Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 21 min ago
Printk Patches For Linux 6.11 Further Work Toward Threaded Console Printing
The latest printk patches have been submitted and merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel. The printk updates take another step toward the long-in-development work around threaded console printing / non-blocking "NBCON" consoles as the last major step to allow the real-time "RT" kernel patches to land...
Intel OSPRay 3.2 Further Advances This Open-Source Ray-Tracing Engine
Intel's OSPRay ray-tracing engine as part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit continues to serve as a great, scalable and portable RT engine for high fidelity visualizations. With OSPRay 3.2 released today, they continue advancing this open-source engine further...
Upstream Linux 6.11 Makes It Easy To Build A Pacman Kernel Package For Arch Linux
The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel is making it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and other Arch derived distributions relying on Pacman...
Intel's Mesa Driver Upstreaming For Xe2 Support Appears Mostly Done
Ahead of launch for new discrete/integrated graphics backed by open-source Linux drivers, it can often be difficult to ascertain the level of support pre-launch given the complexity of today's GPUs, we are past the days of long monolithic patch series for new hardware enablement, and also not knowing about what features may be added for the next-generation hardware. But if latest Mesa developer comments hold, it looks like for Intel Xe2 graphics the open-source Vulkan driver at least has "most" of the code now in place...
Intel Xe2/Battlemage & AMD RDNA4 Lead The Graphics Driver Changes In Linux 6.11
DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements...
NVIDIA 560 Linux Driver Beta Released - Defaults To Open GPU Kernel Modules
NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver...
Fedora Workstation 42 Cleared To Offer Opt-In Metrics Reporting
Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature...
LLVM Clang 19 Branched, LLVM 20 Enters Development- No AMD Zen 5 "Znver5" Merged Yet
As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch...
AMD ROCm 6.2 Release Appears Imminent For Advancing Open-Source GPU Compute
We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features...
Linux 6.11 Begins Upstreaming Support For KEBA CP500 System FPGA
Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support...
OpenBSD Now Supports VA-API Video Acceleration
The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform...
LoongArch Enables More Kernel Features With Linux 6.11
The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture...
X.Org Testing Ground Expands Its Scope To Illumos/OpenIndiana
Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support...
WPA_Supplicant 2.11 Released With WiFi 7 EHT & Many Other New Features
Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes...
Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha With COSMIC Desktop Planned For 8 August
We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August...
Performance Event Changes For Linux 6.11 Bring Several Additions For Intel Hardware
All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window...
MidnightBSD 3.2 Released With Ravenports On x86_64, New AMD Features
MidnightBSD 3.2 is out as the newest feature update to one of the few desktop-focused BSD operating systems still being maintained. MidnightBSD 3.2 continues to be derived from FreeBSD sources while shipping with a nice Xfce-based desktop experience...
X.Org Server Patches Look To Cleanup VRR Handling, Make It Xinerama-Aware
Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support...
Linux 6.11 "MM" Patches Include Many Improvements, A 10x Speedup For One Optimization
Andrew Morton on Sunday sent in his "MM" pull requests for Linux 6.11 of the areas of the kernel he manages...
GNU C Library 2.40 Released With New C23 Features & New Performance Tunables
GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation...
