
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 38 min ago
Intel Posts Latest 113 Patches For Linux KVM TDX Support
One of the new features of Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) but for this generation is only being activated for CPUs going to select cloud providers. Intel TDX allows better isolating virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-TD software on the platform. This limited roll-out of Intel TDX has worked out okay with the Linux support for this security feature still being in flux. Sent out today was the 14th spin of the 113 patches needed for getting KVM TDX support wired up within the Linux kernel...
GCC 11.4 Released With 110+ Bugs Fixed
While GCC 13 saw its first stable release several weeks back, for those taking their time in moving to major new compiler releases and still relying on the two-year-old GCC 11 series, out today is the GCC 11.4 point release...
Arm Details The Cortex-X4 With +15% Performance, Armv9.2 ISA
Arm today announced the new high-end Cortex-X4 CPU core design for delivering their most powerful Cortex compute cluster...
Linux 6.4-rc4 Released As A "Fairly Normal" Release
Due to Linus Torvalds traveling over this US Memorial Day weekend, he released Linux 6.4-rc4 about twelve hours ahead of schedule...
Vulkan 1.3.251 Released With One New Extension Worked On By Valve, Nintendo & Others
Vulkan 1.3.251 is out today as a rare Sunday morning spec update for this Khronos graphics/compute API...
Linux Lands Fix For Potentially Bogus Number Of Intel Hybrid CPU HT Siblings
A few days ago I wrote about a Linux kernel patch being prepared for fixing Intel hybrid CPU SMP/HT topology reporting due to the way the Linux kernel was currently counting the number of Hyper Threading siblings for each core. Fortunately, that fix which is apparently becomes more pressing for upcoming Meteor Lake processors, has now been picked up in time for today's Linux 6.4-rc4 release and is set for back-porting to stable kernel series...
Wine-Staging 8.9 Ships With The Very Latest VKD3D Code
Following the release of Wine 8.9 on Friday for enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux, Wine-Staging 8.9 is now available for this more testing/development-focused flavor of Wine that more liberally picks up in-development patches...
Debian 12.0's Installer Reaches RC4 Status
The Debian 12 "Bookworm" release is quickly approaching with an early June release date while for helping facilitate more last minute testing is a fourth release candidate of the updated Debian Installer...
Mesa 23.2 Virgl Lands Support For OpenGL 4.6 Inside Virtual Machines
The Virgl driver within Mesa for allowing open-source OpenGL support within virtualized environments in conjunction with the Virglrenderer is now capable of exposing OpenGL 4.6...
Linux Patches Improve VM Guest Performance When The Host Encounters Memory Pressure
An updated set of patches were posted on Friday that seem to improve the Linux guest VM performance when the host is under heavy memory pressure...
Intel Proposes Using Netlink For Linux Graphics Driver RAS & Telemetry
Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers are looking at making use of Netlink for exposing RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and telemetry fwatures of kernel graphics drivers to user-space for their modern GPUs...
KDE Plasma 6.0's Night Color Mode Will Work With NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
Even with summertime approaching KDE developers remain very busy further enhancing the desktop stack and continued efforts around Qt6 porting and the Plasma 6.0 desktop...
Wine 8.9 Released With More Wayland Bits, Mono 8.0 Upgrade
Ahead of the US holiday weekend is the latest bi-weekly release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications running well on Linux and other platforms thanks to this open-source project...
AMD Posts QDMA Linux Driver For Review
A new AMD open-source driver posted for code review that's aiming for the upstream Linux kernel is the QDMA driver...
Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
Multiple users have been reporting metadata corruption issues on the XFS file-system when upgrading to the Linux 6.3 stable kernel...
Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 Quick Linux Competition With The Radeon RX 7600
For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...
Ubuntu Forms An HPC Team To Push AI, High Performance Computing Workloads
Announced on Thursday was the Ubuntu High Performance Computing (HPC) team to promote Ubuntu Linux for running AI/ML, energy, bioinformatics, meteorology, and other workloads on Ubuntu Linux...
Linux Preps Hybrid SMP Fix To Avoid Upcoming Laptops Appearing As 11 Socket Monsters
A fix is on its way to the mainline Linux 6.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel series to fix x86 topology reporting for Intel Hybrid systems. The topology bug within the kernel becomes more pronounced for Meteor Lake laptops where currently internal Intel test laptops can report the systems having 11 CPU sockets rather than the proper number of cores all contained within one CPU socket...
Big Throughput Boost & Lower Latency With New Patch For Linux Checksum Function
Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.5 cycle kicking off in about one month is a new Linux x86 optimization patch for further tuning csum_partial, the function used within the kernel for calculating 32-bit checksums on blocks of data. Much lower latency and higher throughput can be observed with the newly-optimized csum_partial on the latest Intel/AMD processors...
Qt 5.15 LTS Takes Another Step Closer To Retirement
The Qt 5.15 Long-Term Support branch as the last release in the Qt5 series is one step closer to retirement with The Qt Group now having ended its standard support for legacy license holders...