
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 33 min ago
Linux 6.3 Released With More Meteor Lake Enablement, Zen 4 Auto IBRS & Much More
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3 as the newest stable kernel version...
Linux 6.3 Features Have A Lot For AMD & Intel, Steam Deck, ASUS Motherboards & More
The Linux 6.3 stable kernel is likely to be released later today so here is a reminder about the most exciting aspects of this spring kernel release...
Libreboot 20230423 Allows A Few More Boards To Run On Fully Open-Source Firmware
Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on ensuring 100% open-source system firmware support without any lurking binary blobs is out this Sunday with a new feature release...
Improved Linux Power Savings For Intel Haswell/Broadwell Laptops In 2023
It's been just shy of ten years since Intel launched their Haswell processors that were very successful at the time and was followed by Broadwell. While Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are primarily concentrated on recent and future Intel hardware platforms, occasionally there is an improvement worth mentioning for mature platforms like Haswell and Broadwell. A new patch series this week will help with some minor graphics power-savings for those still running a nearly decade old Intel Linux laptop...
Flashrom Splits Into Two For This Firmware/ROM Flashing Utility
The Flashrom project that serves as an open-source firmware/ROM flashing utility not only for system BIOS/UEFI on motherboards but also capable of flashing firmware for various network / GPU / storage controller cards and other programmable devices has decided to effectively split into two...
Google Continues Working On More Linux HDCP Bits
Google engineers continue working on enhancing the Linux infrastructure around supporting High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) for Chrome OS...
Mesa 23.0.3 Released With Another Batch Of Fixes
Mesa 23.0.3 was released on Friday as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source user-space GPU driver components...
Redesigned Flathub Site Launches For Flatpak Apps
A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps...
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Performance Looking Very Good For Intel Arc Graphics
Mesa's Zink driver that implements OpenGL atop the Vulkan API has for a while been in wonderful shape for open-source AMD Radeon graphics and even in decent shape for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack while it's also been getting into more robust shape for use on Intel's dedicated graphics cards...
KDE Developers Focused On Tackling Many Bugs This Week
KDE developers were quite busy this week... In addition to shipping KDE Gear 23.04, lots of bug fixing took place this week with around half of Plasma's VHI priority bugs being addressed...
Manjaro 22.1 "Talos" Released With Various Updates
Building off December's release of Manjaro 22.0, this Arch Linux based distribution is out now with its next iteration...
Btrfs Receives A Very Important Last Minute Fix For Linux 6.3
Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted today to address a pressing problem since Linux 6.2...
Intel Updates Packaged Arc Graphics Driver For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages...
Corsair 2 x 24GB DDR5-7000 Memory Linux Performance
Corsair recently launched their line-up of 2 x 24GB DDR5 memory kits. With recent DDR5 memory prices falling, for as little as $215 USD it's now possible to obtain 48GB of DDR5-7000 RAM. With this being my first time testing a non-binary DDR5 memory kit, here is an initial look at the Corsair CMK48GX5M2B7000C40 compatibility and performance under Linux.
Rusticl With RadeonSI Driver Nearing OpenCL Conformance
While the upcoming Mesa 23.1 stable release enables RadeonSI build support for Rusticl and is working out overall, the RadeonSI driver with this Rust-written OpenCL driver is nearing the point of officially passing OpenCL conformance...
Intel's Game Plan For Getting The Xe Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Upstreamed
For more than one year Intel's been working on developing the Xe Linux kernel graphics driver as a modern Direct Rendering Manager driver for Gen12 and newer integrated/discrete graphics. For recent hardware this is to replace the existing i915 kernel driver usage. The Intel open-source developers continue working toward the milestone of being able to submit this driver for mainlining in the upstream Linux kernel...
Valve Lands Another Radeon Vulkan Performance Optimization For An "Upcoming Game"
Yesterday just hours after writing about a RADV optimization by Valve for an "upcoming game" to nearly match the performance they see under Windows, another performance improvement for an "upcoming game" has been merged...
SLOB Removal Submitted Ahead Of The Linux 6.4 Kernel Cycle
With the Linux 6.3 kernel likely being released as stable on Sunday, pull requests have already begun to be submitted of feature code for the Linux 6.4 merge window...
FreeBSD Has A Great Start To 2023 With Numerous Accomplishments
This week the FreeBSD project published their Q1-2023 status report that outlines various technical and organization accomplishments made for the past quarter...
Rust 1.69 Released - No Longer Includes Debug Info In Build Scripts By Default
Rust 1.69 is out today as stable as the newest update to this increasingly popular programming language that has become passionate to many open-source developers for its memory safety guarantees and other principles...