernel crate and as part of that the Rust core library...
Firefox Finally Introducing Matroska / MKV Playback Support
Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska "MKV" content...
Linux 6.18 To Introduce Pixpaper DRM Driver, boot_display DRM Attribute
Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE sent out today what is anticipated to be the last drm-misc-next feature pull request for DRM-Next that is targeting the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle...