Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 29 min ago
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...
macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation...
RISC-V CPU Performance Up 8x In Five Years: SiFive HiFive Unmatched To SpacemiT K3
Recently I published some initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has come compared to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board from five years ago.
Asterinas 0.18 Released For Rust-Written, Memory Safe Linux Alternative OS
In addition to Redox OS continuing to evolve quite nicely for that from-scratch, Rust-based open-source OS, Asterinas OS is also continuing to move forward for that Rust-based operating system striving for Linux compatibility...
LLVM/Clang Lands Initial Compiler Targeting For Hygon x86 CPUs
Following the recent Hygon C86-4G CPU support added to the GCC 17 compiler, the open-source LLVM Clang compiler has similarly seen Hygon c86-4g-m4 / c86-4g-m6 / c86-4g-m7 CPU support merged...
Linux 7.2 Preparing Intel Key Protection Technology "KPT" For Next-Gen QAT
Going back to the launch of 1st Gen Xeon Scalable processors in 2017 was Intel Key Protection Technology (KPT) promoted and there have been Key Protection Technology references in QuickAssist (QAT) documentation since 2016. Surprisingly we are only now seeing Key Protection Technology references for the upstream Linux QAT driver as Intel engineers prepare for their next-gen "Gen6" QuickAssist hardware support...
Lightweight Pragtical Code Editor Adds SDL GPU Backend
Pragtical, the lightweight open-source code editor that prides itself on using just ~50MB of RAM and ~10MB of disk space while being a full-featured code editor, is tacking on more features. Most notable with the new Pragtical release is adding an SDL-based GPU back-end for this MIT-licensed editor...
Vortex 3.0 Released As Full-Stack, Open-Source RISC-V GPU Now With 3D Pipeline
The open-source developers at Georgia Tech working on Vortex as an OpenCL-compatible RISC-V GPGPU implementation are out with their next major release for this open-source GPU design...
Ubuntu MATE Is Continuing Despite No Ubuntu MATE 26.04 Release
Back in March, Martin Wimpress stepped down as the longtime Ubuntu MATE leader and was looking for contributors to keep this Ubuntu derivative going with its GNOME2-derived desktop. That change in leadership paired with no Ubuntu MATE 26.04 release having occurred led to some concerns among users, but the plan is still for Ubuntu MATE to continue moving forward...
Fedora 44 RISC-V Images Released, Including New "Omni" Kernel For Broader RISC-V Hardware Support
Following the official Fedora 44 images released one month ago, Fedora 44 RISC-V images were published today for those wanting to run this newest Fedora Linux on RISC-V hardware...
AMD Support Being Added To UFS Host Controller PCI Driver In Linux 7.2
Linux's ufshcd-pci as the Universal Flash Storage host controller PCI driver has supported a variety of Intel devices to this point while for Linux 7.2 the first AMD device is set to be added...
Running CachyOS With The BORE Scheduler While Disabling Ananicy-CPP
Last week I ran benchmarks of CachyOS with the BORE scheduler using its "linux-cachyos-bore" kernel option. The results didn't end up being as enticing as anticipated but the developer behind the BORE scheduler commented in the forums that he recently received reports from users experiencing game stuttering while using BORE that was attributed to CachyOS' default use of Ananicy-Cpp. So over the weekend I did another CachyOS BORE run without that CachyOS default...
Linux 7.1 Helping Intel Arc Battlemage Graphics Achieve Better Performance
Recent testing of the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage desktop graphics card has shown that the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is delivering superior graphics performance over the current stable Linux 7.0 kernel.
Xfce Ported To Rust-Written Redox OS For Better X11 Experience
The belated "This Month in Redox" was posted today for covering improvements made to this open-source, Rust-based operating system during the month of May. Most notable in May is seeing the Xfce desktop ported over to Redox OS...
Canonical Experimenting With x86-64-v3 Packages For Ubuntu 26.10
Canonical engineers are again evaluating the impact of building the Ubuntu Linux archive for the x86-64-v3 "amd64v3" micro-architecture feature level for its performance benefits on modern Intel and AMD systems. An amd64v3 archive is available of Ubuntu 26.10 for testing with the packages targeting this level that allows for AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU x86_64 ISA capabilities of the past decade...
Linux 7.2 To Add ACPI CPPC v4 Support Authored By NVIDIA
Ahead of NVIDIA Vera ramping up, the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is adding the ACPI CPPC v4 support authored by a NVIDIA engineer...
