Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 57 min 39 sec ago
Linus Torvalds Gets Back To Merging New Code For Linux 6.8
Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window was thrown into a mess with Linus Torvalds losing Internet access and electricity during some significant winter storms battling the Portland, Oregon area. After nearly five days without being able to manage the Git merges for the Linux 6.8 merge window, a few minutes ago activity was restarted...
Gigabyte G242-P36: A Great Ampere Altra Max Platform For AI/GPU Computing
The past two months I've been using the Gigabyte (Giga Computing) G242-P36 and it's been a refreshing delight for an ARM64 server platform running well with the mature Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors while boasting support for up to two GPUs and up to two DPUs or other PCIe adapters to make for a nice GPU/AI accelerated computing server.
NetBSD 10.0 RC3 Released With A Few Last Minute Fixes
After being in development since 2019, the NetBSD 10.0 stable release looks like it will happen soon. Those wanting to help in last minute testing can find NetBSD 10.0 RC3 now available...
Many New Features Approved This Week For Fedora 40
This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April...
Linux On IBM Z "s390" To See ~11% Higher Syscall Entry Performance On Linux 6.8
For those interested in Linux on IBM Z / s390, there's a small change yielding measurable benefits to the s390 system call entry performance with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel...
Linux Distributions Now Encouraged To Build GTK With Vulkan
Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away...
Linux 6.8 Will Let You Know When x86 32-bit Support Is Disabled
Linux 6.7 introduced the "ia32_emulation=" boot option for enabling/disabling support for x86 32-bit programs and the ability to execute 32-bit system calls. This is part of the effort of some Linux distributions working to restrict x86 32-bit user-space support where not needed in order to reduce the software attack surface while still having a boot-time option for those wanting to enable 32-bit support or to otherwise disable it if your kernel build keeps it enabled...
Red Hat Developing AI Tool "Log Detective" To Help Developers
Jiri Kyjovsky of Red Hat has shared news today of Log Detective, a new tool being developed that will leverage an AI model to help in analyzing build failures for RPM packages...
Mesa Eyes Pulling libdrm Into Its Codebase
Longtime AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has laid out a proposal to integrate the libdrm code within Mesa rather than being maintained as its own separate project...
DRM Driver Changes Already Begin Queuing For Linux 6.9
While the Linux v6.8 kernel merge window isn't even over yet and that kernel not debuting until March, a few days ago the first drm-misc-next pull request was submitted to DRM-Next to begin queuing the open-source graphics/display driver changes that will ultimately be targeting the Linux 6.9 kernel...
Wine 9.0 Released With Initial Wayland Driver, WoW64 Taking Shape & Better Direct3D
Wine 9.0 has debuted today for this annual stable release of Wine to allow Windows applications and games to run on Windows, Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms. With Wine 9.0 it's the culmination of all the bi-weekly wine 8.x(x) development releases over the past year to greatly enhance the Windows app support on Linux and other targets...
GCC Rust Compiler "gccrs" Sees ~900 New Patches Upstreamed For GCC 14
Merged this afternoon to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is a big update to the GCC Rust "gccrs" compiler front-end...
Ubuntu Linux Working On Installer Support For NVMe-over-TCP
Ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release that is all important for servers, Canonical engineers are working on extending their installer support to handle NVMe-over-TCP setups...
GFS2 File-System Enables Non-Blocking Lookups With Linux 6.8
The Global File-System 2 (GFS2) for Linux clusters continues to advance thanks to Red Hat and with Linux 6.8 there is now support for non-blocking lookups...
Intel Meteor Lake CPUs Will Be Able To Clock Higher On Linux 6.8
Following last week's Linux 6.8 power management updates, Linux PM/ACPI subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent out a secondary set of changes this morning. Most notable with this second round of power management material is allowing Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors to clock higher with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...
New AMD & Intel Laptop/Platform Support In Linux 6.8
Merged last week for the Linux 6.8 kernel were the platform driver x86 updates, which include a lot of new AMD Ryzen and Intel Core platform support and new laptop functionality...
~5 Minutes Of Coding Yields A 6%+ Boost To Linux I/O Performance
IO_uring creator and Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe spent about five minutes working on two patches to implement caching for issue-side time querying in the block layer and can yield 6% or more better I/O performance...
Rust-Written Linux Scheduler Showing Promising Results For Gaming Performance
A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language. His early results are interesting and hopeful around the potential of a Rust-based scheduler that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time...
Linux 6.8 Introduces New Syscalls For More Detailed File-System Mount Information
Merged back at the start of the Linux 6.8 merge window were the VFS mount API updates that introduce two new system calls: statmount() and listmount() for reading more detailed information about file-system mounts...
X.Org Server & XWayland Updated Due To Another Six Security Vulnerabilities
It was in 2013 a security researcher called the X.Org Server security state "worse than it looks" and quite a disaster from the security/bug perspective for the aging codebase. A decade later there's still no shortage of security vulnerabilities being uncovered within the X.Org Server...
