
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 5 min ago
Linux 6.17 Introduces hash_pointers= Boot Parameter
Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...
Intel Updates Legacy Compute Driver To Benefit Broadwell Through Ice Lake iGPUs
Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms...
openSUSE Leap 16.0 Enters RC Phase With New Installer, Xfce On Wayland Option
Working toward the stable openSUSE Leap 16.0 release in late 2025, the release candidate period has begun for this Linux distribution aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 sources...
F2FS Sees New Improvements Merged For Linux 6.17 While Bcachefs Languishes
Sent out today for the Linux 6.17 merge window and already merged hours later were the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) feature updates...
Git 2.51-rc0 Makes More Preparations For Git 3.0 Where It Will Use SHA-256 By Default
Junio Hamano announced the release of Git 2.51-rc0 to kick off the new week and the first step toward Git 2.51 as the next milestone for this open-source distributed version control system...
AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 "Krackan Point" Offers Outstanding Value In Sub-$500 Laptops
Over the past three months we have been excitedly testing AMD's Strix Halo SoC with the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 flagship model as well as the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 as one step below. Strix Halo offers excellent CPU and GPU performance capabilities at the top-end if your budget allows. But at the opposite end and a step below the Strix Point SoCs that have been available the past year is Krackan Point. Krackan Point is for the mid-range offerings in the Ryzen AI 300 series. Recently I've been testing an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 laptop that offers pretty impressive performance/value when considering it can be found brand new for as little as $449 USD with the HP OmniBook 5.
NVIDIA CUDA 13.0 Available With Unified Arm Platform Support
Along with today's NVIDIA R580 Linux driver beta, the CUDA 13.0 toolkit is now available to download and depends upon the new R580 Linux driver series...
Mesa NVK Driver Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4 For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPUs
Merged a short time ago to Mesa 25.3-devel Git and marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 series is advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs...
NVIDIA 580 Beta Linux Driver Brings Fixes, Wayland fifo-v1 Support With Vulkan
NVIDIA today published the v580.65.06 as their first beta driver version in the new NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series...
AppArmor For Linux 6.17 Set To Introduce AF_UNIX Mediation, Other Improvements
Canonical engineer John Johansen sent out the AppArmor pull request today for the Linux 6.17 merge window that is heavy on changes for this Linux kernel security module...
Google Preparing To Ship Chrome With "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" For Wayland
Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland...
Linux 6.17 Making Kdump Crash Kernel More Reliable, Less Wasted Memory
In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability...
GNOME Shell 49 Beta Brings Restart/Shutdown Support To The Lock Screen
Along with the release of the Mutter 49 beta, GNOME Shell 49 beta was released on Sunday in preparation for the imminent GNOME 49 beta release. Notable here is long sought after support for having the ability to restart or shutdown the computer from GNOME's lock screen...
NetBSD 11.0 Preparing For Release With Improved Linux Emulation, Better RISC-V Support
NetBSD 11.0 release preparations have begun. The NetBSD developers are hoping to officially release NetBSD 11.0 in October and for that to happen the release candidate would be out in September and daily beta builds can already be tested...
GNOME Mutter 49 Beta Released With Pointer Warp Protocol, Wayland Fixes
The GNOME 49 Mutter beta release is now available for testing ahead of the stable release of GNOME 49 coming up In September...
Intel QuickAssist Hit By Second Demotion In Linux 6.17 Due To Lack Of Kernel Benefit
A few days ago the Intel QuickAssist "QAT" accelerators were demoted by FSCRYPT in the Linux 6.17 development code due to being slow and bug prone with AVX-512 showing to be much faster than leveraging the QAT accelerators in this file encryption framework. With the Linux 6.17 crypto subsystem is a second separate demotion to Intel's QAT support for kernel use...
Apple HFS/HFS+ File-System Drivers See Many Fixes In Linux 6.17
Earlier this year there was talk of Linux potentially dropping its Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers as they had been orphaned for a decade and proving to be a maintenance burden. Following that some developers stepped up to better maintain the code for HFS and HFS+ file-system support. In Linux 6.17 we are seeing some of the fruits of that work...
Corsair HX1200i 2025 Power Supply Monitoring Now Works Under Linux
For those shopping for a high-end desktop power supply for use under Linux and interested in being able to take advantage of sensor monitoring capabilities, the 2025 edition of the Corsair HX1200i PSU can now enjoy working sensor monitoring under Linux...
Compute Express Link Code Further Cleaned Up In Linux 6.17
The Compute Express Link code changes landed this weekend for the Linux 6.17 kernel with development continuing to be quite active around this subsystem for supporting latest and next-generation servers...
Linux 6.17 Getting More Rusty With Many Rust Language Additions
As has been the trend with recent Linux kernel releases, a lot of Rust programming language abstractions and other additions are coming for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel...