
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 28 min ago
New Patches Aim To Improve Unicode Support For The Linux VT Console
While there are efforts underway to effectively kill the Linux virtual terminal "VT" console by punting the functionality off to user-space, it's not dead yet and a new patch series out on Wednesday aims to enhance the modern Unicode handling by the Linux VT...
RADV Driver Now Emulates Ray-Tracing By Default For Older AMD GPUs For A Newer Game
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now exposing its emulated ray-tracing support by default for older AMD Radeon GPUs even without any form of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in order to run the new Indiana Jones game. It turns out even the emulated RT mode is fast enough to allow various older AMD Radeon graphics cards to be playable with this title...
Gallium Nine Has Been Deprecated, Planned For Removal In Mesa 25.2
Long before the likes of DXVK for Direct3D APIs implemented atop Vulkan, and even before the Vulkan API was conceived, there's been Gallium Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker implementation for Gallium3D. Gallium Nine showed promise in its early days for speeding up D3D9 Windows games running atop Wine on Linux. But with DXVK working out better these days and Gallium Nine no longer being maintained in recent times, it's now deprecated and set for removal later this year...
Linux 6.16 To Add Asahi UAPI Header For Apple Silicon Graphics But No Actual Driver Yet
Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next for queuing in DRM-Next until the Linux 6.16 merge window in June is the Asahi driver user-space API "UAPI" header. This is the user-space API intended for the Asahi kernel graphics driver for supporting the Apple M-Series graphics hardware under Linux. But due to being written in the Rust programming language and various kernel abstractions not yet ready among other obstacles, only the user-space API header is set to be added and not yet introducing the actual Direct Rendering Manager driver...
TUXEDO Provides Update On Their Snapdragon X Elite Linux Laptop
Last year TUXEDO Computers shared that they were developing an ARM Linux notebook powered by the Qualcomm Snapdeagon X Elite. They hoped to have the Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop shipping by Christmas 2024, but that didn't pan out. TUXEDO Computers has now provided a status update regarding this ARM Linux notebook effort...
Framework Laptop 12 Pre-Orders Open, Starting At €569
Framework Computer has been working on bringing the Framework 12 to market as a new, smaller and convertible laptop while retaining the upgradeable aspects that users have come to love from the company. Today the company announced the pre-orders are open and the first Framework Laptop 12 devices will be shipping in June...
AMD Prepping PKI Accelerator Driver "AMDPK" For Linux
Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver that was mainlined just with the Linux 6.14 kernel, AMD Linux engineers are now working on "AMDPK" as a new accelerator driver for their upcoming PKI Accelerator engines...
AMD To Detail ROCm Open-Source Software Progress In June
AMD announced today they will be hosting a virtual "Advancing AI 2025" event in mid-June where they will talk about their next-gen AMD Instinct accelerators while of much interest to many Phoronix readers is an update on the ROCm open-source software...
OpenSSH 10.0 Released To Better Fend Off Attacks By Quantum Computers
OpenSSH 10.0 is now available for this widely-used SSH client/server implementation. There are a number of changes to find with OpenSSH 10.0 including better protections against possible attacks by future quantum computers...
Benchmarks: Google Cloud's New C4D VMs Deliver Remarkable Performance With AMD EPYC Turin
As part of the announcements coming out today from Google Cloud Next 2025, the embargo has now lifted on the new Google Cloud C4D VMs. Powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, the new C4D instances deliver incredibly high performance and can scale up to 384 vCPUs with 3TB of RAM. For web servers, databases, CPU-based machine learning, and other workloads, the new Google C4D instances deliver incredible uplift compared to the prior-gen C3D instances. Here are some of the first public, independent benchmarks of Google's new C4D family.
Ubuntu 25.04 Now Ships With JPEG-XL Support Enabled By Default
The Ubuntu 25.04 release shipping this month will now feature JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box...
RadeonSI Driver Wires Up Support For 16-bit NIR Types: Benefits GLES & OpenCL
Well known open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has landed his most recent conquest: implementing support for 16-bit NIR types within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver along with the LLVM and ACO compiler back-ends...
Initial Support For Apple Cores Merged For The GCC 15 Compiler: A12, M1, M2 & M3
As a sooner than expected follow-up to the recent news article around Apple M1 / M2 / M3 core support for the GCC compiler, that code has now been successfully merged in time for the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release...
AMD Preferred Core Support For Linux Revised To Better Handle Dynamic Rankings
Merged back in Linux 6.9 was AMD Preferred Core support for Linux for the concept of "preferred cores" with newer Zen processors that are communicated via ACPI CPPC for select cores able to reach a higher maximum frequency or should otherwise be preferred over other cores on the system in the name of maximizing performance. That was a nice step forward for better handling newer Ryzen processors on Linux and matching functionality that had already been working under Microsoft Windows. Of focus more recently has been working on enabling more dynamic Preferred Core support for where the priority of the preferred cores may change at run-time...
Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 Adds AMD GPU Driver Install Instructions
Yesterday brought the newest update to Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux. The Azure Linux 3.0.20250402 brought many package updates mostly in the name of shipping security fixes plus brought new instructions on making use of the AMD graphics driver stack under this Microsoft Linux distribution along with various other updates...
GNU C Library Lands Workaround After Breaking Various Steam Games, Discord & Other Apps
The release of the GNU C Library 2.41 at the end of January ended up inadvertently breaking some Steam games, Discord, Julia, MATLAB, and other select user-space software. A workaround was merged today for Glibc to workaround the problem...
PostgreSQL Merges Initial Support For NUMA Awareness
The PostgreSQL open-source database server has been on an exciting spree of recent changes... IO_uring support was recently merged for PostgreSQL 18 along with AVX-512 acceleration of CRC32 computations for up to a 3x improvement. Merged today to PostgreSQL is initial support for NUMA awareness for helping with the PostgreSQL performance for multi-node/socket servers...
UALink 200G 1.0 Specification Published For Connecting Up To 1,024 Accelerators
UALink as the open standard alternative to NVIDIA NVLink that is backed by Intel, AMD, and other vendors has published the UALink 200G 1.0 specification...
Linux 6.15 Features Deliver A Lot For Intel & AMD, Many Other Changes
The Linux 6.15 merge window ended on Sunday with the release of Linux 6.15-rc1. There is a lot of exciting features and updates that were merged during the two-week merge window. Here is a look at all of the most prominent changes to be found with Linux 6.15.
Blender Is Looking For Help Testing Its Maturing Vulkan Backend
With the recent release of Blender 4.4 it brought many improvements to its Vulkan back-end but is still being treated as experimental. But they hope to make their Vulkan renderer production-ready this year and in order to do that they need more help from the community in testing it...