Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 9 min ago
Even Though It's Currently Slow, The Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan Driver Has Been Making Good Progress
During XDC 2023 this week in Spain, Faith Ekstrand with Collabora provided a status update on the NVK Vulkan driver that continues to be developed inside Mesa for providing open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver support...
AMD Introduces Radeon RX 7900M Laptop Graphics
In addition to AMD announcing the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series / Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series, AMD also used today for announcing the Radeon RX 7900M for what they are calling their fastest Radeon laptop graphics ever developer...
AMD Launches The Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series: Up To 96 Cores, DDR5 RDIMMs, PRO & HEDT CPUs
AMD today announced the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX Series as the company's long-awaited Threadripper update that brings up to 96 Zen 4 cores, RDIMM memory is now required for Threadripper platforms moving forward, and catering to both HEDT enthusiasts and professionals. Here is an initial overview of the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series while the benchmark/review embargo isn't being lifted until a later date.
AdaptiveCpp 23.10 Alpha Released For What Was hipSYCL / OpenSYCL
AdaptiveCpp 23.10 has been released for this open-source project formerly known as hipSYCL and OpenSYCL for aiming to provide an open-source project around SYCL and C++ standard parallelism that can target all major CPU and GPU platforms...
GCC 14 Feature Development Ends Next Month
One month from today the GCC 14 feature development is expected to end as the GNU compiler developers transition to the bug-fixing stage...
Igalia Has Been Doing A Great Job On The Raspberry Pi Graphics Drivers
In addition to Igalia working with Valve on AMD color management / HDR, Igalia engineers have also been working on the open-source Raspberry Pi kernel and Mesa drivers for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This work includes the timely enablement of the new Raspberry Pi 5 hardware support...
IBM Begins Posting "PowerPC Future" Compiler Patches For What Is Likely Going To Be POWER11
Just as IBM was posting "future" processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out "PowerPC future" patches for what is likely to be POWER11...
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Has Become Much More Capable At Ray-Tracing, Thanks To Valve
Friedrich Vock with Valve presented yesterday at XDC 2023 on the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance. Last year at XDC 2022 it was dubbed "the world's slowest raytracer" but thanks to the work done by Valve and others, the RADV ray-tracing performance is now quite capable and also enabled by default since Mesa 23.2. The RADV ray-tracing performance also continues inching closer to the AMDVLK Vulkan performance for that official open-source AMD Vulkan driver...
Multi-Grained Timestamps Revised Following Revert From Linux 6.6
Multi-grain(ed) timestamps had been submitted for Linux 6.6 to better deal with NFS where the once-per-jiffy coarse-grained timestamps aren't enough for (in)validating caches. Multi-grained timestamps sought to address that by optionally allowing for the more fine-grained timestamps when desired but not using that finer granularity everywhere due to the greater overhead costs. This feature though ended up being reverted weeks later due to subtle bugs being uncovered. Now though a new redux patch series has been posted for providing another attempt at multi-grained timestamps...
Intel Releases OSPRay 3.0 With Initial GPU Acceleration
Following other Intel oneAPI components like Embree and OpenVKL introducing GPU acceleration via SYCL, today Intel released the open-source OSPRay 3.0 that rolls out initial GPU support for this portable ray-tracing engine...
X.Org's GLAMOR Adds Support For OpenGL ES 3.0 Shaders
Merged last week to the X.Org Server is support in the 2D-acceleration-via-OpenGL GLAMOR code for allowing OpenGL ES 3.0 (GLES3) shaders...
The State Of HDR On The Steam Deck With Valve's Gamescope Compositor
Kicking off XDC 2023 yesterday in Spain was Igalia's Melissa Wen talking about her work on color management with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack to empower Valve's Linux work on the Steam Deck. That was followed by Joshua Ashton of Valve talking about their work on HDR and color management from the Steam OS / Gamescope side for the Steam Deck...
Inspur WMI Platform Profile Driver Being Worked On For Linux
Adding to the list of vendors exposing ACPI Platform Profile controls under Linux so the user can easily set their power/performance preference for the system is major Chinese hardware company Inspur...
Mold 2.3 Linker Allows Removing Superfluous ENDBR64 Instructions
Mold 2.3 was released today by Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high-speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold...
Qt 6.5 LTS Shifts To Its Commercial-Only Phase
It's already that time of the Qt 6.5 long-term support (LTS) cycle where The Qt Company has shifted it over to being focused on access only to their commercial customers...
AMD Posts Linux Patches For Better Graphics/Compute Interoperability & Other Benefits
AMD today posted a set of interesting patches for enabling better integration of their AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver, what is their compute kernel driver) memory management with Linux's DRM GEM ioctl API. In turn the code allows managing virtual address (VA) mappings in compute VMs with the GEM_VA ioctl interface for greater control of buffers imported via DMA-BUF...
GNOME Foundation Names A New Executive Director
The GNOME Foundation has named a new Executive Director for overseeing the foundation responsible for this leading open-source desktop environment...
Intel Arc Graphics A580 On Linux: Open-Source Graphics For Under $200
Last week Intel announced the Arc Graphics A580 as a new mid-range DG2/Alchemist graphics card option that comes in between the entry-level Arc Graphics A380 and the higher-end Arc Graphics A750/A770. With the Arc Graphics A580 coming in at under $200, it's quite an interesting graphics card for those after open-source Linux driver support and/or those wanting to experiment with Intel's growing oneAPI software ecosystem with excellent open-source GPU compute support.
NVIDIA R545 Linux Beta Driver Brings HDMI Deep Color, Night Color & FB Consoles
NVIDIA today published their first R545 Linux driver beta series with a number of shiny new features...
Debian Repeals The Merged "/usr" Movement Moratorium
Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged "/usr" file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed...
