Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 9 min ago
Qt 6.6 Wayland Compositor Handoffs Look Promising For More Robust Experience
KDE developer David Edmundson has written an interesting blog post looking at robustness improvements coming with Qt 6.6 via QtWayland compositor handoffs support...
VKD3D-Proton 2.10 Released With More Performance Improvements, Game/Driver Workarounds
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's stellar Linux graphics/Proton team has released VKD3D-Proton 2.10 as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop Vulkan that allows for modern Windows games to run on Linux atop Steam Play...
Linux 6.6 Enables Tracking Per-CPU Cgroup CPU Usage Stats
With the Linux 6.6 merge window the cgroup changes brought one change worth mentioning...
RADV Ray-Tracing Monolithic Pipelines Support Merged For Better Performance
The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines...
GNU Boot 0.1 RC1 Released For This Coreboot/Libreboot Fork
The first release candidate of the inaugural GNU Boot has been released with users sought to try out this fork of Libreboot that in turn is derived from Coreboot...
Linux 6.6-rc1 Released With EEVDF, AMD DBC & Intel Shadow Stack But No Bcachefs
The Linux 6.6 merge window is over as the period by which new features and improvements are added to the kernel. Linux 6.6-rc1 is out the door as the kernel developers and testing community begin stabilizing this next major Linux kernel release. With Linux 6.6 there are many exciting feature additions but also one notable addition that once again didn't make the cut...
DRM CI Merged Into Linux 6.6 - Linus Torvalds: "Let's See Where It Goes"
In addition to all the open-source kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.6, merged this afternoon ahead of the Linux 6.6-rc1 tagging is merging of the DRM continuous integration (CI) code to hopefully lead to better testing of DRM subsystem/driver changes...
Linux 6.6 WQ Change May Help Out AMD CPUs & Other Systems With Multiple L3 Caches
In addition to the EEVDF scheduler replacing the CFS code in Linux 6.6, another fundamental and interesting change with Linux 6.6 is on the workqueue (WQ) side with a rework that can benefit systems with multiple L3 caches like modern AMD chiplet-based systems...
Linux 6.6 SMB Client To Allow Adjusting Cache Time For Directory Contents
With Linux 6.6 the KSMBD server is no longer "experimental" while this new kernel on the SMB3 client side also brings a notable addition: the new "dir_cache_timeout" option to control the cache time for directory contents...
Mesa 23.3 Fixes Zink Rendering For X.Org/XWayland GLAMOR
Mike Blumenkrantz working for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added implicit sync support to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, which in turn now opens this generic driver up for correctly providing GLAMOR rendering with X11 and XWayland environments...
Linux 6.6 Allowing Per-Policy CPUFreq Performance Boost Control
While last week saw the main set of power management updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel, this week a follow-on pull request was submitted -- and merged -- with a few last minute additions...
RISC-V With Linux 6.6 Offers Better Kernel Security With KASLR
More RISC-V architecture updates were merged this weekend for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window...
AmpereOne Core PMU Perf Events Added For Linux 6.6
Merged overnight were the perf subsystem tooling updates for the Linux 6.6 merge window that is set to close later on Sunday...
LoongArch With Linux 6.6 Adds KGDB/KDB, KFence, KASAN, LBT Binary Translation
The LoongArch CPU port is seeing a number of new kernel features enabled with Linux 6.6 as well as seeing some new hardware features wired up such as for Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) and allowing LSX/LASX instruction use in kernel-space...
KSMBD Declared Stable - No Longer "Experimental" - In Linux 6.6
Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its "experimental" marking...
DXVK-NVAPI 0.6.4 Implements HDR Support Via DXVK
A new version of DXVK-NVAPI is now available, the NVIDIA public NVAPI interface implemented atop DXVK for use by Direct3D games running on Valve's Steam Play (Proton). DXVK-NVAPI allows for NVIDIA DLSS for Vulkan / D3D11 / D3D12, NVIDIA Reflex support, PhysX, and other NVIDIA features to be enabled for popular Windows games running on Linux...
GNOME 45.rc Brings GDM Wayland Multi-Seat, More libadwaita Adoption
The GNOME 45 release candidate is now available for testing ahead of the desktop's stable release later this month...
KDE Lands More Power Management Tuning, Behaves Better On Btrfs File-Systems
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his newest weekly development summary as the developers work toward releasing Plasma 6.0 in February...
FreeBSD 14 Beta Released - Initial WiFi 6 Support, Updated LLVM Toolchain, Fwget Utility
FreeBSD 14 Beta 1 is available this weekend for helping to test out this major BSD operating system update that should debut as stable before the end of October...
Vulkan 1.3.264 Released With Microsoft Layered Driver Extension
Earlier this year I wrote about Microsoft working on their first Vulkan extension and today it finally debuted within the Vulkan 1.3.264 spec update...
