Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 12 min ago
RadeonSI Driver Integrates Perfetto Support
AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver...
Zlib-ng 2.1.4 Brings LoongArch Port, New RISC-V & ARM Optimizations
Zlib-ng 2.1.4 was released this week as the newest version of this Zlib data compression library intended for "next generation" uses. Zlib-ng continues having a lower barrier for new contributions and optimizations than the upstream Zlib repository itself to allow for it to more rapidly evolve on today's systems...
Libreboot 20231021 Brings Some Additional Laptops, Desktops / Motherboards For Testing
Libreboot 20231021 was published for testing today as the newest Coreboot downstream focused on providing only fully free software support for system firmware with more stringent open-source requirements than Coreboot itself...
Intel Optimizing Its MDS Mitigation Handling To Avoid Possible Kernel Data Leaking
An Intel engineer on Friday posted a set of Linux kernel patches that are working to refine the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation handling for the Linux kernel to better protect some kernel data and also some very subtle performance benefits...
TuxClocker 1.2 Released With AMD GPU Thermal Monitoring, CPU Governor Controls
Ever since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 last month, this open-source community software project for enhancing overclocking controls under Linux has been living up to the "release early, release often" mantra. Out today is TuxClocker 1.2...
FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 Pulls In OpenZFS 2.2, OpenSSH 9.5p1
FreeBSD 14.0 is preparing for release in early November as a big update to this leading BSD operating system. It's going to be a great release and Friday's FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 milestone landed some last minute updates...
More Optimizations Made For Making GNOME/VTE Terminals Go Faster
Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn't plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he's been making enhancements to GNOME's VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps...
Geany 2.0 Lightweight IDE / Text Editor Released
Thursday marked the 18th birthday of the Geany open-source text editor / lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) project. In celebrating Geany turning 18, the Geany 2.0 release was made available. Geany 2.0 continues to strive toward the project goal of being a fast and easy to use text editor for coding...
AMD Wants To Know If You'd Like Ryzen AI Support On Linux
With the newest AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops there is "Ryzen AI" as a dedicated AI engine based on Xilinx IP to help accelerate machine learning with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. Sadly though this Ryzen AI with their new Zen 4 laptops is only supported under Microsoft Windows at this point. But it could change with sufficient customer interest...
Raptor Computing Developing New Secure BMC & New OpenPOWER ISA 3.1 Based Systems
Raptor Computing Systems as the company behind the open-source friendly, POWER-based Talos II server and Blackbird microATX desktop has continued leveraging POWER9 given the binary blobs and challenging state around POWER10. But looking ahead to next year it looks like they'll be debuting some new hardware platforms...
Linux 6.5+ Is Great For The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 / AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U
As shown already the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U works out well on Linux and is very speedy as shown with that prior benchmarking on Linux 6.3, but for those moving to Linux 6.5 or newer the performance and power efficiency is even better. Like for those moving to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.5, there are some nice performance gains to find with this laptop -- similar to the experience seen with various AMD Ryzen desktops on the new kernel.
COSMIC Desktop Rolls Out Lock/Login Screen, More Wayland Protocols
System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code...
Vulkan 1.3.269 Released With New Extension For Launching CUDA Kernels
Vulkan 1.3.269 released this morning with new extensions from Arm and NVIDIA...
Rusticl OpenCL Still Striving For Better Performance, SYCL & HIP Features
Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL "Rusticl" driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D's Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers...
Mesa 23.3 Merges Initial Support For RDNA3 Refresh "GFX11.5" Graphics
For going along with the initial GFX11.5 kernel support that is set to be introduced in Linux 6.7 along with other portions of new AMD Radeon graphics IP enablement, this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release will also bring initial GFX11.5 graphics support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
Lutris 0.5.14 Released For Better Managing Your Games On Linux
Lutris 0.5.14 is out today as the newest feature update to this Python-written open-source solution for managing your games on Linux whether they be native titles or via Steam Play / Wine as well as integrating into popular gaming services like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and EA App. With Lutris 0.5.14 this centralized Linux game launcher has picked up some additional capabilities...
AMD Completes Nod.ai Acquisition To Enhance Open-Source AI Capabilities
It was just over one week ago that AMD announced plans to acquire Nod.ai to enhance their open-source AI software capabilities. Today already they announced that acquisition has completed...
Linux's DRM GPUVM Code Relicensed From GPLv2-Only To GPLv2 Or MIT
Sent out today were a new batch of drm-misc-next changes intended for Linux 6.7. There's various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers, DRM VM_BIND async documentation, and other small changes. Plus the DRM_GPUVM code has been re-licensed from being GPLv2-only to now GPLv2 or MIT...
AMD Family 19h CPU Microcode Updated (2023-10-19 Rev)
AMD today published a new CPU microcode revision for Family 19h processors, which include Zen 3 / Zen 3+ / Zen 4 processors. As is sadly standard, no change-log is provided...
Intel Meteor Lake Graphics Declared Stable With Linux 6.7
With the pending changes set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel, all known issues/limitations around the i915 kernel driver support for upcoming integrated graphics with Intel Meteor Lake laptop processors...
