Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 35 min ago
AMD Preparing PCIe TPH Support For Upcoming CPUs
A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express...
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS & Fedora 40 Continue To Trail Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations
While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.
AMD Publishes Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" Firmware Documentation
As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack...
ChromeOS EC Hardware Monitoring Driver Being Revived For Framework Laptops
In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux...
Intel NPU Driver Preparing Hardware Scheduler & Profiling Support
The Intel iVPU accelerator driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window have been submitted for advancing the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) support found since the launch of Meteor Lake with Intel Core Ultra notebook CPUs. For this iVPU/NPU driver in Linux 6.10 are a few notable new features...
AMD Linux Graphics Driver Plumbs Integration With New ISP Hardware Block
The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP...
Limbo Is An SQLite-Compatible OLTP DBMS Leveraging IO_uring & Rust
For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux's IO_uring for async I/O...
Python 3.13 Beta Out For Testing With Experimental JIT, Better Interactive Interpreter
The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year...
Pop!_OS' COSMIC Desktop Finishing Up Work On App Store
The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort...
AMD ROCm 6.1.1 Brings Fixes, Preps For Upcoming Changes & cuDNN 9.0 Support
Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack...
Mesa 24.0.7 & Mesa 24.1-rc3 Provide Latest Open-Source OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
Ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom continues carrying out a splendid job with the on-time releases of new bi-weekly Mesa point releases and the weekly release candidates heading toward the next feature release of these open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...
Zed Code Editor Making Progress On Linux Support
Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together...
Intel Revises PCIe Cooling Driver To Reduce Link Speed When Running Too Hot
Since last year Intel's open-source software engineers have been working on a PCIe bandwidth controller driver for the Linux kernel to avoid thermal issues by being able to automatically reduce the PCIe link speed when needed. This driver still isn't over the finish line but today brought the fifth iteration of these patches...
RISC-V Performance On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS With Scaleway's EM-RV1
Recently I've been testing out the Scaleway's Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks.
Fedora Asahi Remix 40 Now Available For Apple Silicon Devices, KDE Plasma 6 By Default
Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that's optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems...
SHIFTphone 8 Preparing Mainline Linux Support Ahead Of Launch
SHIFTphone 8 is the upcoming modular and easy-to-repair smartphone from Germany's SHIFT GmbH. This is the first major SHIFTphone update in four years and there are pending patches providing mainline Linux kernel support for this forthcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon powered modular/upgradeable smartphone...
AMD Linux Engineers Introduce New "schedstat" Tool
AMD Linux engineers have introduced a new perf tool called "schedstat" that aims to be less resource intensive and convenient than the existing "perf sched" tool for profiling kernel scheduler behavior...
GCC 15 Bids Farewell To Solaris 11.3 Support
With GCC 14 stable released and GCC 15 now in development on trunk, new feature code is landing for the GNU Compiler Collection. Among the early features is Microsoft contributing the "Windows on ARM64" target with aarch64-w64-mingw32. The start of the new cycle also brings code removal for features deprecated in prior cycles. Among the old code being cleared out in GCC 15 is saying goodbye to Oracle Solaris 11.3...
Zstd Compression For EROFS Published: Better Than LZ4 But Higher CPU Costs
As noted recently, EROFS has been exploring Zstd compression support for this open-source read-only Linux file-system. Today the patch was posted for enabling Zstandard use...
Merged For Mesa 24.2: Faster Startups For Zink, Rusticl Now Handles Bigger Workloads
Two different merges today for Mesa 24.2 are worth calling out for the open-source Linux graphics stack...
