Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 24 min 59 sec ago
The X.Org Foundation Needs More Candidates To Hold An Election
The X.Org Foundation's elections for the Board of Directors have been delayed as there weren't enough participants nominated for the available seats to hold an election...
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Won't Support JPEG-XL Out-Of-The-Box
There had been some hope that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format out-of-the-box, but that isn't going to happen as a default change...
Intel Enables Fastboot Across The Board With Their Graphics Driver In Linux 6.9
A last set of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted this week for DRM-Next to stage ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...
CUDA On ROCm, Ryzen 8000G Series & Rust Activity Made For An Exciting February
February was an exciting month in the hardware and Linux/open-source space with 224 original news articles written by your's truly over the past month along with 15 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark featured articles. There was a lot of exciting open-source accomplishments, the launch of the AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs with RDNA3 graphics, breaking the news about ZLUDA providing CUDA atop AMD ROCm as a formerly stealth project, the Znver5 GCC patch emerging, and more...
Musl libc 1.2.5 Released With RISC-V 32-bit & LoongArch 64-bit Ports
Musl libc 1.2.5 released on Thursday as the newest version of this lightweight, speedy, and free software C library implementation that is popular for embedded use, containers, and elsewhere...
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Enters Its Feature Freeze
Now rolling into March, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "Noble Numbat" has entered its feature freeze period ahead of its official release in April...
Serpent OS Makes Progress On Packaging The GNOME 45 Desktop
Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution continues being raised and over the past month made progress on packaging up various GNOME 45 desktop components, working on stateless system support with systemd, and other features...
Arch Linux CachyOS Benchmarks Of x86-64-v3 & x86-64-v4 Repositories
The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution aims to be a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" that is aggressive with its performance optimizations. CachyOS takes to leveraging compiler optimizations like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), the BORE scheduler, and also offering package archives compiled for x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 in allowing the distribution's packages to be catered toward newer Intel and AMD processors. In this article is a comparison of CachyOS packages from their main archive, the x86-64-v3 optimized packages, and then the x86-64-v4 wares that can be beneficial for modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC / AMD Ryzen systems.
Zink Lands Support For Partial Updates / Damage Handling
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is back at it working on some exciting improvements to Mesa and in particular for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation...
Mesa 24.1 Enables AV1 LTR Encode Support For RDNA3 GPUs With VCN4
Building upon the existing AV1 encode support for RDNA3 GPUs within the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, AV1 Long-Term Reference "LTR" support is now enabled within Mesa 24.1...
GNOME Prompt Becomes Ptyxis
The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis...
Distrobox 1.7 Improves NVIDIA GPU Support, Better Wolfi Containers
Distrobox is the open-source software making it easy to run any Linux distribution inside your terminal by leveraging Podman, Docker, or Lilipod for containerizing the Linux distribution of your choice. Distrobox works well with a range of Linux distros and has developed quite a following. Out now is Distrobox 1.7 with yet more improvements to this innovative software...
NetBSD 10.0 Should Be Released Soon - Likely Last RC Debuts
NetBSD 10.0-RC5 was released on Wednesday as what is hopefully the last release candidate...
Mesa 24.0.2 Brings Many Zink Fixes, More Intel Alder Lake N IDs
Mesa 24.0 series release manager Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time bi-weekly point release for this set of open-source GPU user-space driver components. There are many fixes, new Intel ADL-N PCI IDs, and other backported updates for this latest stable release...
Steam On Linux Should Stop Crashing If No OpenGL Drivers Are Found
Wednesday's small Steam client beta update should fix a crash when starting the Steam client when no OpenGL drivers are found...
Mesa NVK Vulkan Driver Now Declared Vulkan 1.3 Conformant, Mesa 24.1 To Build By Default
It's a big day today in the open-source NVIDIA Nouveau/NVK space... The Mesa NVK driver is now officially declared a Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation by the Khronos Group! In turn the NVK driver is no longer considered experimental and with Mesa 24.1 will build by default for x86/x86_64-based installations...
HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD
One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed...
AMD Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C Performance, Zen 4C Core Scaling With Ryzen 5 8500G
Besides the integrated RDNA3 graphics making the Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs interesting, making the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G a fun benchmarking target besides its sub-$200 price tag is having a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C performance and power efficiency when offlining various core combinations on the Ryzen 5 8500G desktop processor.
Cloudflare Makes Pingora Rust Framework Open-Source
Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework...
FUSE Passthrough Support May Land For Linux 6.9 To Help Boost I/O Performance
Being worked on and off for several years has been FUSE read/write passthrough support for improving the performance of File-Systems in User-Space by avoiding the daemon overhead on a per-file basis where read/write operations are forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower file-system rather than the FUSE daemon. FUSE passthrough mode has shown to be a big performance win and it looks like it could be finally mainlined come Linux 6.9...
