Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 26 min ago
Haiku OS Now Enables AVX-512 Support, Other Hardware Improvements
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month...
KDE Plasma 6.7 Sees Last Minute Fixes Ahead Of Next Week's Release
Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes...
Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages
The day started out with Arch Linux's AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages...
OpenZFS 2.4.3 Released With Many Bug Fixes
OpenZFS 2.4.3 is out today as the newest stable point release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation as well as point releases for the OpenZFS 2.3 and 2.2 series too...
Wine 11.11 Released With Wayland Improvements
Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.11 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for running Windows games and applications under Linux as well as other platforms...
AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform
AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux...
Linux 7.2 Features Expected: Apple M3, Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, USB4STREAM, Cache Aware Scheduling
Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks...
Red Hat Releases Second Developer Preview Of RHEL 10 For RISC-V
Last year when releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, Red Hat announced a RHEL 10.0 developer preview for RISC-V. Since then that RISC-V developer preview hadn't been updated but now Red Hat has published a new developer preview snapshot based on RHEL 10.2...
The Best Features Of Linux 7.1: FRED, New NTFS Driver & More Performance
On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1...
Ubuntu 26.10 Reaffirms Plans For Switching To Dbus-Broker
Among the many new features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 is switching the default D-Bus implementation over to using the high performance Dbus-Broker drop-in replacement...
Open-Source Success Achieved For Greater Transparency & Security: Running AMD openSIL + Coreboot On EPYC
Ever since AMD announced openSIL in early 2023 for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA and enhance their Coreboot support, I have been eager to try it out. The openSIL code drops to date though have just focused on select reference platforms with only aiming for production status in the Zen 6 timeframe. But thanks to 3mdeb porting openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte server motherboard, it's now possible to try out openSIL+Coreboot right now on Zen 5 hardware.
New NTFS Linux Driver Being Improved For Windows Native Symbolic Links
One of the exciting additions to the Linux 7.1 kernel is the introduction of the new NTFS file-system kernel driver. While in good shape already and proving advantageous over other NTFS open-source driver options, one of the initial limitations on it is around Windows native symbolic link handling but that is now in the process of being resolved...
AVX-512 Optimization For Linux RAID Showing Up To 41% Improvement On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Linux cryptography subsystem expert Eric Biggers Eric Biggers of Google worked on some pretty nice Intel/AMD x86_64 optimizations over the years. Especially around AVX-512 optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto code has been one of his many nice improvements to the kernel in recent times. Today he's out with another enticing AVX-512 optimization and this time it's for the software RAID code...
Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware
The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised...
Wine Wayland Driver Lands Alpha Modifier Support For Opacity Handling
The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces...
Qt 6.12 Beta Released With Qt Quick 3D XR Apps Now Able To Run On 2D AR Glasses
The first beta release of the Qt 6.12 toolkit is now available for testing. Qt 6.12 is packing a number of refinements and new features compared to earlier Qt6 releases. For paying Qt commercial customers, Qt 6.12 is also going to be the latest Qt6 Long Term Support (LTS) release...
GCC 15.3 Compiler Brings Nearly A Year Worth Of Bug Fixes
For those relying on last year's stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes...
Mesa 26.2 Preps For AMD GFX1156 For New, Post-Strix-Halo RDNA 3.5 Graphics
Being submitted on the kernel side with the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is initial support for the GFX 11.5.6 graphics IP block along with several other newer IP blocks such as SDMA 6.4, NBIO 7.11.5, IH 6.4, HDP 6.4, MMHUB 3.4.2, SMU 15.0.5, ATHUB 3.4.2, and VPE 2.2. Now in user-space for the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers is the GFX1156 (GFX 11.5.6) support being prepared too...
Git 2.55-rc0 Released With Rust Enabled By Default
Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default...
Benchmarking The Performance Benefits To Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Packages
With Canonical engineers again experimenting with x86_64-v3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux using an "amd64v3" archive for the current Ubuntu 26.10 development, I decided to see how these latest amd64v3 packages comparing to their conventional Ubuntu 26.10 amd64 packages.
