
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 47 min ago
Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Wassette" Using Rust + WebAssembly To Help AI Agents
Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents...
Mesa 25.2 Released With Many Improvements For RADV, Intel & NVK Drivers
Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop...
Intel Xe Enabling SR-IOV PF By Default, Marking Driver As "Broken" For Non-4K Kernels
On top of all the Linux 6.17 kernel graphics driver feature changes that landed last week like promoting Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics to on-by-default, SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs, multi-GPU preparations, Wildcat Lake enablement work, and more, some additional Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for merging to Linux 6.17 in the coming days...
AlmaLinux Introduces Native NVIDIA Support Using Open-Source Kernel Driver
The AlmaLinux project announced today that there is now "native" NVIDIA graphics driver support for AlmaLinux 10 and AlmaLinux 9 using NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules that are now conveniently packaged in an AlmaLinux repository for easy usage complete with NVIDIA's closed-source user-space packages like CUDA...
Linux 6.17 Fixes A Performance Bottleneck In The Futex Code
Merged last week for Linux 6.17 were the FUTEX locking changes that include addressing an observed performance bottleneck...
Btrfs Sees Urgent Fix Following Recent Reports Of Log Tree Corruption
On Linux 6.15.3+ there have been increased reports of log tree corruption being hit by users of the Btrfs file-system. Fortunately, a fix has now been submitted for Linux 6.17 Git and then for back-porting to the recent stable kernel versions...
Valve's ACO Compiler Used By AMD Drivers Optimize Scheduling Heuristic For Newer GPUs
Merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel to benefit the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D AMD drivers are improved scheduling heuristics for the ACO compiler back-end developed by Valve...
Linux 6.17 Optimizes khugepaged For ARM64 With Huge "16x" Impact For One Code Path
Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems...
GTK3 Version Of gconfig Merged For Linux 6.17
All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3...
systemd 258-rc2 Released In Preparing For H2'2025 Linux Distributions
Released two weeks ago was systemd 258-rc1 with many changes throughout its massive codebase. Out today is a second release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 258...
Rust Making Progress On Its 2025 Project Goals
The Rust project put out a status update concerning its 2025 project goals to summarize what has been accomplished during the first half of the year...
PCI Express 8.0 Aims For 256 GT/s In 2028
The PCI-SIG announced today the PCI Express 8.0 specification due out in 2028 will double the data of the PCI Express 7.0 specification, taking it to 256 GT/s...
Debian 13 Showing 13% Performance Improvement Over Debian 12 On AMD EPYC
If all goes according to plan Debian 13.0 will be released this weekend. Already in its effectively final state aside from any last minute fixes, I've begun running Debian 13 testing builds on various systems in the lab to great success. With two years since Debian 12, the new software packages of Debian 13 help in delivering better performance especially on modern systems. Here is a look at Debian 12 versus Debian 13 performance on an AMD EPYC server across 130 benchmarks. Coincidentally, Debian 13 is coming in at 13% faster than Debian 12.
exFAT Fixes Significant Random Write Performance Regression With Linux 6.17
Following yesterday's F2FS pull request, the exFAT file-system updates were sent out and since merged for the ongoing Linux 6.17 kernel merge window...
Intel Upstreams libsycl SYCL Runtime Library Into LLVM
For several years now Intel has been working on SYCL support within LLVM and various related efforts like the LLVM SPIR-V back-end as part of their oneAPI ambitions and Data Parallel C++ across their spectrum of hardware. The latest hitting upstream LLVM is libsycl as a SYCL run-time library...
Raja Koduri Announces New GPU Software & IP Startup - OXPython For CUDA AI On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
Oxmiq Labs exited stealth mode today as a new startup led by Raja Koduri of AMD / Apple / Intel fame to focus on GPU software and licenseable graphics IP. Oxmiq Labs is a new GPU software and IP startup that has been in development for two years already and built a team of talented GPU and AI architects...
SDL Library Lands Precision Scrolling For X.Org Usage
For Linux gamers relying on the X.Org Server, the SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed support for precision/pixel scrolling...
FFmpeg Delivers Very Nice Performance Gains For Bwdif Deinterlacing With AVX-512
FFmpeg developers are known for delivering some really wild performance gains from hand-optimized Assembly code especially around Intel/AMD AVX-512 optimizations for various features of this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Merged this week was enhancing the Bwdif deinterlacing video filter with a 23~28x speed-up over the basic C code path when using AVX-512...
Linux 6.17 Introduces hash_pointers= Boot Parameter
Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...
Intel Updates Legacy Compute Driver To Benefit Broadwell Through Ice Lake iGPUs
Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms...