Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 39 min 26 sec ago
Time Is Running Out On Our Autumn Deal To Help Support Linux Hardware Reviews
Just a friendly reminder that our autumn promotion is ending in a few days for those wishing to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate. Less than 1% of readers currently do so for helping to support the site and its Linux hardware testing and open-source news operations over the past 21 years. Joining Phoronix Premium gets you ad-free access, multi-page articles on a single page, custom forum avatar support, and other benefits all while helping for operations to continue during this difficult period for the web/ad industry...
Linux 6.18 Landing Patch For Old AMD Bulldozer CPUs With XOP Instruction Set
The Linux 6.18 kernel is bringing a new patch to benefit those using the decade-old AMD Bulldozer processors and wanting to make use of Linux's X86_NATIVE_CPU build option for enhancing performance in some areas by optimizing the kernel build for your particular processor/ISA capabilities...
Mesa 25.3 Intel Driver Lands Support For Stochastic Rounding
A new feature merged this week for the Intel Mesa compiler code for their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers is support for Stochastic Rounding...
System76 Releases Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta Alongside COSMIC Desktop Beta
Overnight the Linux PC vendor System76 released their long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta operating system along with the beta milestone of their COSMIC desktop environment...
AMD's GAIA For GenAI Adds Linux Support: Using Vulkan For GPUs, No NPUs Yet
Back in March AMD announced the open-source GAIA software for GenAI but as noted in that former article, at launch it was limited to Windows-only support. AMD recently released a new version of GAIA with Linux support albeit in a rather interesting twist is limited to Vulkan acceleration...
Servo Engine Lands Support For Rendering Inline SVG Elements, More Performance
The Servo open-source browser engine project has published their monthly status update that covers all the improvements they made over the course of August. There's been a lot of progress on this Rust-based browser engine that has a lot of potential particularly for embedded/CEF-like use-cases...
Linux 6.18 Linear RAID "md-linear" To Support Atomic Writes
Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window...
PostgreSQL 18.0 Released With Async I/O, Performance Improvements
PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features...
BPF With Linux 6.18 To Support Signed Programs & Deferred Task Execution
Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions...
Intel Posts New Linux Patches To Reduce Overhead Of VMSCAPE Mitigation
Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors...
Wild: A Very Fast Linker Written In Rust, Aims To Outperform Mold Linker
While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild...
Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 Prepares For Panther Lake
The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode...
Qualcomm Begins Posting Linux Patches For Snapdragon X2 Elite, 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs
Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel...
Intel Releases IGSC 1.0 For Applying Firmware Updates To Graphics Cards
Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices...
Raspberry Pi 500+ Benchmarks: Mechanical Keyboard Computer, 16GB RAM & NVMe SSD
Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.
SUSE Announces Better Support For NVIDIA CUDA
SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms...
Qualcomm Announces X2 Elite SoCs - Up To 18 Cores & Up To 5.0GHz Boost Frequency
Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency...
Linux Laptop Vendor MALIBAL Attempting To Pursue Made-In-USA Laptops
Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads...
The Massive AI Performance Benefit With AMX On Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids"
Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.
Mesa's PowerVR Vulkan Driver Gets Rid Of Its Old Hardcoded Shader Code
Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders...
