
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 38 min 53 sec ago
AMD EPYC 9655 Benchmarks Show The Terrific Generational Gains With 5th Gen EPYC
With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" series launch earlier this month there was launch-day benchmark review results for the EPYC 9575F, EPYC 9755, and EPYC 9965 processors in looking at that frequency optimized SKU, the new flagship 128-core Turin "classic" core model, and the new flagship 192-core Turin "dense" core SKU, respectively. That's interesting for looking at the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC top-end wares but in comparing to 4th Gen EPYC also means higher core counts at the top-end. In being curious about the core-for-core advantages of 5th Gen EPYC, I managed to get my hands on the AMD EPYC 9655 processors for seeing how that model compares to the prior AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" flagship model. Here's a look today at how the AMD EPYC 9655 1P/2P 96-core processor compares to the prior EPYC 9654 flagship.
AMD Formally Announces Ryzen 7 9800X3D Specs - Should Be Great For Linux Creators
AMD has been teasing the Ryzen 9000X3D Zen 5 CPUs with 3D V-Cache and today they formally announced the specs of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor that will begin shipping 7 November...
Fedora Stakeholders Debate Idea Of "-O3" Optimized Packages
Following the announcement yesterday that Ubuntu 25.04 will default to the -O3 optimization level with GCC for its Debian package builds, Fedora stakeholders have begun debating the merits of switching to the -O3 optimization level or not instead of the existing -O2 optimization level default...
Linus Torvalds Lands A 2.6% Performance Improvement With Minor Linux Kernel Patch
Linus Torvalds merged a patch on Wednesday that he authored that with reworking a few lines of code is able to score a 2.6% improvement within Intel's well-exercise "will it scale" per-thread-ops benchmark test case...
AMX-FP8 Support Upstreamed Into LLVM For Intel Diamond Rapids
Intel compiler engineer Feng Zou has upstreamed AMX-FP8 support into the LLVM compiler stack. This FP8 extension to the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is coming with next-gen Diamond Rapids processors alongside other new ISA extensions...
SUSE's Agama Installer Adds QR Code To The Console & Other Improvements
SUSE's Agama OS installer 10 was recently released as the newest feature iteration for this next-gen OS installer for SUSE/openSUSE...
SVT-AV1 2.3 Brings More Performance Improvements: AVX-512 & LTO By Default, More Tuning
SVT-AV1 2.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this leading open-source AV1 encoder. With SVT-AV1 2.3 there are yet more performance improvements...
AMDVLK 2024.Q4.1 Adds A Few More Vulkan Extensions
One month has passed since the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 driver release while today has brought the AMDVLK 2024.Q4.1 release with a few new Vulkan API extensions...
AMD "Cleaner Shader" Coming For GFX11.0.3 GPUs To Help Ensure User/App Isolation
A new patch posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is introducing a "cleaner shader" explicitly for GFX11.0.3 GPUs like the Radeon 780M integrated graphics to help ensure that there is sufficient data isolation between different workloads running on the GPUs. The motivation isn't clear if there is some GFX11.0.3 security vulnerability, some AMD Linux customer particularly concerned about security on said GPUs, or some other motivation for focusing this latest cleaner shader work on GFX11.0.3 hardware...
Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" Development Opens - Defaulting To -O3 Optimizations
Canonical has announced the formal state of the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" development. Among other early changes are now defaulting to -O3 compiler optimizations rather than the default -O2 optimization level when building Debian packages...
Benchmarks Of Google's Axion Arm-based CPU: Competitive Performance & Compelling Value
Earlier this year Google announced Axion as their first Arm-based CPU for the Google Cloud. Today already they are taking Axion to general availability with the new C4A instances. These new C4A instances are advertised as offering up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than their current generation x86 instance types. In this article are some of the first public independent performance benchmarks of the Google Axion CPU along with comparing to existing GCE Arm and x86_64 instance types.
OpenPaX Announced As "Open-Source Alternative To GrSecurity" With Free Kernel Patch
Enterprise security firm Edera today is announcing OpenPaX that they promoted in their advance press notice as a "new open-source alternative to GrSecurity." GrSecurity being the firm focused on providing out-of-tree Linux kernel patches focused in the name of security enhancements. With OpenPaX they are open-source and publicly available kernel patch for mitigating common memory safety errors and other system hardening...
DRM Panic "Screen of Death" Support Being Extended To All Recent AMD GPUs
DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards...
RadeonSI Lands Async Video Operations For Improving FFmpeg Performance
The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver used by all modern AMD Radeon graphics hardware has landed support in Mesa 24.3 for async VCE/UVD video operations to enhance the performance with the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...
VirtIO-GPU Vulkan Support Approaching Upstream QEMU
Support for making use of Vulkan with VirtIO-GPU while using QEMU could very soon be upstream...
Wasmer 5.0 WebAssembly Runtime Released With V8, WAMR & WASMI Backends
Wasmer 5.0 is now available as the latest major update to this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime focused on being able to allow developers to write "universal apps" that will run anywhere thanks to the power and versatility of WebAssembly...
Shotcut 24.10 Open-Source Video Editor Adds Initial AI Feature
Shotcut 24.10 is now available as the latest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT framework, Qt6, FFmpeg, SDL, and other software components...
Intel Posts Updated Raptor Lake Microcode For Linux: Fixes Voltage Issue & Other Bugs
Intel off their typical second Tuesday of the month patch regiment today posted new CPU microcode just for 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" and 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors for Linux systems. Notable with the updated Raptor Lake CPU microcode is the internal voltage handling fix for that well known problem plaguing many Raptor Lake owners plus two other fixes...
Coreboot Issues Rebuttal To Recent Laptop Vendor Controversy
Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response...
Linux Use On Microsoft Azure Crosses 60%, AlmaLinux Now An Endorsed Distro
For years there have been statements about how over half of the VMs running within the Microsoft Azure public cloud are Linux-based... In a new blog post today is the first time I am seeing Microsoft cite now "over 60%" Linux marketshare on Microsoft's cloud...