
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 12 min ago
Intel Begins Linux Preparations For Bartlett Lake
The first Linux patch was posted today by an Intel engineer that explicitly mentions "Bartlett Lake" in opening the door for any other Linux kernel patches explicitly catering to Bartlett Lake processors...
AMD RDNA4 Paired Context Reg Feature Merged For RADV To Potentially Help Performance
After various commits to Mesa 25.1 in recent days in preparing for a new paired context registers feature of AMD RDNA4 (GFX12 graphics), the feature today is wired up for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release. This feature has the possibility of helping performance for new AMD RDNA4 hardware but the performance benefits at this time aren't clear...
Linux PCACHE Proposed For Persistent Memory Cache For Block Devices
Sent out as a request for comments today is a patch series implementing PCACHE, a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of code originally designed for the CXL block device driver but ultimately is useful outside the context of Compute Express Link as well...
Qualcomm Open-Sources The ELD Linker Embedded Linker
While LLVM LLD and Mold are two popular linkers on Linux systems with the latter being known for its impressive speed and much faster than GNU LD and Gold, this past week Qualcomm open-sourced a new linker: ELD...
Linux 6.15-rc2 Released With An Assortment Of Fixes
One week after the Linux 6.15 merge window was capped off, the Linux 6.15-rc2 release is now available in rolling up all of the early fixes that were collected over the past week...
Amarok 3.3 Beta Released For Qt6-Powered KDE Music Player
Last year work on KDE's Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support...
Intel TDX Support For KVM Finally Expected To Debut In Mainline Linux 6.16
While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a "next" branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined...
Pinta 3.0 Image Editing Program Released With Port To GTK4
One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita...
DragonFlyBSD Lands "Next-Gen" Disk Encryption Code
It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption...
Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.16 After Going Through 38 Revisions
Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support...
SDL Merges Wayland Multi-Seat Support
An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve's Linux graphics efforts...
Linux 6.16 Could See AMD SEV-SNP SVSM vTPM Driver Merged For EPYC CPUs
The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel...
A Fresh Take On Virtual Swap Space Being Pursued For The Linux Kernel
A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines...
KDE Plasma 6.4 Lands Initial Support For The Wayland Session Restore Protocol
It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma space with the start of a big new feature landing for the Plasma 6.4 desktop...
LibreOffice 25.8 Landing Many Patches For Improving Qt Toolkit Integration
In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration...
NVIDIA Upstreaming Work For Linux On Their Smart Switch SN4280, SN5610, SN5640
One of many Linux kernel patch series that NVIDIA has been working on recently to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel are the adjustments needed for Linux running on their newest Smart Switch networking products for the data center...
GNOME Now Has A Second Core App Written In TypeScript
GNOME 48 made Decibels the desktop's official audio player and in doing so also became the first GNOME core application written in the TypeScript porting language. There's now a second core app for GNOME written in TypeScript...
AMD Releases ROCm 6.4 Without Any Official RDNA4 Support
After several ROCm 6.3 point releases, AMD today rolled out ROCm 6.4 as the next update to their open-source GPU/accelerator compute stack and ahead of their big Advancing AI event in June where they will talk about future ROCm work...
Running Linux 6.15 vs. 6.14 Performance With The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360
So far my testing this week of the Linux 6.15 kernel in its early, post-RC1 state has been going well. No major upsets, yet to uncover any significant performance regressions, and overall has been going smoothly with the many new features/changes in Linux 6.15...
Intel Preps VRR Refactoring For Linux 6.16, More Xe3 Panther Lake Display Enablement
Intel graphics driver engineers today sent out their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the next Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...