
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 11 min ago
AMD Preps More GPU Driver Fixes For Linux 6.14, Cleaner Shader For RDNA2 dGPUs
On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...
Intel Xe Driver Adding "RPa" Frequency Reporting With Linux 6.14
This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver...
GNOME Image Viewer Now Editing JPEGs, Other GNOME 48 Progress
GNOME 48 is moving along with the GNOME 48 Alpha packages due this weekend followed by the beta in early February. GNOME 48 is still making good progress in its goal to release on 19 March...
Sony Proposes Changing LLVM Clang Default To C++20 Mode
Sony engineers are proposing that the LLVM Clang compiler changes its default C++ mode from C++17 to C++20. This coincides with Sony planning to soon upgrade their PlayStation 5 compiler downstream to C++20 by default...
KDE Plasma 6.3 Bringing A More Consistent Close Button, Other Last Minute Changes
This week brought the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta as well as a number of last minute feature changes for this desktop update due for release in February...
Intel Open-Source Vulkan Driver Merges Initial AV1 Decode Support
Merged this Friday night for Mesa 25.0 is initial Vulkan Video AV1 decode support for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...
Wine 10.0-rc5 Brings Another 31 Bug Fixes
Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes...
Experimental Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" v2 Patches: I/O Throughput Lower By 70%
Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit...
Git 2.48 Released With Initial Support For The Meson Build System
Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system...
More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13
Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors...
Lenovo Discovers Situation Of Linux Dropping PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs To Gen 1 Speeds
A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution...
Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support
The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord...
VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 Brings A Few Fixes For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation...
Ubuntu Considers Taking It Easier On Software Updates Over Weekends
Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either...
12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix
The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics...
Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance...
COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates
Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...
AMD Secure TSC Support Might Finally Be Ready For Landing In The Linux Kernel
Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel...
Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 Brings More Battlemage Optimizations
The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations...
Google & Linux Foundation Launch "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" Fund
Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects...