
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 25 min ago
Libre-Chip Awarded NLnet Grant To Prototype A CPU That Isn't Vulnerable To Spectre Flaws
The Libre-Chip project led by Jacob Lifshay has received a grant from NLNet to develop a prototype/proof-of-concept processor design that can be high performance but not vulnerable to speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre...
systemd 259 To Raise Linux System Requirements
Systemd 258 is nearing release with many big changes to this init system / service manager. Systemd 258-rc3 was released today with some last minute fixes while also now adding that the next release, systemd 259, will face increased Linux system requirements...
AMD FidelityFX SDK 2.0 Released With FSR 4 Included
AMD's GPUOpen team just released the FidelityFX SDK 2.0 development kit and with it is now the inclusion of the FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling tech to complement the existing FSR 2 / FSR 3 support...
Mesa 25.2.1 Released: Restores NVK On Kepler, Additional Intel Battlemage ID
Following the release of Mesa 25.2 from two weeks ago, Mesa 25.2.1 is out now as the first point release. Mesa 25.2.1 is quite heavy on bug fixes and some other notable back-ports from Mesa 25.3-devel...
MoltenVK 1.4 Released For Bringing Vulkan 1.4 To macOS Atop Metal
MoltenVK 1.4 is available today for this Vulkan portability implementation that layers the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers for allowing Vulkan games/apps to run across macOS, iOS, and tvOS devices...
Ubuntu 25.10 ARM64 Desktop ISO Aims For Better Hardware Experience With "Stubble"
With the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are aiming to have a better ARM64 experience with their generic desktop ISO thanks to a new improvement they have been working on called Stubble...
LibreOffice 25.8 Released With UI Enhancements, Better Performance
LibreOffice 25.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source office suite that is one of the most comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux and other platforms...
AMD EPYC 9005 Squeezes Out More Performance On Linux 6.17
Given the promising AMD Strix Halo benchmark results on Linux 6.17 following the recent merge window and early regression fixes landing in the kernel, I was curious to see how Linux 6.17 was fairing on more powerful AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a brief look at some of the performance improvements found running EPYC 9005 "Turin" with the latest Linux 6.17 development kernel compared to Linux 6.16 stable...
Linux 6.18 To Introduce New Driver For TASCAM US-144MKII USB Audio Interface
One of the new hardware drivers expected to appear in the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year is the "us144mkii" USB sound driver for supporting the TASCAM US-144MKII USB audio interface...
AMD HIPRT Updated With New Features For RDNA 4 GPUs
AMD's GPUOpen HIPRT 3.0.9ba63f3 released today as the first update since HIPRT 2.5 shipped near the beginning of the year. HIPRT is AMD's ray-tracing library built around their HIP Interface for making it easier to enable ray-tracing workloads for HIP-based software like Blender...
Google Chrome/Chromium Merges Wayland Color Management - Enables HDR Video Playback
Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser...
Ahead Of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ubuntu 25.04 Has AMD SEV-SNP Host Support
While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...
Tinygrad 0.11 Released With AMD MI350 Support, NVIDIA Blackwell
Tinygrad 0.11 is out as the newest version of this deep learning framework maintained by Tiny Corp...
Pinned Device Memory Patches For Intel's Multi-GPU "Project Battlematrix" Linux Efforts
As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage...
Rusticl vs. AMD ROCm Performance On Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo"
One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs. Given all the interest recently around Strix Halo and the Framework Desktop as well, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance between these different OpenCL driver implementations for the Radeon 8060S Graphics.
Linux Adding Detection For BSD's Bhyve Hypervisor To Support 255+ vCPUs
Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs...
Apple SoC DT Updates Already Begin Lining Up For Linux 6.18
While the Linux v6.17 merge window only wrapped up earlier this month, Apple Silicon DeviceTree "DT" updates have already begun queuing for the Linux 6.18 merge window that will happen in October...
Intel Upstreams XeVM Into LLVM
Intel's newest contribution to the upstream LLVM compiler stack is XeVM as their Multi-Level Intermediate Representation "MLIR" dialect catering to modern Intel graphics processors...
Kernel Stack Watch Proposed As New Linux Debugging Tool
Patches were posted on Monday for Kernel Stack Watch, a new lightweight debugging tool for detecting kernel stack corruption in real-time on Linux...
New Linux Patches Allow Manipulating Out-Of-Memory Behavior Using BPF
Google engineer Roman Gushchin has proposed the ability for the Linux kernel to customize the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs...