Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 1 min ago
Wayland Protocols 1.49 Released With Improved Multi-GPU Support, Windows BT.2100
Simon Ser just published Wayland Protocols 1.49 as the latest version for this primary set of Wayland protocol definitions...
"Flatten The Pick" Linux Patches Progress For Better cgroup Scheduling While Linux Gaming
A month ago I wrote about Linux scheduler work to help boost gaming performance on old "potato" hardware with Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra noting that Linux cgroup scheduling has continued to be "a pain in the arse." This work continues advancing with a third iteration of these "flatten the pick" patches being posted...
Mesa 26.2 Lands VK_GOOGLE_display_timing Support For Direct Display Mode
The VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension for obtaining display timing information that can be useful for frame-pacing and eliminating micro-stuttering in games now has direct display mode support with KHR_display for the Mesa Vulkan drivers. This now merged addition immediately benefits the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers as well as the PowerVR, Turnip, and V3DV drivers too...
Linux 7.1-rc7 Adding More AMD Zen 6 CPU Models
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc7 test kernel release due out later today, a pull request has been submitted of some "x86 fixes" for this kernel release. Most notable with this pull request is acknowledging some additional AMD Zen 6 CPU models...
Some Broadcom V3D Graphics Support On Path For Removed Over Lack Of Testing
Broadcom V3D 3.3 and V3D 4.1 graphics IP is set to be deprecated and removed from the V3D kernel graphics/display driver after the Mesa driver support was removed two years ago already. The situation in both cases amount to lack of hardware by developers for testing and with that likely no other known users of these particular Broadcom graphics in selects SoCs...
FreeBSD 15.1 Delayed To Mid-June Due To Critical x86 Bug Fixes
FreeBSD 15.1 was supposed to be out at the start of June but a second release candidate pushed it back by a week and now a third needed release candidate has pushed out the stable release by an additional week...
GNOME File Previewer Finally Switches TO GTK4, Adds Dark Mode
GNOME Sushi as the file previewer component for the GNOME Files (Nautilus) file manager has now been adapted to make use of GTK4 as well as delivering other enhancements for a nicer file previewing experience on GNOME...
OpenCV 5.0 Released With Rewritten DNN Engine, Built-In LLM & VLM Support
OpenCV 5.0 released today as a major update to this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library...
Valve Developer Posts New AMD Anti-Lag Implementation For RADV Driver
Daniel Schürmann of Valve's Linux team has posted a new VK_AMD_anti_lag implementation for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...
Ape: A New Vulkan Driver Written In The Zig Programming Language
Ape is a new open-source Vulkan driver written in the Zig programming language and not dependent upon any Mesa code...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Make Sure You Don't Miss Your Low Battery Notifications While Gaming
KDE developers continue with last minute bug fixes ahead of the Plasma 6.7 desktop release later this month as well as preparing early feature work toward Plasma 6.8 and also landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series...
GNU Gets Back Into Nutrition Software After 14 Year Hiatus
For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU's GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years...
Linux DRM Ioctl Developed By AMD Being Disabled Following Ongoing Security Issue
It's unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week's DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year...
Ubuntu 26.10 To Begin Laying Foundation For Context-Aware Desktop, Other New Features
Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team today posted a roadmap of many development items they are hoping to tackle for Ubuntu 26.10 due out in October. Some of these desktop plans are more ambitious and will take multiple release cycles to fully realize, but it goes to show their continued investment into the Ubuntu desktop...
CUDA-Oxide 0.2 Brings Early Improvements To Pure Rust CUDA Kernels
Last month CUDA-Oxide was introduced as an experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler. From pure Rust programming language code, one can write CUDA GPU kernels in a "safe(ish)" manner with the CUDA-Oxide compiler emitting NVIDIA PTX output directly. Out today is the second update to CUDA-Oxide...
ARM Linux Server Performance Up More Than 7x Geo Mean In 8 Years, As Much As 15x With NVIDIA Vera CPU
NVIDIA's Vera CPU is delivering the fastest ARM performance I have ever seen. For putting it into perspective how far the ARM server CPU hardware has come in just the last decade and for some "fun" benchmarks as part of Phoronix marking 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, here are some benchmarks showing the Ampere eMAG from September 2018 to the performance now with NVIDIA Vera. Not even factoring in the many software optimizations across the stack over the period, from simply the hardware side the ARM server CPU performance has advanced by more than 7x in eight years and in some workloads nearly 15x faster.
Vulkan 1.4.353 Released With Three New Extensions
After three weeks without any Vulkan API spec updates, Vulkan 1.4.353 was released today to deliver the latest documentation updates for this high performance graphics/compute API as well as introducing three new extensions...
More SpacemiT K3 & K1 Support Landing In Upstream Linux 7.2
In addition to Apple M3 Device Trees for Linux 7.2, the SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs are seeing some notable Device Tree improvements with this next version of the Linux kernel...
NVIDIA's Nova Driver Continues Being Built Up In Linux 7.2 Along With Other DRM Rust Code
Danilo Krummrich sent out the main set of DRM Rust subsystem changes on Thursday that are targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel. NVIDIA's open-source Nova driver continues seeing a bulk of the DRM Rust work as this modern successor to Nouveau continues taking shape...
Linux 7.2 Continues Improving AMDGPU Support On POWER, ARM
In addition to AMDGPU finally seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL support in Linux 7.2, another change worth noting in this week's AMDGPU pull request is the continued work on enhancing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver support for non-4K page size kernel builds. In particular this helps out with AMD graphics and ROCm for the likes of ARM and POWER...
