
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 51 min ago
Rust Is Looking For Your Feedback To Help Guide Its Future
With Rust turning ten years old this year, they are reflecting and working to draft plans for the next decade. They have started the Rust Vision Survey where they are looking for feedback from all Rust skill-sets as they look toward the future...
AMD RDNA 3.5 Graphics On 2025 Drivers: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 25.04 iGPU Performance
With having a new Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop in the lab, a lot of Linux benchmarks are forthcoming from this ThinkPad laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. This AMD Zen 5 SoC with Radeon 880M RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics had me curious how the Windows 11 vs. Linux iGPU performance is looking now more than a half-year after launch. Prior to blowing out the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation that shipped on the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and loaded with the latest AMD drivers and Windows 11 updates, I ran some graphics benchmarks for seeing how they stack up against the open-source AMD graphics drivers found on the brand new Ubuntu 25.04 release.
ZLUDA Continues Working On PyTorch Support, Eyes 32-bit PhysX Support
The ZLUDA open-source project for "CUDA on non-NVIDIA GPUs" continues being developed for enabling CUDA like GeekBench and AI workloads on AMD GPUs and other hardware vendors. The ZLUDA project hopes to have PyTorch up and running on it this year along with eyeing 32-bit PhysX support since NVIDIA has dropped support upstream for the 32-bit PhysX libraries with the recent RTX 50 Blackwell launch...
NVIDIA Engineer Fixes Early Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Affecting AMD GPU Drivers
Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code...
Linux Bring-Up For The Apple M4 Looks Like It Will Be "Rather Painful"
Sven Peter who remains one of the very active Asahi Linux developers and working on upstreaming various elements of Apple Silicon support for the Linux kernel has sent up warning flares around the eventual Apple M4 support...
MSEAL Protection Of System Mappings Merged For Linux 6.15
In addition to all of the memory management "MM" changes merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel, a secondary round of MM updates was submitted and subsequently merged for this next kernel version. Interesting here is using the recent MSEAL system call for being able to now seal system mappings...
Linux Patches Being Worked On For The HP EliteBook Ultra G1q
Yet another Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptop seeing new DeviceTree patches for enabling Linux support is the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q...
LoongArch Enables A Few More Features With Linux 6.15
The Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture will enjoy slightly better support with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel...
Coreboot 25.03 Released With Support For 22 More Motherboards
For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution...
AMD's AOMP 21.0 Switches To New Fortran Compiler, Delivers More Performance
AMD software engineers today released AOMP 21.0-0 as the newest snapshot of their LLVM/Clang compiler downstream focused on providing the best OpenMP/OpenACC GPU offloading support to AMD GPUs and Instinct accelerators via the ROCm software stack...
OpenCL 3.0.18 Published With New Extensions & Other Updates
The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.18 specifications as the latest incremental update to OpenCL 3.0...
AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D Impact Of The 3D V-Cache Optimizer Linux Driver
Last month I posted benchmarks showing the performance when using the new 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver on Linux using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This optimizer driver allows tuning the "amd_x3d_mode" for indicating your prefereoce for the CCD with the higher frequency or larger cache size. For some additional insight into the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver performance impact on Linux, here are benchmarks looking at the difference while using the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D.
Intel Updates Linux Patches For Adaptive Sharpness Property, Xe VRAM Self Refresh
Two separate patch series updated this week for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack is the still-ongoing work around the DRM sharpness property for the new adaptive sharpening filter with Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics and then separately is the work to bring VRAM Self Refresh (VRSR) over to the modern Xe kernel driver...
Linux 6.15's New "hugetlb_alloc_threads" Option Can Help Speed-Up Boot Times
Among the changes that landed this week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the memory management "MM" updates, of which there are several notable patch series included...
Intel Patches Finally Exposing NPU Frequency Under Linux
For those looking into some insight around the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) utilization with modern Core Ultra systems, pending Linux patches will finally introduce the ability for user-space to obtain the current NPU frequency...
Linux 6.15 Brings Improvements For Five Decade Old GPIB Bus
Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn't until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel's staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements...
Linux 6.15 Device Mapper Brings Inline Crypto Passthrough For DM-Stripe
All of the Device Mapper "DM" changes have been merged to mainline for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel...
Rust 1.86 Released With Trait Upcasting, Deprecates i586-PC-Windows-MSVC
Rust 1.86 is now available today as the latest version of this popular programming language...
Linux 6.15 Removes Support For IBM's CXL/CAPI Drivers
Not to be confused with the modern Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, but IBM's Coherent Accelerator Interface "CXL" / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface "CAPI" support was stripped away today from the mainline Linux kernel...
Linux 6.15 Further Improves AMD P-State Driver, Intel Dev Tackles A ~50% SPEC Regression
Linux power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki last week sent out the assortment of ACPI/PM material for the new Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. The AMD P-State driver continues to be heavy with its code churn and there have been various other optimizations and code clean-ups. The CPUIdle Menu governor also received some performance tuning worth mentioning...