
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 48 min ago
Hangover 0.8.3 Released For Enjoying Windows x86/x86_64 Apps/Games On Linux ARM64
Hangover 0.8.3 is now available as the newest version for this open-source project started by several Wine developers to ease the pathway for running Windows x86/x86_64 games and applications on Linux under AArch64 (64-bit Arm) as well as other possible architectures like POWER9 and RISC-V...
The Technical Workloads Where AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D CPUs Are Excellent
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.
TikTok Owner Bytedance Goes Big On Open-Source Firmware
TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI...
PipeWire 0.3.67 Fixes Stuttering For Some Bluetooth Devices
PipeWire 0.3.67 is now available as the latest version of this now widely used server by the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams as an alternative to PulseAudio and JACK on the audio side...
Initial Batch Of Intel Graphics Driver Updates Queued For Linux 6.4
While less than one week since the Linux 6.3-rc1 release, already the first batch of Intel (i915) kernel graphics driver updates has been sent to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off in two months...
Linux Patch Updated For Rumble Support On Latest Microsoft Xbox Controllers
Last year I wrote about a Google engineer working on rumble support for the latest Microsoft controllers in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox team. That patch seemed to have fallen through the woodwork but has been updated and sent out in "v2" form this week for allowing Linux gamers to enjoy rumble functionality with these latest Microsoft controllers...
Ruby Lands New "RJIT" Just-In-Time Compiler
Back in 2021 Ruby merged the YJIT just-in-time compiler that last year with Ruby 3.2 was deemed production grade. There's also been the MJIT compiler that relies upon an external C compiler. And now landing this week in Ruby is RJIT as the newest just-in-time effort...
Open-Source AMD OpenGL Driver Drops Support For Smart Access Memory / ReBAR
Since late 2020 there had been work by AMD Linux engineers on adding Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support to RadeonSI as the Gallium3D OpenGL driver and improved since that point in the name of performance. However, for this OpenGL driver now they've come to realize the benefits haven't necessarily panned out and the developers went ahead and disabled this SAM/ReBAR support followed by removing the support from this driver...
Tuned AMD Zen 4 Scheduler Model Lands In LLVM 17 Compiler
Back in December initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support was merged for the LLVM/Clang 16 compiler. While the "-march=znver4" targeting at least flips on the newly-added AVX-512 instructions with these AMD processors, it was re-using the existing scheduler model from Zen 3. Finally today a tuned Zen 4 scheduler model has landed for what will be found in the LLVM 17 compiler later this year...
Mesa 22.3.7 Released To End Out The Series
Mesa 22.3.7 has been released as the last planned point release for that driver Q4'2022 driver series...
Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 / DDR5-5600
Micron recently sent over their latest Crucial 2 x 16GB DDR5-5200 and DDR5-5600 memory kits for testing with these low cost options for running with the latest Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake and AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. Here's a look at how these affordable DDR5 memory options are performing and a look at the Linux workloads that can benefit from higher frequency memory.
Ubuntu Announces Official Support For The PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit RISC-V Board
Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board...
Samba 4.18 Released With Performance Optimizations
Samba 4.18 is out today as the popular open-source implementation of the SMB networking protocol that allows for file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems in an Active Directory (AD) environment...
Wayland Clients Can Now Survive Qt Wayland Crashes / Compositor Restarts
A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes...
IOCB_NOWAIT For Linux Pipes Yields 10~23x Performance Improvement
In wanting to avoid waiting for pipes via the IOCB_NOWAIT option in order to further enhance IO_uring performance, Jens Axboe has implemented said functionality and in a simple test is seeing 10x to 23x performance improvements...
RADV Enables Variable Rate Shading For RDNA3, RadeonSI Lands More Fixes
If you are an AMD Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" GPU owner and don't mind running bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code, you'll want to pull down today's Mesa 23.1-devel Git snapshot...
Vanilla OS 2.0 Shifting From Ubuntu Base To Debian Sid
One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid...
Python 3.12 Alpha 6 Released With More Improvements
Python 3.12 Alpha 6 was released on Tuesday as the newest development release toward this next major Python release...
Intel Releases x86-simd-sort v1.0 Library For High Performance AVX-512 Sorting
Last month you may recall the news of Intel having an extremely fast AVX-512 sorting library they published as open-source and found adoption already by the popular Numpy Python library. In the case of Numpy it could deliver some 10~17x speed-ups. That header-only library has now reached version 1.0...
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux Performance
Following last week's review of the brand new AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and then moving on to looking at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D gaming performance, today's Linux hardware coverage on Phoronix is looking at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux performance in other system/CPU workloads aside from gaming.