
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 16 min 27 sec ago
AMD Announces Ryzen PRO 7000 Series Laptop & Desktop CPUs
AMD is kicking off what is going to be an exciting day with announcing the Ryzen PRO 7000 series processors for upcoming laptops and desktops.
The Old ATI R300 Open-Source Driver Sees Improvements For OpenGL, WineD3D Apps/Games
Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago...
Meta Proposes Shared Workqueue For Linux's CFS - Small Throughput Win
Meta engineers have proposed a shared workqueue "swqueue" feature for the Linux kernel's CFS scheduler that can help with a small throughput performance improvement and slightly better latency, particularly for AMD systems with multiple CCXs...
Tracking The OpenCL Support Status With Mesa Drivers
The convenient Mesa Matrix tracker that has long shown Vulkan and OpenGL versions and extensions supported by the different open-source drivers has also now begun reporting OpenCL support...
Intel Linux Graphics Driver Continues Work Toward Per-Client Memory Reporting
One of the interesting Intel i915 DRM kernel driver patch series being worked on recently is fdinfo memory statistics with the ability to report per-process/client memory statistics around vRAM use...
Virtual PCM Test Driver Coming With Linux 6.5 To Help With Audio Testing & Fuzzing
Last month I wrote about the virtual ALSA driver being developed for the Linux kernel. That driver has now morphed into the Virtual PCM Test driver and is on its way with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle...
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Sees More Performance Tuning, Regression Fixing
Following my recent RADV+Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarking for various games and workloads, Valve's Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz was hopping on some of the benchmarks where this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation lagged behind the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
VMware SVGA Graphics Driver Switches To NIR By Default
VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver that provides OpenGL support within guest virtual machines running with VMware virtualization products is now finally defaulting to using the modern NIR intermediate representative rather than Gallium3D's TGSI...
AMD Continues Work On Enhancing GPU Support With Xen Virtualization
In recent months AMD open-source graphics driver engineers seem to be taking more interest in supporting the Xen hypervisor with their graphics hardware. It's not clear yet externally if this is just due to customer demand or other yet-to-be-announced interest in Xen...
RISC-V KASLR Support For Linux Revised Again
While the upstream Linux kernel support for RISC-V continues to improve with new ISA features, support for more RISC-V SoCs, and other enhancements, in some areas the open-source RISC-V code continues to play catch-up with the other mature architectures supported by the Linux kernel. One of the areas still pending is enabling KASLR support for RISC-V on Linux to enhance system security...
Linux cpupower Tool Being Extended For AMD P-State Features
The cpupower tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree can be used for easily querying and setting various CPU power-related features. This tool now has patches pending for extending it for exposing more functionality found within AMD's modern P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...
Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 Released
Following this weekend's release of Debian 12.0, the Debian GNU Hurd port has been released that rather than utilizing the Linux kernel is making use of GNU Hurd...
RISC-V Vector ISA Support Slated For Linux 6.5
Support for RISC-V's Vector ISA is now expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window...
Linux 6.5 To Enable Rumble Support For Newer Microsoft Xbox Controllers
For Linux gamers relying on Microsoft Xbox controllers, the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel will enable rumble support for several newer controller models...
Fwupd 1.9.2 Released With Support For Firmware Updating On More Hardware
Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released a new version of Fwupd, the open-source tool that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing motherboards/systems and various peripheral devices to enjoy firmware updates easily from Linux...
Linux 6.4-rc6 Released: The Kernel Appears To Be In Good Shape
Linus Torvalds announced the release this afternoon of the Linux 6.4-rc6 kernel. The Linux 6.4 cycle continues going smoothly which means we could see the stable release potentially debut in two weeks...
More ACO Code Landing For RadeonSI Gallium3D
AMD engineer Qiang Yu has recently been working on bringing support for Valve's ACO compiler from RADV over to the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver as an alternative to using the default AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. More code has landed this week in furthering the effort...
Linux Patches Updated For Sapphire Rapids C0.x Idle States
While Intel has been working on the Sapphire Rapids support for Linux going back years and to other key components like GCC and LLVM/Clang to provide for a good at-launch experience with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors, one bit that they hadn't squared away in advance of launch has been the new C0.x idle states. These new idle states between POLL and C1 allow for a mix of low latency and better power-savings than POLL...
Mesa's Venus VirtIO-GPU Driver Adds More Extensions To Help Zink
The Mesa Venus driver that provides Vulkan API support for use inside of QEMU with VirtIO-GPU has added a number of extensions to help support for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...
Wine-Staging 8.10 Adds D3D9 Improvement, Fix For A Bug Open Since 2009
Friday marked the release of Wine 8.10 as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this software allowing Windows games and apps to run on Linux and elsewhere. Out now is Wine-Staging 8.10 as the more experimental/testing form with an extra 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...