
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 41 min ago
The Most Popular Clear Linux Benchmarks & Intel's Software Innovations Over Its History
Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clear Linux testing over its decade in existence as a high performance Intel Linux OS...
LLVM Begins Landing Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" Support
The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations...
Around 8% Of Debian Source Packages Are Building Against Rust Libraries
At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large...
HarfBuzz 11.3 Delivers Significant Performance Improvements
HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others...
Firefox 141 Release Brings Lower RAM Usage On Linux
The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser...
Linux 6.16-rc7 Released: "I Think We're In Good Shape"
The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now availablr for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week...
Linux 6.16-rc7 Bringing Fix For Possible Bogus/Miscalculated Load Averages
Among the fixes merged today ahead of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 6.16-rc7 test kernel release is a lone patch on the "sched/urgent" side to fix possible bogus load average values. Reported system load averages within the kernel's scheduler code could potentially be off going back to May of 2021...
NVIDIA Bringing CUDA To RISC-V
NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors...
Linux Kernel Patches Speed-Up CRC32 Performance For CPUs With "Good" AVX-512
Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC32 checksum performance...
Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support But Still Bound By Slow Hardware
With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware...
SFrame Support Beginning To Materialize For LLVM/Clang
SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream...
Radeon Vulkan Driver's Emulated Ray-Tracing Scores A ~40% Improvement For Quake II RTX
In addition to Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" making some nice performance improvements for modern AMD GPUs with hardware ray-tracing, the emulated ray-tracing code path in RADV for primarily older GPUs has seen some improvements merged this weekend. In fact, so significant that from one merge request is around 40% faster performance for the Quake II RTX game with the emulated RT handling...
Debian 13.0 "Trixie" Planning For Release On August 9
The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time...
Rust-Written NOVA Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Being Further Built Out In Linux 6.17
For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version...
Open-Source & Rust-Written Burn MATMUL Kernels Can Compete With NVIDIA's CUDA/cuBLAS
The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end...
Wayland Color Management For HDR Under Review For Chrome/Chromium
The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser...
KDE Plasma 6.5 Brings Rounded Bottom Corners For Windows By Default
KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows...
Arch Linux AUR Packages For Firefox & Other Browsers Removed For Containing Malware
While the Arch Linux AUR repository can be popular for fetching some packages not found in Arch Linux proper, it's important to keep in mind that AUR stands for the Arch User Repository. These user packages aren't always the best and rarely can be done with malicious intent as shown this week with an advisory over several malicious browser packages being briefly pedaled through AUR...
Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux
The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset...
Bcachefs Lands More Fixes Ahead Of Linux 6.16-rc7
As we await to see what Linus Torvalds will end up doing about the Bcachefs file-system come Linux 6.17, for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle he continues to honor the Bcachefs pull requests containing fixes...