
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 4 sec ago
Hangover 0.8.5 Released For Running Windows Apps/Games With Wine On AArch64/POWER
André Zwing on Thursday released Hangover 0.8.5 as the third alpha release of this software for running Windows x86 32/64-bit applications and Wine on other CPU architectures like AArch64 and POWER PPC64LE...
Intel Linux Optimizations Help AMD EPYC "Genoa" Improve Scaling To 384 Threads
Last month I wrote about Intel's Linux kernel engineering improvements to help enhance CPU scaling across various workloads by addressing low-level bottlenecks within the kernel. It's an area we'll likely see Intel continue to invest in as Sierra Forest comes next year with 144 E cores per socket. Already with the Linux kernel patches Intel is carrying at the moment via their in-house distribution, there are some significant benefits for Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids. I was curious to see how this Intel-focused work impacted AMD EPYC servers and thus in today's article is a similar analysis using two AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" flagship processors while evaluating Intel's Linux kernel optimizations.
Free Software Foundation Certifies A $99 Mini VPN Router
Over the years the Free Software Foundation has certified various devices that to their standards "Respect Your Freedom" from USB to parallel printer cables to re-branded and re-flashed motherboards to the Talos II at the higher-end. They've also certified different network hardware and other devices. The newest that they announced today is backing a $99 mini VPN router that supports WireGuard and other solutions...
Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions For 2022 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini
Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2...
Dozens Of Rust Updates Merged Ahead Of GCC 13.1
While the release of GCC 13.1 as the first stable GCC 13 compiler is due out in the next few weeks, ahead of that milestone dozens of Rust "gccrs" patches were merged today for furthering along that new language support...
Qualcomm QAIC Accelerator Driver Coming With Linux 6.4
Following the Intel Meteor Lake VPU driver being added to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem in Linux 6.3 along with converting over the Habana Labs AI driver, coming in Linux 6.4 is now the Qualcomm QAIC Cloud AI driver to this subsystem that lives within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella...
PipeWire 0.6.38 Released With New RTP Session Module, Many Other Changes
PipeWire 0.3.68 is out today as a significant update for this alternative to JACK and PulseAudio as well as managing both audio and video streams on the Linux desktop...
Intel Carries Out More Meteor Lake Graphics Enablement For Linux 6.4
Intel today submitted their final batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes that they have planned for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle...
Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default
While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support! WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web...
Huawei's Bolt 1.5 Adds AVX-VNNI, Intel Desktop GPU Support
Huawei's Bolt project is a deep learning library focused on high performance and heterogeneous flexibility and supporting a variety of neural networks. Bolt claims to outperform other deep learning acceleration libraries while supporting models from TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe, and more...
VVenC 1.8 Released For Speeding Up Open-Source H.266/VVC Encoding
VVenC is an open-source project from the Fraunhofer Institute for providing H.266/VVC video encode/decode capabilities. Out today is VVenC 1.8 with the latest enhancements for speeding up CPU-based H.266 video coding...
Intel Vulkan Driver Squeezes In A Few More Performance Optimizations For Mesa 23.1
Ahead of the Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze coming up in the next week or two, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have been landing some last minute performance optimizations to benefit their "ANV" Vulkan driver...
HP WMI Driver To Expose More Sensors Under Linux For Business-Class Systems
A patch was posted this week introducing a new "hp-wmi-sensors" Linux kernel driver for HP business-class computers for exposing WMI sensor functionality...
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Linux Performance
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D processors went on sale at the end of February as the first Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors, today marks the availability of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor. I've recently been putting the 7800X3D through its paces under Linux and have a plethora of benchmark data to share for launch day.
GTK 4.11.1 Released With Better Textures, Wayland Fractional Scaling
Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12...
Ubuntu Talks Up Rust Kernel Programming Potential With Ubuntu 23.04
Ubuntu 23.04 is being talked up for how it can aide developers that want to begin programming with Rust code for Linux kernel modules. It's possible to get started with Rust kernel development on Ubuntu 23.04 thanks to its generic kernel having the necessary kernel configuration, but ultimately it's still in an early state and there isn't much to do with the stock kernel...
Zstd 1.5.5 Released With Corruption Fix, Improved Performance In Some Scenarios
Just two months after Zstd 1.5.4 was published, Zstd 1.5.5 has been released as the newest version of this Zstandard compression algorithm implementation. Zstd 1.5.5's release is motivated by addressing a rare corruption bug fix but also has various performance optimizations...
LLVM 16.0.1 Released With Many Compiler Fixes, Backports AMD Zen 4 Scheduler Model
It's been two weeks already since the release of LLVM 16.0 as the latest shiny feature update to this widely-used, open-source compiler stack. LLVM release manager Tom Stellard today issued LLVM 16.0.1 as the first point release with a wide collection of fixes and other maintenance work to LLVM and its contained sub-projects...
MidnightBSD 3.0.1 Released With Security Fixes, rc.d Scripts Cleanup
Building off last month's release of MidnightBSD 3.0 for this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-forked operating system the v3.0.1 update is now available...
Chrome 112 Released With WASM Garbage Collection Trial, CSS Nesting
Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms...