
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 15 min 36 sec ago
Ubuntu Adds Support For A New Low-Cost RISC-V Board: The OrangePi RV2 8GB For ~$64
Canonical announced today they have released Ubuntu developer images for the Orange Pi RV2, a new RISC-V single board computer that is low-cost with the SBC featuring 8GB of RAM costing just $64 USD...
RADV Lands Workaround For Buggy HiZ/HiS On AMD RDNA4 GPUs
It turns out the Hierarchical Z "HiZ" implementation with AMD RDNA4 GPUs with the GFX12 graphics engine for early rejection of fragments before hitting the rendering pipeline is slightly buggy. Driver workarounds are needed for the HiZ/HiS support with RDNA4 GPUs to avoid potential hangs...
IBM Announces The z17 Mainframe Powered By Telum II Processors
Following IBM engineers doing a lot of open-source compiler work around a new "arch15" that we suspected to be IBM z17 with Telum II processors, this morning IBM officially announced their next-generation mainframe hardware...
New Documentation Aims To Help Improve AMD Zen System Debugging On Linux
In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes...
Rust-Written Redox OS Makes USB 3.x Improvements, Async NVMe Driver Support
The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project has published its March 2025 status report that outlines exciting progress made over the past month...
Mozilla Builders' LocalScore: An Interesting Local AI LLM Benchmark
Via Mozilla's Mozilla Builders initiative for fostering open-source AI projects is LocalScore, an interesting local AI large language model (LLM) benchmark for Windows and Linux systems. LocalScore has a lot of potential and also builds off the Mozilla Ocho Llamafile project as an easy-to-distribute LLM framework. LocalScore is still in its early stages but is already working well and will also be used in future hardware reviews on Phoronix...
Ubuntu 25.04 Boosting AMD EPYC 9005 Performance Even Higher: ~14% Faster Than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" servers is even more exhilarating. As the first of a lot more Ubuntu 25.04 server benchmarks to come, today is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance on AMD EPYC 9005 compared to Ubuntu 24.10 and the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS releases.
DXVK 2.6.1 Released With More Bug Fixes & Performance Optimizations
DXVK 2.6.1 was just released as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other softwarefor enjoying older Windows games on Linux...
Five Year Old Ubuntu Bug For NVIDIA Suspend/Resume Experience: Now Working On X11, Wayland Not Yet
For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor...
FFmpeg Lands AES-NI Optimized Implementation For Big Speed-Up
FFmpeg is known for carrying a lot of hand-optimized Assembly code for speeding up this widely-used multimedia library and taking advantage of AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA capabilities. Merged yesterday was support for making use of AES-NI for those relying on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) within FFmpeg for encrypted video streams...
Apple M1 / M2 / M3 Core Support Might Soon Be Merged For The GCC Compiler
When it comes to compiler support for Apple Silicon and their hardware at large, Apple has long been focused on the LLVM/Clang toolchain given their long history with it, employing many of the developers, and Xcode being based on LLVM. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though may soon see upstream support for the newer Apple Cores thanks to the work of GCC developer Iain Sandoe along with the input of engineers from Arm and the Apple open-source team...
Linux 6.14.1 Released With An Initial Set Of Fixes & Hardware Quirks
For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading to a new feature release, Linux 6.14.1 was released this morning with an initial collection of fixes atop the Linux 6.14 codebase from two weeks ago...
Turbostat Utility Bumps 1024 CPU Core Limit To 8192 Cores After HPE Breaches It With 1152 Cores
On Sunday prior to releasing Linux 6.15-rc1, one of the last feature pulls was merging updates for the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree. The Turbostat tool provides CPU frequency and power statistics along with the ability to query temperatures and other CPU metrics on AMD and Intel processors...
Linux 6.15-rc1 Released With New Performance Optimizations, Updated Zstd & New Hardware
The Linux 6.15 merge window has been capped off with the Linux 6.15-rc1 test kernel having been just released...
NVIDIA Makes PhysX & Flow GPU Code Open-Source
As a win for the open-source community from NVIDIA, the company recently announced they are making their PhysX and Flow GPU-accelerated source code open-source...
Apple Z2 Touchscreen / Touch Bar Driver Lands In Linux 6.15
As we close out the Linux 6.15 merge window this weekend culminating with the Linux 6.15-rc1 release, the input driver updates were merged that include introducing the new Apple Z2 driver...
PostgreSQL Turns To AVX-512 For CRC32 Computations: Up To 3x Faster
In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations...
Large Atomic Write Preparations Land In Linux 6.15
One of the early pull requests for Linux 6.15 that I've been meaning to highlight are the VFS iomap updates sent in by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner. In particular, the VFS iomap pull brings preparations for large atomic writes and its upcoming usage by the XFS and EXT4 file-systems...
Linux 6.15 Performance Events Adds Support For AMD Zen 5 Load Latency Filtering
Merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.15 kernel were all of the performance events updates for which there are a few notable patches on the AMD and Intel side this cycle...
Linux 6.15 Kbuild Adds Support For LoongArch Debian & Faster gendwarfksyms
Among the pull requests coming in at the tail end of the Linux 6.15 merge window with 6.15-rc1 expected tonight are all of the Kbuild updates as the infrastructure for building out the kernel...