
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 18 min ago
Wlroots-Based Xfce Xwfm4 Wayland Code Taking Shape
With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing...
Linux MGLRU Results Are Looking Great On Ampere Altra
One of the best features to make it into the mainline Linux kernel this year is MGLRU as the Multi-Gen LRU for overhauling the kernel's page reclamation code. The MGLRU code that premiered in Linux 6.1 has been showing off very well in a variety of benchmarks...
USB & Thunderbolt Updates Land In Linux 6.2
The USB and Thunderbolt driver updates were merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.2 kernel with its merge window open until Christmas...
Fedora 38 Plots Path To Unified Kernel Support
Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place...
NetBSD 10 Beta Brings Much Improved Performance, Long Overdue Hardware Support
After being in development for three years the first beta builds of the upcoming NetBSD 10.0 operating system release are now available for testing...
Mesa 23.0 Enables Vulkan Mesh Shaders For AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series
As of today with Mesa 23.0 Git the EXT_mesh_shader extension is finally enabled by default for AMD Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" graphics hardware when running on a new Linux kernel build...
NTFS Driver Adds New Mount Options With Linux 6.2
The NTFS3 kernel driver, which was contributed to the mainline kernel by Paragon Software for read/write NTFS file-system support and other features while being faster than the NTFS-3g FUSE driver, is seeing a number of updates with the Linux 6.2 kernel...
openSUSE ALP "Punta Baretti" Prototype Released With More Changes
SUSE has released a new prototype build of their Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) that will serve as the basis for the next-generation SUSE Enterprise Linux...
Running The New Open-Source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Support In Linux 6.2
While NVIDIA is already out with multiple GeForce RTX 40 series products, coming only now with the Linux 6.2 kernel is initial open-source 3D acceleration support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors. Here is my initial experience with this open-source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series support in Linux 6.2.
Intel Sends Out Initial Linux Kernel Patches For FRED
Intel last year published documentation concerning a feature for future CPUs that they dubbed FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery. FRED has the capability of helping system performance and response time while now initial patches for the Linux kernel have been published for supporting FRED...
Linux 6.2 Allows For Zstd-Compressed Debug Information
In addition to Linux 6.2 upgrading its Zstd implementation for speedier compression/decompression for in-kernel uses of the Zstandard compression algorithm, this new kernel version is adding another Zstd use-case: compressed debug info sections...
Linux Patches Posted For Enabling The Aquacomputer Aquaero
Over the past year we've seen a fair amount of work for enabling support for various Aquacomputer devices under Linux. The German parts vendor specializes in various PC cooling solutions and other cooling accessories that can be monitored and managed under Linux thanks to this open-source driver work...
Intel Releases oneDNN 3.0 In Advance Of Sapphire Rapids
Intel overnight released oneDNN 3.0 as the newest major release to this open-source project for assisting in building deep learning applications. This oneAPI software component can already be used by PyTorch, ONNX, MATLAB, and other prominent software while the v3.0 release prepares it for future Intel hardware...
Arch Linux Powered EndeavourOS "Cassini" Brings Desktop & Arm Improvements
EndeavourOS continues to prove itself as one of the easiest-to-use, quick-to-install Arch Linux powered operating systems out there. Out today is the EndeavourOS "Cassini" update with more desktop enhancements as well as a number of Arm hardware support improvements...
Updated Zstd Implementation Merged For Linux 6.2
It finally happened! An updated Zstd kernel implementation based on Zstd v1.5 upstream has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 to provide better performance and reliability for Zstd compression/decompression use-cases from compressed firmware to transparent file-system compression...
Linux 6.2 "char/misc" Changes Land With Continued Intel Gaudi2 Enablement
The "char/misc" changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.2 as the random catch-all area of the kernel for drivers not fitting well in other subsystem areas. Notably with this update for Linux 6.2 is continued work on enabling the Intel-owned Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator...
AMD 4th Gen EPYC 9654 "Genoa" AVX-512 Performance Analysis
With the great AMD 4th Gen EPYC Linux performance showing significant generational uplift and dominating against the current Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" competition, it's a combination of the twelve channels of DDR5 system memory support, up to 96 cores per socket, introduction of AVX-512, and other Zen 4 micro-architectural improvements. As follow-up testing articles to all of the Genoa data delivered thus far, over the weeks ahead I have additional benchmark results to share looking more closely at these different areas of improvement for AMD 4th Gen EPYC. In today's article is a look at the EPYC 9654 2P performance with AVX-512 on/off while also looking at the CPU power consumption impact and the affect on CPU clock frequencies and thermals.
Vulkan Video 1.0 Extensions Published As Part Of Vulkan 1.3.238
In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...
Phoronix Premium 2022 Christmas Deal For Enjoying Ad-Free Access, Single Page Articles
In the event you missed out on participating in last month's Black Friday deal for joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page while helping to support continued operations of Phoronix, the deal has returned for Christmas week and marking the end of the year...
Linux 6.2 Landing Scalability Improvement For Large IBM Power Systems
The IBM Power/PowerPC architecture updates were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window and most significant with this update is the introduction of a new Power-specific qspinlock implementation designed to bolster large system scalability...