Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 21 min 44 sec ago
9-Way AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Benchmarks On Linux 6.5 / Ubuntu 23.10
For those currently weighing between the (currently) nine different AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors for Linux use, here are fresh benchmarks of the Zen 4 desktop CPU line-up while testing with Ubuntu 23.10 and the Linux 6.5 kernel...
OpenSSL 3.2 Reaches Beta With Client-Side QUIC, Zstd & Brotli Certificate Compression
OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library...
RADV Hooks Up Image Compression Control To Workaround Game Bugs
Samuel Pitoiset on Valve's Linux graphics driver team has wired up VK_EXT_image_compression_control support to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) in order to workaround same game bugs being encountered with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton...
Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q3 Released For Latest VA-API & QSV Code
Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics...
Fedora 39 Delayed To At Least 7 November
While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November...
Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" Opens For Development
The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release...
AMD-Powered Framework Laptop Now Working On Linux With Latest BIOS
Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux...
RadeonSI Completes ACO Compiler Support With Mesa 24.0
With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end...
Linux Mint Starts Working On Wayland For Cinnamon, Likely Not Fully Ready Until 2026
Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support...
Intel's Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver
Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I've been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.
Servo Web Engine Made Some Nice Progress In October
The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged...
Experimental Zero-Copy Support For Nouveau With GNOME Mutter
Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver...
File Searching On KDE Plasma 6.0 To Use Less CPU Resources & Better Usability
Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area...
Blender 4.1 To Support Cycles Renderer On AMD RDNA3 APUs
Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year...
Mesa 23.3-rc1 Available For Testing With NVIDIA Vulkan Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Support
Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series...
SteamVR 2.0 Officially Released With Many Improvements
For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable...
Mesa 24.0 Enters Feature Development For Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers
Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024...
The Fedora 39 Release Has Been Held Up By Raspberry Pi Bugs
Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi...
Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops
With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.
Intel Releases OSPRay Studio 0.13 With Xe GPU Acceleration Support
Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application...
