Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 24 min 49 sec ago
Intel Xeon D "Granite Rapids-D" Processors Coming In 2025
Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors...
Reverse-Engineered NPU Driver Tantalizingly Close To Proprietary Driver Performance
When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver...
WayVNC 0.8 Adds Auto Server-Side Resizing Of Headless Outputs, Detached Mode
WayVNC 0.8 was released this weekend as the VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC attaches to wlroots-using compositors and creators virtual input devices and exposes the display via the RFB protocol for the lack of Wayland having any standardized VNC-type support for remote/network computing...
Linux 6.8-rc6 Released: This Kernel May Need An Extra Week For Testing
The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks...
Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Lands Improvements For ReBAR
The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support...
GNOME Makes Progress On GPU-Accelerated Screencasting, systemd-homed Home Encryption
GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...
Linux 6.8 x86/urgent Update Beefs Up Protection Against Side Channel CPU Bugs
Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...
Bcachefs Publishes Patches For Disk Accounting Rewrite
Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9...
Microsoft Pushes Out Big February Update For CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distro
Microsoft's in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution has routinely seen weekly-ish updates to this open-source code used within Azure, WSL, and other areas of the Redmond company. But it's been one month since the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 release... That changed Saturday night with a shiny new release...
GLFW 3.4 Brings Better Support For Wayland & Run-Time Platform Selection
GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input...
CachyOS Moves To Glibc 2.39 & Other Package Upgrades For February
CachyOS 240224 was released today for this Arch Linux derived desktop distribution that focuses on being a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" with a variety of desktop options, employing LTO and other optimizations for packages, optional x86-64-v3 binaries, and other tuning to make for a speedy out-of-the-box Linux experience...
Sway 1.9 Released - Using New wlroots Rendering API For Better Performance
Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library...
Git 2.44 Released - Can Yield Faster Pack Generation & Faster Rebases
Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system...
XZ 5.6 Released: Sandboxing Improvements, Prefers -O2 Instead Of -O3
XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling...
Intel Releases OSPRay Studio 1.0 As Its Awesome Interactive Visualization & Ray-Tracing App
Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened...
KDE Plasma 6.0 Ready For Release Next Week, Plasma 6.1 Seeing Early Feature Work
It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1...
Proton 9.0 Beta Makes More Games Playable Under Steam Play, Updates VKD3D-Proton & DXVK
In time for weekend Linux gamers, Valve and their CodeWeavers partners today rolled out their first public beta of Proton 9.0 as their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with ease under the Steam client...
Wine 9.3 Brings New HID Pointer Driver & Better Internet Proxy Support
Wine 9.3 is out this Friday as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux...
Micron Engineer Sends Out Linux Patches For New FAMFS File-System
A request for comments patch series was posted today for FAMFS, a new special purpose file-system proposal out of Micron for dealing with Fabric-Attached Memory (FAM) devices such as will become more common within the Compute Express Link (CXL) server space...
Intel Extension For PyTorch Now Officially Supports Arc A-Series Graphics
Intel's latest release of their Intel Extension for PyTorch "IPEX" now officially supports their consumer Arc A-Series Graphics hardware across Linux, Windows, and also WSL2...
