
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 40 min ago
Intel Continues With More Big-Time Optimizations To The Linux Kernel
I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel...
Asahi AGX Mesa Driver Prepares For Compute Kernels On Apple Silicon
The Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 graphics hardware has seen preliminary work merged into Mesa 23.1 for supporting compute shaders/kernels...
AMD Continues Linux Upstreaming For Pensando Elba SoC
Last year AMD acquired Pensando in part for adding DPUs to their portfolio from this young company that only exited its stealth mode in 2019. While sadly it's missed out on the Linux 6.3 cycle, AMD-Pensando engineers continue work on upstreaming support for their "Elba" SoC into the mainline Linux kernel...
LibreELEC 11 Released With GBM/V4L2 HDR Support On x86_64, More ARM Hardware
LibreELEC 11 is out today as the newest version of this Linux distribution that is purpose-built for an HTPC-oriented experience powered by the recent Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software...
Linux 6.3-rc1 Brings File-System Optimizations, HID-BPF, More Intel & AMD Features
The merge window for Linux 6.3 is now over and Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc1...
Linux 6.3 Drops Support For The Intel ICC Compiler
On this last day of the Linux 6.3 kernel merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the patch dropping support for Intel (ICC) compiler support. Specifically this is Intel's long-standing ICC compiler now known as the "Intel C++ Compiler Classic" prior to its transition to being LLVM/Clang-based with the modern Intel DPC++ compiler...
Testing The First PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD On Linux Has Been Disappointing
This past week saw the first two consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives released to retail: the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 and the Inland TD510. I've been testing the Inland TD510 2TB Gen 5 NVMe SSD the past few days. While in simple I/O testing it can hit speeds almost up to 10,000 MB/s reads and writes, for more complex workloads it quickly dropped against popular PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD options. In my testing thus far of this first consumer Gen5 NVMe SSD it's left me far from impressed.
Latest System76 Intel-Powered Laptops Added To Coreboot
Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76...
Linux Landing Change To Allow STIBP When Using Legacy IBRS
Ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc1 release later today, a set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out Sunday morning that include the change to allow Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) to be used in the presence of legacy Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for security reasons...
Wine-Staging 8.3 Released With Fix For MeshroomCL
Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.3 is a new release of Wine-Staging, the experimental/testing blend of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine-Staging 8.3 carries more than 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...
GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractional_scale_v1 Wayland Support
While GNOME 3.32 saw initial work on fractional scaling support for the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor, the upcoming GNOME 44 release is bringing support for Wayland's fractional_scale_v1 protocol...
AMD Unified Inference Frontend 1.1 Released
AMD in February quietly released version 1.1 of their in-development Unified Inference Front-end "UIF" that aims to be their catch-all solution for AI inference from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and other IP from their recent Xilinx acquisition...
Intel Mesa Vulkan Driver Fixed Up For Very Slow Gen9 GravityMark Performance
Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a set of patches to fix a glaring performance issue affecting Skylake/Gen9 era graphics with the cross-platform GravityMark benchmark...
GNOME's Mutter Lands Experimental Code For HDR Modes
Yesterday saw GNOME Shell and Mutter drop the last of their GTK3 dependence while today there is another interesting change to mention on the Mutter compositor side... An experimental option for enabling some HDR modes with supported high dynamic range displays...
KDE Developers Continue Pushing More Plasma 6.0 Changes
This week KDE Plasma's development branched to Qt6-only and a lot of other development happenings around Plasma 6.0 occurred...
Wine 8.3 Released With Low Fragmentation Heap, Smart Card Support
Wine 8.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...
Intel Shifts Its HPC Max Series Focus To Falcon Shores In 2025
Intel announced today it has cancelled Rialto Bridge and Lancaster Sound development while shifting its Max Series focus to their Falcon Shores XPU that is now set to ship in 2025...
GNOME Shell & Mutter Complete Their Migration Away From GTK3
The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3...
AMD Preparing "openSIL" For Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot
If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support...
Small I/O Performance Boost Coming For Intel Ice Lake & Sapphire Rapids Servers
There should be "slight improvements for I/O performance" coming to Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids servers on a future kernel release with a patch having surfaced to remove a check that led to these newer processors not seeing HWP I/O boosting enabled...