
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 47 min ago
KDE Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support
As a wonderful Christmas gift to KDE Plasma users on Wayland, fractional scaling under Wayland has been successfully merged...
Hardware Monitoring Driver Updates Land In Linux 6.2
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window...
AMD Overhauls Their SEV-SNP Hypervisor Patches They Are Working To Upstream In Linux
Introduced in early 2021 with now prior-generation AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. While this year saw the initial SEV-SNP support was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel, the hypervisor portion remain outstanding and have taken a step back as the AMD engineers overhauled their implementation...
Linux Moves Another Step Closer To Removing Ancient NFSv2 Support
With the Linux 6.2 kernel the NFSD code is taking another step closer to removing the older NFSv2 support...
Intel oneAPI 2023 Released - AMD & NVIDIA Plugins Available
Ahead of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable, Xeon CPU Max, and Intel Data Center GPUs shipping, Intel today announced the oneAPI 2023 tools release...
KDE Plasma 5.27 To Provide Better Multi-Monitor Support
The KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop, which is to be the last Plasma 5 feature release before Plasma 6.0, is poised to introduce revamped multi-monitor handling...
AOCC 4.0 Shows The Strong Advantages Of Compiler Optimizations With 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs
Last month when AMD launched the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series they also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler derived from LLVM/Clang and tailored to their latest Zen microarchitecture. At the time I ran some AOCC 4.0 benchmarks on the Ryzen 7000 series and compared it to GCC and Clang. Since then I've had the time on my Genoa test rig to look at how well AOCC 4.0 is performing and in this article are some benchmarks with the EPYC 9374F processors between GCC and AOCC 4.0.
22 Patches From AMD Further Along Mesa's Workstation Performance
Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests...
Intel IFS Ready To Weed Out Faulty Silicon With Linux 6.2
The x86/microcode changes that were merged this week into the Linux 6.2 kernel address prior shortcomings with the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver so it's now deemed ready to help in spotting out faulty silicon across a fleet of systems in production or prior to commissioning new hardware...
Ampere Computing Joins Intel, AMD, Arm, Microsoft & Others On The Cloud Hypervisor
Ampere Computing is the latest major vendor now backing the Cloud Hypervisor Project hosted by the Linux Foundation as a Rust-written VMM focused on running modern cloud workloads in a fast and secure manner...
Linux 6.2 FUSE Continues Improving File-Systems In User-Space
The FUSE kernel code for supporting "File-Systems In User-Space" has ready several updates for Linux 6.2 including some performance optimizations...
KVM Preps For New Intel CPU Instructions With Linux 6.2
The initial batch of feature updates for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) have been submitted for the Linux 6.2 merge window...
exFAT With Linux 6.2 Allows Creating Files & Directories Much Faster
For those relying on Microsoft's exFAT file-system for your SD cards or USB flash drives, the kernel driver with Linux 6.2 is capable of handling much faster file and directory creation than on prior versions...
Radeon ROCm 5.4.1 Released
AMD today capped off their busy week by releasing ROCm 5.4.1 as the newest version of their open-source compute stack...
VKD3D-Proton 2.8 Brings Many Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
VKD3D-Proton 2.8 has been released as a nice Christmas gift to Linux gamers for advancing this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...
openSUSE Is Still Looking For Users To Step Up And Maintain 32-bit x86 Support
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is transitioning to x86-64-v2 CPU requirements and for the x86 32-bit realm they are working to carve-out their i586 packages into a separate "openSUSE:Factory:LegacyX86" archive. But so far no one has stepped up to maintain these 32-bit packages and thus jeopardizing its future...
Linux 6.2 Will Help With Power Savings For Intel Alder Lake N & Raptor Lake P
There's a fair amount going on in the power management space for both Intel x86_64 and Arm hardware with the Linux 6.2 kernel...
Blender 3.4 HIP Performance With Radeon RX 7900 Series + RDNA3 OpenCL Compute Benchmarks
Earlier this week was the initial Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX Linux review focusing on the gaming performance while in today's article is a look at the Radeon RX 7900 series when running on Blender 3.4 with its Cycles HIP back-end as well as various OpenCL compute benchmarks against the older Radeon graphics cards and NVIDIA GeForce competition.
AMDVLK 2022.Q4.4 Released With RX 7900 Series Support
AMD today published the AMDVLK 2022.Q4.4 open-source Vulkan driver that provides Navi 31 GPU support for this week's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX graphics cards...
Experimental RADV Vulkan Video Gets H.264 & H.265 Decode Working
Interest and support around Vulkan Video for adding GPU-accelerated video encode/decode to the Vulkan API has been (sadly) rather slow. But at least the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen some new work around enabling H.264 and H.265 video decoding over Vulkan Video...