
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 4 min 6 sec ago
openSUSE Aeon RC2 Released With Btrfs Compression Default, ZRAM & Tik
Nearly one year ago to the day the openSUSE project anounced MicroOS Desktop GNOME being renamed to openSUSE Aeon while openSUSE Desktop Plasma was taking the name openSUSE Kalpa...
Ubuntu 24.04 Now Available For The Milk-V Mars RISC-V Single Board Computer
Canonical announced this morning an optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a "credit card sized" RISC-V single board computer...
FreeBSD 14.1-RC1 Adds More Packages To The DVD Images - Including The Sway Compositor
FreeBSD 14.1-RC1 is now available for testing as this incremental update to FreeBSD 14 prepares for its stable release in June...
Intel Performance Limit Reasons For Linux To Report Why Your CPU Is Downclocking
Intel Performance Limit Reasons (PLR) can indicate why your CPU is downclocking / limited to a lower performance limit for a given core or die. With some Windows utilities this information this Intel CPU feature has been available there while now Intel is bringing PLR support to Linux too...
Intel Releases ISPC 1.24 With New AVX-VNNI & AVX512-VNNI Targets
The Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) is out with a new version today for this C programming language variant that features SPMD programming extensions. Intel ISPC aims to make it easy to take advantage of SIMD capabilities on their modern processors as well as GPUs...
AMD's GPUOpen Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.1 Improves Raspberry Pi Support
AMD by way of their GPUOpen group have released version 3.1 of the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator...
Linux Patches Posted For Enabling A 22 x 35 mm RISC-V / ARM Board
Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling Linux to boot on the LicheeRV Nano, a mini single board computer that comes in at a mere 22.86 x 35.56 mm. As interesting as the size with this SBC is the Sophgo SG2002 SoC that features a mix of RISC-V and ARM cores...
An End-User Has Made It Easier To Build ROCm & AMD GPU Machine Learning Software
An end-user and Phoronix reader has taken up creating his own AMD ROCm SDK build system to make it easier to setup a machine learning software stack from scratch on AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux. This open-source build system pulls in the AMD ROCm source code as well as AMD GPU-accelerated tools like PyTorch and ONNX and makes it easier to deploy and without having to rely on Docker or other solutions...
Linux 6.10-rc1 Kernel Released With Many New Features
The Linux 6.10-rc1 kernel was just released to top off the Linux 6.10 merge window...
Intel NPU Driver Being Refactored For More Versatile CPU+NPU Handling
Intel's open-source NPU "iVPU" Linux kernel driver for supporting their Neural Processing Unit beginning with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors is already seeing a code refactoring. The refactoring of this Intel accelerator driver is intended for allowing more versatile CPU and NPU combinations moving forward...
Linux 6.10 Supports NUMA Balancing For Multi-Size THPs
With the memory management "MM" updates merged for the Linux 6.10 there is now NUMA balancing support for multi-size transparent hugepages (THPs). This is yielding some nice performance results and there is also other work in this new kernel around multi-size THPs...
Updated Patches For AMD "Fast CPPC" To Yield Higher Performance At Same Power Level
One of the patch series that sadly was not ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window and thus will need to wait a few months for at least the next kernel is enabling AMD Fast CPPC support for Zen 4 processors. Fast CPPC aims to allow the processor to deliver higher performance at the same power consumption...
Nouveau DRM_Panic Being Worked On For Linux "Blue Screen Of Death" Type Situations
Merged for Linux 6.10 is DRM_Panic as a kernel panic screen for situations akin to Windows' well known "Blue Screen of Death". This is a kernel-based panic screen as an alternative to systemd's recent systemd-bsod. Patches have been posted by Red Hat for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Direct Rendering Manager driver to work with DRM Panic...
Modern NTFS Driver Sees Bug Fixes With Linux 6.10
While not as exciting as XFS expanding its online repair support, Bcachefs prepping for online fsck, Btrfs seeing some performance work, or F2FS improving zoned storage support, the modern NTFS driver "NTFS3" saw a set of fixes land for the Linux 6.10 kernel...
Linux 6.10 Improves AMD ROCm Compute Support For "Small" Ryzen APUs
Sneaking in as a "fix" for the Linux 6.10 kernel is an enhancement to the AMDKFD kernel compute driver used by the ROCm compute stack for better supporting small Ryzen APUs like client and embedded SoCs...
Linux 6.10 On RISC-V Allows Configurable Boot Image Compression
A few days ago with the main RISC-V architecture pull for Linux 6.10 was enabling Rust support within the kernel for this ISA as well as other additions. A secondary set of RISC-V changes have been merged as well ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window closing this weekend...
Llamafile 0.8.5 Delivers Greater Performance: Tiny Models 2x Faster On Threadripper
The Mozilla Ocho group has published their newest version of Llamafile, the open-source project that makes it very easy to distribute and run large language models (LLMs) as a single file. Llamafile is an excellent solution for easily sharing and running LLMs and supporting both speedy CPU-based execution as well as GPU acceleration where available...
GNOME Continues Working On New Installer, "Major Issue" With STF
This Week In GNOME is out with their newest edition to outline all of the interesting developments as we approach the end of May...
Intel NPU Acceleration Library 1.1 Adds New Model Support & Optimizations
Intel software engineers did a late Friday night release of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library v1.1, their Python library for tapping into the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found on the new Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. This Python library makes it easier to interface with the Intel VPU/NPU kernel driver and in turn enjoying accelerated operations for AI...
KDE Landed Many Last Minute Features Ahead Of The Plasma 6.1 Beta
It was a busy week for KDE developers ahead of yesterday's Plasma 6.1 Beta release. KDE developer Nate Graham in his weekly development summary outlined all of the interesting changes to make it into the Plasma 6.1 desktop ahead of the feature freeze that went into effect with the beta release...