
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 11 min 23 sec ago
Asahi Linux Project Makes Progress On USB3, Toward Speaker Support, Keyboard Backlight
The Asahi Linux crew has published their November 2022 status report highlighting recent open-source progress on supporting Apple Silicon M1/M2 devices under Linux...
New Dasharo v1.1 Firmware For The MSI Z690 Board - DDR5 Variant Now Supported, ME Disable
One of the exciting open-source milestones this year was Dasharo/Coreboot being ported to a modern Intel Alder Lake Z690 motherboard that is readily available and at a decent price. That work by the open-source firmware engineers at 3mdeb was focused on the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard while with today's v1.1 release there is also support now for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR5...
Phoronix Premium Black Friday Deal To Support Open-Source News, Linux Hardware Testing
It's that time of the year with "Black Friday" this week and the start of the holiday shopping season. As usual, there is the annual holiday deal for Phoronix Premium to enjoy it at a discounted rate. Unfortunately the state of the ad industry and rampant ad-block use continue to greatly hurt the sustainability of the site while Phoronix Premium allows for enjoying the website ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page...
AMD Releases Brotli-G For GPU-Accelerated Brotli Compression
After open-sourcing its Radeon Raytracing Analyzer code last week, this week AMD's GPUOpen team has a new open-source project announcement: Brotli-G...
oneVPL 2023.1 Released For Intel's Open-Source Video Processing Library
Intel has published a new version of its oneVPL library as its open-source oneAPI Video Processing Library for video encoding/decoding and media processing across CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators...
Wayland Screen Sharing For Chrome/Chromium Improving - Enabled By Default Soon?
Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has written a year-end summary about the ongoing work for supporting Wayland-based screen sharing for the Google Chrome/Chromium web browser. The code still isn't enabled by default but given the strides being made that could change "sooner than later" if all goes well...
SDL 2.26 Released, SDL3 Development Now Underway
SDL 2.26 has been officially released as the latest version of this widely-used library by cross-platform games and other software wishing to abstract various hardware/software differences between systems. With the release of SDL 2.26 out, SDL 3.0 is now officially under development...
Wayland Protocols 1.30 Introduces New Protocol To Allow Screen Tearing
In the early days of Wayland one of the main philosophical driving points for this alternative to the X.Org Server was that "every frame is perfect" and would forego screen tearing among other rendering impurities. Introduced now with Wayland Protocols 1.30 though is a new staging protocol to allow screen tearing...
The Epic Gains Made In 5 Years For AMD EPYC 7601 Naples vs. Newest 4th Gen EPYC Genoa
The AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" processor performance has been outright phenomenal. These new AMD server processors have shown stunnning performance with up to 96 cores per socket and beyond the increased core count is now up to 12 channels of DDR5-4800 memory and most significantly in the HPC space is the introduction of AVX-512 support with Zen 4. Even the 32-core high frequency Genoa performance has been dominating against Intel's current Xeon Scalable competition. While AMD EPYC Genoa brings very impressive gains generation-over-generation and against the current Xeon Ice Lake CPUs, curiosity got the best of me for seeing how the new AMD EPYC CPUs compare to AMD's original EPYC 1st Gen "Naples" flagship - the EPYC 7601 2P. Here are Genoa benchmarks showing how far the AMD server/HPC CPU performance has evolved over the past five years since Naples.
Intel TDX Guest Driver Ready Ahead Of Linux 6.2
Intel open-source engineers continue working on getting their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support squared away for the mainline Linux kernel. With the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle, the TDX guest driver is now ready...
RADV Wires Up VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer, VKD3D-Proton Usage Pending
Introduced last week as part of Vulkan 1.3.235 was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension. NVIDIA issued a same-day Vulkan beta with support for this new capability while now the open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for it too and there is also VKD3D-Proton usage for this new extension pending...
Wasmer 3.0 Released As The Latest "Universal WebAssembly Runtime"
Following the development builds over the summer, Wasmer 3.0 was officially released this weekend as the newest feature release for this open-source software aiming to serve as a universal WebAssembly runtime with a goal to "run any code on any client" via WebAssembly...
Ubuntu Bring-Up Happening For The StarFive VisionFive 2 RISC-V Board
This summer saw official Ubuntu Linux images released for the StarFive VisionFive RISC-V board while now Canonical engineers are working to ensure their Linux distribution is all squared away for the upcoming VisionFive 2...
Linux 6.1-rc6 Released - Still Coming In Larger Than Torvalds Would Like
Last week with Linux 6.1-rc5 there was concerns raised by Linus Torvalds that the v6.1 cycle may need an extra week of testing and fixes. Now Linux 6.1-rc6 is available with Torvalds' latest prognosis for the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle...
OpenRazer 3.5 Brings Support For Newer Razer Devices On Linux
While Razer still sadly isn't officially supporting their various gaming-focused computer peripherals under Linux, the OpenRazer project providing open-source drivers for Razer products continues working out well and offering broad hardware support under Linux...
Intel's IWD 2.0 Released For Modern Linux Wireless Daemon
One of countless great open-source projects from Intel over the years is IWD as a modern wireless daemon for WiFi devices on Linux. IWD has been in the works for over a half-decade as a new replacement to wpa_supplicant and with time has implemented many features and seen widespread adoption. Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon...
New Patches Allow More Easily Managing The AMD P-State Linux Driver
Since the introduction of the AMD P-State driver to the mainline kernel, enthusiasts and gamers have been experimenting with the amd_pstate driver and some distributions like Ubuntu have went with using this driver in place of ACPI CPUFreq by default for Zen 2 and newer processors. Patches posted this week by AMD make it easier to switch between the AMD P-State driver and ACPI CPUFreq...
Fixed Intel IFS Driver Ready To Go With Linux 6.2
In addition to Linux 6.2 promoting [DG2] Arc Graphics to stable, this next kernel version will no longer deem the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver as "broken" now that it's API/ABI is in good shape...
Compute Accelerator Subsystem Hopes To Be Ready For Linux 6.2
Thanks to this year's Linux Plumbers Conference it looks like the compute accelerator subsystem/framework is finally coming together. The fourth and potentially final iteration of the accelerator framework patches have been sent out with hopes of them being mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel...
Libinput 1.22 Brings More Input Hardware Quirks, New Flat Acceleration Profile
Libinput 1.22 was released this weekend by José Expósito as the newest version of this widely-used input handling library that is now common to the Linux desktop by both X.Org and Wayland based environments...