Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 34 min ago
"Rocket" Accelerator Open-Source Linux Kernel Driver Posted For Rockchip NPU
The past few months open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso has been developing an open-source accelerator driver for Rockchip's NPU. The experimental driver has shown the open-source code can compete with Rockchip's proprietary driver and Vizoso has been working to develop an upstream-minded driver for a kernel driver living within the "accel" subsystem and then leveraging Mesa's Teflon for the user-space component. Yesterday the "Rocket" accel kernel driver was posted for the Rockchip NPU...
X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit: Making It Less Difficult To Compile The X Server In 2024
While the upstream X.Org Server development remains slow with most of the large vendors treating it in maintenance mode and not investing in new features, open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has been one of the few still working to improve the X.Org Server. As part of his work besides pushing new patches and testing of the latest X.Org Server Git state, today he announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit v0.0.1 as a means to help in facilitate testing of the latest X.Org Server Git by making it easier to build it...
Ubuntu Talks Up A RISC-V Octa-Core Laptop
Ubuntu maker Canonical put out a news release today around the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II that is an octa-core RISC-V laptop shipping soon with Ubuntu Linux...
Coreboot To Be Shown Today With An Intel Meteor Lake Laptop
Going back to 2022 we've seen work by Intel engineers on adding Meteor Lake SoC support to Coreboot while to date there hasn't been much in the way of actual Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops with Coreboot as a replacement to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. But to be shown later today is one of the first laptop designs using these latest Intel mobile processors and running the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot...
Framework Laptop 16 CAD Design Files Open-Sourced
In making the Framework 16 laptop even more appearing to open-source hardware enthusiasts and makers, Framework Computer has published the CAD design files as open-source...
Microsoft's Azure Linux 2.0 Update Ships Dozens Of Security Patches, Adds Azl-Compliance
Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux (nee CBL-Mariner), is out with a new update. In the first new stable release for Azure Linux 2.0 since late April, the Azure Linux 2.0.20240609 update ships with dozens of security fixes to address a wide range of CVEs as well as bringing various bug fixes and other updates...
FEX 2406 Brings JIT Optimizations For Running x86_64 Binaries On AArch64
FEX is one of the open-source projects working on user-mode x86/x86_64 binary emulation atop ARM64/AArch64 Linux. FEX 2406 is out today as the project's newest monthly feature release...
FreeBSD Community Survey Confirms ZFS Is Their Most Valued Server Feature
The FreeBSD Foundation has published the results of the FreeBSD Community Survey that reveal interesting insights about FreeBSD usage and its users...
Valve Rolls Out Proton 9.0-2 With Many Fixes For Running More Games On Steam Play
Proton 9.0-2 is out this afternoon as the Valve/CodeWeavers downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games under Linux within the Steam client...
Safety-Critical Rust Consortium Announced
In aiming to make the Rust programming language more suitable for safety-critical software like within automobiles, aviation, and other industries, the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium was announced today...
FreeBSD 14.1 vs. FreeBSD 14.0 Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
Debuting last week was FreeBSD 14.1 with performance improvements and more. Given there being some performance optimizations and other upgrades like a more recent LLVM Clang compiler by default, I've begun running some benchmarks of this newest FreeBSD stable release. In today's article is a quick comparison of FreeBSD 14.1 vs. FreeBSD 14.0 performance using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-core processor within the System76 Thelio Major workstation.
AMD Fast CPPC To Be Merged For Linux 6.11
The AMD Fast CPPC feature enablement for the "amd_pstate" driver has been submitted to the power management subsystem ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 merge window...
openSUSE Leap 15.6 Release - Adds Cockpit, Linux 6.4 & Other Updates
OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 is now officially available for this community Linux distribution release aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 6. With Leap 15.6 comes the inclusion of the Cockpit web administration software and many software updates...
Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.4 Released To Optimize Hybrid CPUs On Linux
Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.4 has been released with "LPMD" being the open-source daemon for optimize active idle power for modern Core hybrid CPUs under Linux that sport a combination of the E and P cores...
LLVM Clang 19 Lands Support For C23's #embed
Merged today to LLVM Clang 19 Git is support for the #embed resource inclusion mechanism that is an approved C23 feature. This also makes Clang the first for supporting this pre-processor embed feature...
Marek Lands 40 Patch Series To Further Enhance The Open-Source AMD Graphics Driver
Well known open-source AMD OpenGL/Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has landed a big patch series into Mesa 24.2 for a universal optimized compute image clear/blit shader and MSAA-resolving pixel shader...
Intel's oneDNN 3.5 Begins Optimizing For Xe2, More Xeon 6 Tuning
Intel's oneDNN 3.5 has been released as this Deep Neural Network Library for the oneAPI specification and now part of the UXL Foundation. With oneDNN 3.5 comes more performance optimizations for existing and upcoming Intel hardware...
Linus Torvalds Throws Down The Hammer: Extensible Scheduler "sched_ext" In Linux 6.11
The extensible scheduler "sched_ext" code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it's remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...
systemd 256 Released With run0, systemd-vpick, importctl & Other New Features
Systemd 256 is out today as the latest major feature update to this integral component to modern Linux distributions...
SUSE Working To Upstream RP1 Southbridge Linux Driver For The Raspberry Pi 5
The Raspberry Pi 5 features the "RP1" as the in-house silicon design for the southbridge to this single board computer. The RP1 driver maintained by Raspberry Pi is just found in their downstream kernel while a SUSE engineer is working to rework that driver so that it can be eventually mainlined in the upstream Linux kernel...
