Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 11 min ago
PoCL 6.0 OpenCL Implementation Brings OpenMP For CPU Driver, More Remote Driver Features
The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets...
Marek Olšák Lands Support In Mesa 24.2 To Vectorize IO In The GLSL Linker
Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has shown no signs of hitting the end of the road for optimizing OpenGL support within the Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack. More than one decade since joining AMD and more than a decade and a half of being involved with Mesa since beginning as a student developer, Marek still isn't slowing down with his performance optimizations and new features to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers...
New Linux Patches To Help Ensure Intel Xeon Servers Can Achieve Highest Frequencies
A set of patches for the Linux kernel's Intel P-State driver aim to ensure Intel Xeon servers can hit their highest clock frequencies following changes in the server's performance profile. It turns out some special handling is needed to update the highest frequencies of a CPU after boot to ensure the performance profile is properly reflected...
Fedora 41 Hopes The GIMP 3.0 Photoshop Alternative Will Be Ready To Shine
Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41...
Patches For AMD GPUs On Loongson Point To "Massive Platform Bug" For These Chinese CPUs
A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems...
X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit v0.0.2 Adds NetBSD & FreeBSD Support
Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too...
Fedora 41 Aims To Ship AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Virtualization Host Support
With the release of Fedora 41 in October, this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution is hoping to have all the software bits aligned that its AMD SEV-SNP virtualization stack will be all squared away for this latest iteration of Secure Encrypted Virtualization...
Intel Releases OpenVINO 2024.2 With Llama 3 Optimizations, More AVX2 & AVX-512 Optimizations
Intel today released OpenVINO 2024.2, the newest version of its open-source AI toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning (A) inference models across a range of AI frameworks and broad hardware types...
GNOME Software To Better Support NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver
As a planned change for Fedora 41, Red Hat engineers are working on upstream GNOME Software better supporting the NVIDIA proprietary driver installation by allowing the installation to work gracefully with UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems...
FreeBSD 14.1 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6.4 vs. NetBSD 10 vs. Linux Benchmarks
After last week looking at how FreeBSD 14.1 has improved performance over FreeBSD 14.0, here is an expanded cross-OS comparison now looking at how the new FreeBSD 14.1 stable release compares to the recently released NetBSD 10.0, the current DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release, and then CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for some Linux comparison data points.
Sovereign Tech Fund Opens Up To Smaller Investments & Updated Criteria
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making sizable investments into various Linux desktop projects, the Rust-based Coreutils implementation, libmicrohttpd, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and other prominent open-source software that could benefit from greater financial resources. Today they have announced they have opened up for a new round of applications for those open-source projects seeking funding from this German government initiative...
Open Image Denoise 2.3 Prepares For Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake & Battlemage
Intel's Open Image Denoise open-source software that is a denoising library used by Blender and other applications is out with a new feature release as it prepares for the integrated graphics of upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors as well as nearing the launch of Xe2 / Battlemage discrete graphics...
Linux To Incorporate Intel CPU Hybrid Topology For Determining Vulnerabilities/Mitigations
Within the every increasingly complex world of CPU security mitigations, Intel engineers have submitted Linux kernel patches to begin taking into account the CPU core "hybrid" topology when determining relevant CPU security vulnerabilities and in turn the mitigations to apply...
Fedora 41 Looks To Offer A KDE Plasma Mobile Spin
Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn's Fedora 41 release...
NumPy 2.0 Brings Faster Performance Thanks To Intel's x86-simd-sort & Google's Highway
NumPy 2.0 was released on Sunday that's been in the making for the past year and their first major release since 2006. While it comes with API/ABI breakage, NumPy 2.0 delivers new features and performance improvements...
The JFS File-System Remains In Sad Shape With The Upstream Linux Kernel
While at the start of 2023 was talk among kernel developers for orphaning the JFS file-system at a time that developers began the processes toward removing the ReiserFS file-system driver, the Journaled File-System so far remains within the mainline kernel and not yet officially orphaned...
Linux 6.10-rc4 Released With Another Week Worth Of Driver Fixes
Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel set aside some time this Father's Day to release Linux 6.10-rc4...
IceWM 3.6 Released With A Few New Features & Fixes
IceWM 3.6 is out today as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager...
Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action
After being talked about for years of DRM panic handling and coming with a "Blue Screen of Death" solution for DRM/KMS drivers, Linux 6.10 is introducing a new DRM panic handler infrastructure for being able to display a message when a panic occurs. This is especially important for those building a kernel without VT/FBCON support where otherwise viewing the kernel panic message isn't otherwise easily available...
VMware Hypercall API To Likely Land In Linux 6.11
For months Broadcom has been working on the VMware Hypercall API for the Linux kernel. This "vmware_hyperscall" is a new family of functions for use by the VMware guest code and virtual device drivers in an architecture-independent manner...
