Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 30 min ago
NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.9 Released With YUV444 Support
The open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver project is an independent effort implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop of the NVDEC interface supported by NVIDIA's proprietary driver. This VA-API-on-NVDEC implementation allows for video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting this open API...
VirtIO Native Context Being Worked On For AMD Drivers To Enhance VM Performance
As part of an AMD effort to enhance the performance of the AMD Linux graphics drivers when running in a virtualized environment, a set of initial patches are pending for Mesa that implement native context support for VirtIO...
Linux 6.4 To Enable Sensor Monitoring On More ASUS Z590 Motherboards
A simple patch queued in "hwmon-next" this week for the Linux 6.4 cycle later this spring gets motherboard sensor monitoring working on three more ASUS motherbards for modern Intel systems...
Linux 6.2.4 & 6.1.17 Released To Fix An Easy-To-Trigger Kernel Oops
Linux 6.2.4 and 6.1.17 kernels have been released this morning as new emergency releases...
GNU Octave 8.1 Released For Free Software MATLAB Alternative
GNU Octave 8.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this free software for scientific computing and numerical computations that remains a leading open-source alternative to MATLAB...
KDE's Konsole Now Works On Windows, More Plasma Wayland Fixes Come Too
It was a busy March week for KDE developers as they have now got the Konsole terminal emulator working on Windows, Qt apps surviving compositor restarts, other Plasma 6.0 development work under their belt, and the continued flow of fixes...
Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 Released - Finishes Transition From OpenCL To HIP
AMD today published Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 as the newest version of this cross-platform and open-source physically-based rendering engine...
Linux 6.4 Slated To Start Removing Old, Unused & Unmaintained PCMCIA Drivers
Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.4 cycle this spring is removing all of the PCMCIA "char" drivers as part of a broader effort to remove PCMCIA socket and card driver code where there is no apparent users remaining...
Box86 v0.3 & Box64 v0.2.2 Released For Running Linux x86/x86_64 Programs On Arm
In addition to this week seeing new releases of FEX-Emu and Hangover for open-source projects aiming to run x86/x86_64 binaries on 64-bit Arm, the Box86 and related Box64 projects are out today with their own feature updates for helping to enable x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on Arm systems...
OpenBSD Finally Adds Guided Disk Encryption To Its Installer
Full disk encryption is quite important in today's computing environment while some operating systems still sadly don't provide an easy and streamlined manner of setting up an encrypted disk at install-time. Thankfully with the next release of OpenBSD, they are introducing a guided disk encryption option to their installer...
Lenovo Begins Supporting LinuxBoot Firmware With ByteDance
This week TikTok-owner ByteDance hosted the CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium to talk up their open-source firmware work, showcase their industry partnerships, and more. One interesting takeaway is that thanks to the weight of ByteDance, Lenovo is now supporting LinuxBoot in some capacity...
Embree 4.0.1 Released With Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series Support
Embree 4.0.1 is out with a few changes to note for this open-source high performance ray-tracing library for CPUs and GPUs...
Chrome 112 Beta Released With CSS Nesting, WebAssembly Tail Call
Chrome 112 beta is now available for testing as the next step forward for Google's web browser...
AMD Releases AOMP 17.0-0 For Latest Radeon OpenMP Offloading Compiler
On Thursday AMD engineers released AOMP 17.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler that carries their latest development patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP GPU/accelerator offloading support...
Hangover 0.8.3 Released For Enjoying Windows x86/x86_64 Apps/Games On Linux ARM64
Hangover 0.8.3 is now available as the newest version for this open-source project started by several Wine developers to ease the pathway for running Windows x86/x86_64 games and applications on Linux under AArch64 (64-bit Arm) as well as other possible architectures like POWER9 and RISC-V...
The Technical Workloads Where AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D CPUs Are Excellent
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.
TikTok Owner Bytedance Goes Big On Open-Source Firmware
TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI...
PipeWire 0.3.67 Fixes Stuttering For Some Bluetooth Devices
PipeWire 0.3.67 is now available as the latest version of this now widely used server by the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams as an alternative to PulseAudio and JACK on the audio side...
Initial Batch Of Intel Graphics Driver Updates Queued For Linux 6.4
While less than one week since the Linux 6.3-rc1 release, already the first batch of Intel (i915) kernel graphics driver updates has been sent to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off in two months...
Linux Patch Updated For Rumble Support On Latest Microsoft Xbox Controllers
Last year I wrote about a Google engineer working on rumble support for the latest Microsoft controllers in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox team. That patch seemed to have fallen through the woodwork but has been updated and sent out in "v2" form this week for allowing Linux gamers to enjoy rumble functionality with these latest Microsoft controllers...
