
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 5 min ago
Qualcomm Posts "QAIC" DRM Accelerator Driver For Linux
After Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 Accelerator back in 2019, in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic they posted a Linux driver for this accelerator. That driver didn't get picked up for the mainline Linux kernel and two years later there still is little fanfare around the Qualcomm AI Cloud Accelerator hardware. However, now they have posted a new Linux driver that goes the DRM driver route...
Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android...
GNOME 43 Beta Released With More GTK 4 Porting, Other Desktop Improvements
The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month...
Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware, Performance Improvements & Much More
Yesterday marked the release of Linux 6.0-rc1 and as such the merge window is no over and no more feature work is set to land in this kernel version. Here is my write-up of all the interesting new features and changes/improvements coming for Linux 6.0.
Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops - Intel Webcam Linux Driver Long Ways Out
Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away...
AMD P-State Patches Updated But Miss The Linux 6.0 Merge Window
AMD today sent out revised patches for improving the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver that aims to provide better power efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been relied upon for AMD processors...
Intel's oneAPI Support Appears To Be In Good Shape For Blender 3.3
Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux...
MGLRU v14 Released For Improving Linux Low-Memory Performance
While Linux 6.0 will bring a lot of shiny new features, Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) is one of the anticipated changes that isn't going to land now until Linux 6.1. But in the interim, MGLRU v14 was posted today that re-bases the code against 6.0-rc1 to help facilitate more testing of this kernel change that primarily helps Linux systems under memory pressure...
Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations, New Hardware Support
After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great...
Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Performance Is Looking Great For Linux 6.0
Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window...
Ubuntu Linux Preparing systemd-hwe To Ease OEM Hardware Enablement
Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement...
Wine-Staging 7.15 Released - Currently At 536 Patches Atop Upstream Wine
Following yesterday's belated release of Wine 7.15, Wine-Staging 7.15 is now available that continues to carry hundreds of extra testing/experimental patches atop upstream Wine for bug fixes and other features to empower Windows games and applications on Linux...
Glibc 2.36 Dropping DT_HASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games With Steam Play
Those on rolling-release Linux distributions that are quick to adapt to new toolchain updates are finding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) enabled games breaking when running on the recently released Glibc 2.36. The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH...
Wine 7.15 Adds RSA Encryption, Direct2D Command Lists
Wine 7.15 is out a day late as the newest development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine is also what serves as the base for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play...
AMD Radeon 680M Graphics Benchmarks Across Various Linux Kernel, Mesa Versions
With the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors most exciting about these Zen 3+ SoCs has been the energy efficiency improvements and moving from Vega to RDNA2 graphics as with the Radeon 680M found on the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U that I have been running many Linux benchmarks on over the past several weeks. For those wondering if it pays off moving to a newer Linux kernel or Mesa version with Radeon 680M integrated graphics, here are some reference benchmarks I recently conducted...
Linux Gets New Patch To Fix AMD Retbleed Mitigation - STIBP Needed With IBPB
Sent out this morning is a Linux kernel "fix" that now enabled STIBP when using the IBPB mode for Retbleed mitigations on AMD processors. In other words, more protections needed for this enhanced mode of Retbleed mitigation...
RISC-V Lands New Extensions In Linux 6.0
Last week was the main set of RISC-V updates for Linux 6.0 that included improving Svpbmt support, a more robust default kernel configuration, and other improvements. A secondary set of RISC-V CPU architecture updates has now been merged for Linux 6.0...
Plasma 5.26 Improving Widget Accessibility, Kickoff Gets Compact Mode + Wayland Fixes
It's been another busy summer week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing within this open-source desktop stack...
Many VirtIO Changes Land For Linux 6.0
A number of changes were merged into Linux 6.0 for benefiting virtualization when making use of VirtIO...
FFmpeg Begins Integrating Intel oneVPL Support
Intel has contributed support for their oneVPL open-source video processing library to the upstream FFmpeg project for that widely-used, cross-platform multimedia library...