Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 1 min ago
Linux 6.6 Adds New Sound Support For AMD Van Gogh, Valve Galileo
The sound subsystem and audio driver updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window. Interesting about the sound work this cycle is a fair amount of work around AMD Van Gogh platforms, which so far is just the APU that's known to power Valve's Steam Deck...
Hangover 8.15 Released With Box64 Integration As PE Library
Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.15 is a new version of Hangover, the Wine-based software that aims to ease the deployment of Wine with x86/x86_64 Windows software support atop AArch64 processors and other CPU architectures...
Some AMD CPUs To Benefit From New Micro-Optimization In Linux 6.6
One of the patches to be picked up by the Linux 6.6 kernel this week brings back REP MOSQ for user-access on CPUs without Enhanced REP MOVSB (ERMS) support. In turn this can equate to some performance benefits on AMD CPUs lacking ERMS...
Manjaro 23.0 Released With GNOME 44, KDE Plasma 5.27 & Xfce 4.18 Desktop Options
Manjaro 23.0 "Uranos" has been released as the latest version of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...
Linux Fix Incoming For Intel Fallout After The Kernel Disabled Buggy AMD fTPM RNG
The decision last month for the Linux kernel to disable random number generation (RNG) for all AMD fTPMs ended up having some unintended consequences on Intel systems that ended up breaking S3 suspend behavior...
Microsoft Adds AMD SEV-SNP & Intel TDX Guest Support To Hyper-V With Linux 6.6
Microsoft continues improving the Hyper-V support within the Linux kernel for benefiting Linux guest VMs running within this hypervisor on Windows. With Linux 6.6 the Hyper-V code adds support for SEV-SNP secure guests on the AMD EPYC side while over on the Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids side is initial support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) protected guests...
DXVK 2.3 Brings Presentation Improvements, More Game Fixes, "hideNvidiaGpu" Option
It's been nearly four months since the release of DXVK 2.2 for this Direct3D 9/10/11 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Out today is DXVK 2.3 as the latest major step forward for the project...
AMD P-State Fixes & Other Power Management Changes For Linux 6.6
The ACPI and power management updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel...
uutils 0.0.21 Released With More Improvements For GNU Coreutils Written In Rust
Released at the end of August was GNU Coreutils 9.4 while out this weekend is uutils 0.0.21 as the open-source, Rust-written re-implementation of the Coreutils utilities...
Printk Cleanups Ready For Linux 6.6 - Stepping Towards Threaded/Atomic Console Printing
A set of printk clean-ups were sent in today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. These clean-ups are important as they are a stepping stone towards the threaded / atomic console printing and in turn that is the last major blocker before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can finally be upstreamed in the kernel...
Fwupd 1.9.5 Released With Optional Passim Support, Firmware Updating For New Devices
Fwupd 1.9.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for enabling system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). With the Fwupd 1.9.5 some additional devices are now supported plus there are some other core improvements...
Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs
Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices...
Partial SMT Enablement Support Lands For Linux 6.6
As part of the "smp/core" changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel, partial SMT enablement landed for processors that support more than two threads per physical core to allow greater run-time control over just how many threads to enable...
OpenBLAS 0.3.24 Released With Intel Sapphire Rapids Improvements, Apple M2 Detection
OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels...
EXT4 Lands A Nice Performance Improvement For Appending To Delalloc Files
With the EXT4 file-system updates for Linux 6.6 there is mostly some code clean-ups and other bug fixing. But one change in particular stands out for its performance impact...
Stadia Controller Rumbles & New Gaming Peripherals Supported By Linux 6.6
There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel...
Linux 6.6 Unconditionally Enables x86 CPU Microcode Loading Support
Among the many changes to land during this first week of the Linux 6.6 cycle were the x86 CPU microcode loader updates that now unconditionally makes that support part of the x86/x86_64 kernel builds...
Initial AMD EPYC Genoa Support Added To Coreboot, New Onyx Motherboard Target
Going along with AMD's work on AMD openSIL for open-sourcing the CPU silicon initialization code to ultimately replace AGESA in future hardware platforms, the initial EPYC "Genoa" code for Coreboot has been upstreamed along with the Onyx motherboard target...
Bcachefs File-System Re-Submitted For Linux 6.6
The Bcachefs file-system code born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code was submitted for Linux 6.5 but ultimately rejected. Bcachefs is now trying again to land for the current Linux 6.6 merge window...
Debian Dropping Its 32-bit MIPS Little Endian "mipsel" Port
Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward...