
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 51 min ago
Intel's Open-Source Vulkan Driver Will No Longer Warn Over Using Xe2 Graphics
With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware...
getrandom() vDSO Coming To More Architectures With Linux 6.12
Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support...
OpenZFS 2.2.6 Debuts With Linux 6.10 Support & Early Linux 6.11 Compatibility
Succeeding OpenZFS 2.2.5 from early August is now OpenZFS 2.2.6 that brings various fixes plus newer Linux kernel compatibility...
QEMU 9.1 Released With AMD SEV-SNP Support & Intel IAA Acceleration During VM Migrations
QEMU 9.1 is out in stable form today as the newest feature release to this open-source processor emulator that plays a vital role within the free software Linux virtualization stack...
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Power/Performance With CPU Frequency Scaling Driver Tunables
Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor.
Redox OS Unlocks Faster VM Performance, "Slightly Faster" Than Linux In Some Benchmarks
The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux...
More AMD Zen 5 Tuning/Optimizations Merged For The GCC 15 Compiler
Following yesterday's initial tuning of the "znver5" target for the AMD Zen 5 CPUs with the GCC 15 compiler, several more rounds of compiler tuning/optimizations were merged for benefiting the Ryzen AI 300 series, Ryzen 9000 series desktops, and upcoming EPYC Turin processors...
Linux Patches Enable Partially-Working, Snapdragon-Powered Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G
While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel...
Mozilla Is Interested In A Rust JPEG-XL Decoder For Firefox & Google Might Develop It
Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox...
Linux Patches Posted For RAID0 Atomic Write Support
Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code...
Raspberry Pi Bugs Currently Make Up Half Of The Fedora 41 Blocker Bugs
There are six accepted blocker bugs so far for the Fedora 41 Beta and three of them all pertain to Raspberry Pi issues...
Wayland's Weston 14.0 Compositor Released
Weston 14.0 was released today as the newest feature release for this reference Wayland compositor...
New Patches Bring Rust Linux Kernel Support To MIPS
When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS...
Android 15 Released To The Android Open-Source Project
Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP)...
Debian Developers Figuring Out Plan For Removing More Unmaintained Packages
While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive...
Intel Launches Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" While Linux Support Settling
Intel formally announced their Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors today in Berlin...
AMD Zen 5 Tuning "Part Two" Merged For GCC Compiler
Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning...
Intel Battlemage OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Support Enabled By Default For Linux
Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series...
Samba 4.21 Released With LDAP TLS/SASL Channel Binding, Other Improvements
Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems...
Klp-build Proposed As A New Means Of Generating Linux Kernel Livepatch Modules
Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image...