Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 15 min 12 sec ago
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...
GNOME 51 Retires Legacy NVIDIA Driver Support With Removing EGLStreams
EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter...
Today Marks 22 Years Of Phoronix For Linux Hardware Testing & Benchmarking
Today marks 22 years since I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. It's been quite a journey from the early state of Linux hardware support.....
Benchmarking The BORE Scheduler Performance With CachyOS Linux
Earlier this week I ran benchmarks of different CachyOS Linux kernel flavors that proved interesting from the performance overhead of their hardened kernel build to various other interesting performancr takeaways. One kernel flavor I hadn't tested though was their build with the BORE scheduler. Given the interest and feedback from Phoronix readers, here is an article focused on looking at the performance of the BORE scheduler for the Linux kernel on CachyOS.
Linux 7.1 + Mesa 26.1 Performance With The Radeon RX 9070 GRE, RX 9070 XT
With this week's launch day review of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Ubuntu 26.04 with its Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0 default driver stack was used for testing. That choice was made since the Ubuntu 26.04 release is still fresh, the RDNA4-based RX 9070 GRE was working without issue there, and from other RDNA4 testing knowing there isn't much uplift from the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel or the current stable Mesa 26.1 OpenGL RadeonSI / Vulkan RADV drivers. But for those interested, here are those tests...
Linux 7.2 Will Be Able To Boot On Apple M3 Macs - But Far From Useful For End-Users
The upcoming Linux 7.2 mainline kernel is expected to be able to boot on Apple M3 devices including the M3-powered iMac and MacBook products. But before getting too excited it's still a long ways to go before it will actually be useful for any Apple M3 daily usage under Linux with the overall support at this stage still being very limited for these 2~3 year old Apple Macs...
