Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 27 min ago
OpenJPH 0.28 Up To 1.9x Faster With New AVX2 Optimizations For High-Throughput JPEG2000
OpenJPH as an open-source implementation of high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (or JPH or HTJ2K) is now significantly faster for both encode and decode operations thanks to new AVX2 optimizations for Intel and AMD processors...
Intel's Open Image Denoise 2.5 Delivers Solid Performance Improvements For GPUs
Intel's Open Image Denoise is the open-source project providing a high performance denoising library for ray-tracing and used by the likes of Blender and other renderers/creative apps for powerful denoising capabilities. Released last week was Open Image Denoise 2.5 with some very nice performance improvements for Intel GPUs...
GNOME Foundation Announces First Participants Of Fellowship Program
Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced...
Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY Driver Coming To Linux 7.2
One of the new network drivers destined for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window is for supporting the Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY...
ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life
ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform...
Framework Laptop 13 Pro To Begin Shipping In July
Framework Computer began informing those that pre-ordered the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro that it will begin shipping in July rather than their original June target. The setback is coming to address two issues that came up in their testing process that delayed the start of mass production...
Intel XPU Manager 2.0 Overhauls Windows & Linux Management For Arc Pro GPUs
Just a week after the release of Intel XPU Manager 1.3.7, Intel today released XPU Manager 2.0 as a major overhaul for this software for monitoring and management of their data center GPUs on Microsoft Windows and Linux...
Linux 7.2 To Enable ESWIN SoC Support By Default For RISC-V Kernel Builds
An important one-liner is set to come for Linux 7.2 to enable ESWIN SoC support by default for RISC-V kernel builds. This change will allow default RISC-V kernel builds in turn to boot on the likes of SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 developer board...
AMD's Lemonade SDK For Local AI Adds NVIDIA CUDA Support
Lemonade, the local AI server solution developed by AMD that is designed to work across their CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, is out with a new version today that also adds NVIDIA CUDA support...
Intel Arc Pro B70 Showing Off Some Performance Wins With Linux 7.1
After recently noticing the Intel Arc B580 performing better on Linux 7.1 for that kernel version soon to be released as stable, I was curious if there were performance gains also to be found with the new flagship Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 workstation graphics card. Here are some benchmarks of the Intel Arc Pro B70 in relevant workloads between Linux 7.0 and the near-final Linux 7.1 kernel.
Linux Foundation's Latest AI Effort Is Around AI Asset & Data Exchange
The Linux Foundation continues working to get more involved in new AI initiatives. Today the Linux Foundation announced the OpenSharing Project with an effort to standardize AI asset and data exchange...
NVIDIA Engineer Devises Patch To Significantly Reduce GCC Bootstrap Time
NVIDIA engineer Kyrylo Tkachov posted a patch for testing yesterday to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for conducting a native bootstrap. The time spent in the configure process for native GCC builds is reduced by around 43% while the overall bootstrap wall time is lowered by around 15%...
Linux's CrOS EC Driver To Support Custom Fan Curves - Useful For Framework Laptops
The cros_ec Linux kernel driver is used for supporting the ChromeOS Embedded Controller "EC" used by Chromebooks and various other laptops like Framework Laptops. With patches pending to cros_ec, support for custom fan curves is being introduced...
KDE KWin Patches Aiming To Optimize Gaming Latency To Better Compete With Windows
Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE's KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11...
Linux Firmware Repository Preps For AI Coding Agents
The linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the de facto home of all the binary blobs used by the mainline Linux kernel open-source drivers has now introduced AGENTS.md documentation and other preparations for embracing AI coding agents...
AMDGPU Linux Driver Preps For HDMI 2.1 Compliance Testing
While not as exciting as features like HDMI 2.1 FRL and Display Stream Compression itself, as part of AMD's efforts to provide a fully open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for AMDGPU, new code is being prepped for their kernel driver to support the HDMI compliance testing efforts...
Linux's KVM Preps For APX Support In VMs
Among the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window are preparations for supporting Advanced Performance Extensions within KVM virtual machines...
RADV Driver Now Leveraging RDNA3+ Hardware Feature For Better Instruction Cache Prefetching
Initially introduced in RDNA3 (GFX11) GPUs is INST_PREF_SIZE to specify the number of instruction bytes to prefetch prior to a wavefront beginning execution. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now making use of this feature in RDNA3/RDNA4 GPUs for better instruction cache prefetching...
Linux Sees Patches For "Critical" Vulnerability Affecting Many Arm CPUs
Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI...
Alpine Linux 3.24 Improves Installer Experience, Adds COSMIC Desktop Option
Alpine Linux, the Linux distribution popular especially for containers / micro-services and embedded devices, is out with its newest feature release...
