
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 45 min 53 sec ago
More ASUS Motherboards Will Have Working Sensor Support With Linux 5.20
The ASUS-EC-Sensors driver that provides better and faster hardware sensor reading for ASUS motherboards on Linux and premiered earlier this year in Linux 5.18 is continuing to broaden its list of supported ASUS motherboards...
Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Joins Google
Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google...
Stalld 1.17 Brings LoongArch Support, Bug Fixes For Thread Stall Detection & Boosting
Red Hat released Stalld 1.17 this past week as the newest version of this open-source daemon used for thread stall detection and boosting on Linux...
Linux 5.19-rc7 Released Following A Tough Week With Retbleed, Intel GPU Firmware Snafu
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc7 following a busy week due to the Retbleed security mitigation and not only the CPU overhead performance impact it puts on users but the mess it has on kernel development especially when it comes to embargoed issues that make the patches difficult to review/test well prior to embargo lift...
The Current Retbleed Performance Costs With An AMD Ryzen 7 4800U
Following some weekend benchmarks here are more complementary numbers on the Retbleed mitigation performance benchmark costs. These additional numbers are on a Zen 2 based AMD Ryzen 7 4800U APU that has been common both to laptops as well as embedded/low-profile devices for thin client computing, IoT / edge use-cases, and more...
Retbleed: Call Depth Tracking Mitigation Eyed To Avoid IBRS "Performance Horror Show"
Due to the new "Retbleed" security mitigation further hurting CPU performance for affected processors, Intel engineers have revisited work on call depth tracking mitigation as an alternative to the Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) mitigation to help in lowering the overhead costs...
Raptor Computing To Launch "Arctic Tern" As An FPGA-Based Soft BMC
Raptor Computing Systems that is known for their open-source POWER9-based Talos II and Blackbird systems that are fully open-source designs and running on free software down to the firmware level are preparing for a new product launch...
RADV Vulkan Driver Now Supports NVIDIA's Device Generated Commands
As of this week in Mesa 22.2, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the VK_NV_device_generated_commands extension. This NVIDIA-created extension that has been around for a few years with their hardware allows for the GPU to generate some of the most frequent rendering commands on the hardware itself...
Debian's DebConf22 Kicks Off In Kosovo
After the COVID-19 pandemic hiatus, Debian's annual conference "DebConf" is back to being an in-person event and started this morning in Kosovo...
Intel's Compute Runtime To Default To Disabling Gen11 & Older Support On Windows
Intel this week issued their Compute Runtime 22.28.23726 pre-release for this open-source GPU compute stack on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware...
Fedora 37 Hopes To Have A Preview Of The New Web-Based Install UI
The existing GTK-based Anaconda installer is to remain the default installation experience for Fedora 37 this autumn but a change proposal has been filed with hopes of having a public preview image for Anaconda's next-gen web-based interface for installations...
Igalia Working Towards Faster 2D Rendering For Older Raspberry Pi Boards
Igalia developer Christopher Michael has begun a blog post series outlining the consulting firm's work on improving the accelerated 2D rendering for the Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 single board computers...
Arcan 0.6.2 Display Server Continues Working On Network Transparency
Arcan 0.6.2 was released this week as the newest version of the open-source display server built atop a game engine and aiming to compete with the likes of X11 and Wayland while focusing on advanced capabilities...
Vulkan 1.3.221 Released With VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness
Vulkan 1.3.221 was released this week as the newest spec update for this industry-standard graphics/compute API...
KDE Plasma 5.26 Continues Preparing More Features, More Plasma Wayland Fixes Too
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with another great weekly recap of all the interesting changes coming together in the KDE desktop space...
Wine 7.13 Converts Its USB Driver To PE Format, Brings Theming Improvements
Wine 7.13 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...
Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 Released With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Support
While AMD is normally fairly good at promptly supporting major new enterprise Linux distribution releases from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical (Ubuntu), this time around with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it's taken just shy of three months since the official release for them to formally release a new packaged driver supporting it...
Two Months After Being Merged, Intel In-Field Scan Marked "Broken" For Linux 5.19
While there are many shiny new features coming in this next kernel version, the Linux 5.19 cycle hasn't been particularly smooth for Intel. In addition to now needing to deal with their GuC firmare breakage for Alder Lake P "ASAP", their brand new In-Field Scan (IFS) driver set to premiere in Linux 5.19 has been marked as "broken" after it was determined its exposed interface may need some alterations...
Booting Linux On A Modern AMD Ryzen 6000 Series Laptop / ThinkPad X13 Gen3
Earlier this week Linux security researcher Matthew Garrett shared that Lenovo's newer AMD Rembrandt laptops with Microsoft's Pluton security co-processor would not boot Linux by default. The issue stems from the third-party UEFI certificate not being enabled by default and it turns out is something Microsoft is seemingly now enforcing. Fortunately, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U on the way and so was now able to test this experience under Linux.
Booting Linux On A Modern AMD Ryzen 6000 Series Laptop / ThinkPad X13 Gen3
Earlier this week Linux security researcher Matthew Garrett shared that Lenovo's newer AMD Rembrandt laptops with Microsoft's Pluton security co-processor would not boot Linux by default. The issue stems from the third-party UEFI certificate not being enabled by default and it turns out is something Microsoft is seemingly now enforcing. Fortunately, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U on the way and so was now able to test this experience under Linux.