
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 44 min ago
Wayland 1.21 Released With New High Resolution Scroll Event
It's been over a half-year since the last Wayland update with the core code now largely mature, but out today is Wayland 1.21 with the new wl_pointer high-resolution scroll event as well as some smaller additions and fixes...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Has A Change On The Way For Systemd-OOMD Being Kill-Happy With Apps
This month Ubuntu developers have been trying to figure out how to best deal with systemd-oomd on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS killing applications like Firefox during high memory/swap use and that leading to a poor user experience when desktop users not being aware of the situation and suddenly finding their software killed...
Rust 1.62 Released With Faster Mutexes On Linux, Bare Metal x86_64 Target Promoted
Rust 1.62 is out today as the latest update to this popular systems programming language with a few notable changes...
OpenGL Celebrates Its 30th Birthday
It was on this day in 1992 that Silicon Graphics (SGI) released OpenGL to the world...
A Dream Come True: Running Coreboot On A Modern, Retail Desktop Motherboard
Over the many years of covering Coreboot (going back to when it was called LinuxBIOS!) on Phoronix the selection of supported motherboards has been rather unfortunate especially over the last decade. If wanting to run Coreboot on a system today it basically means running a Google Chromebook, using an outdated server motherboard or old Lenovo ThinkPad that has seen a Coreboot port, or out of reach to most individuals are various server motherboards that are reference platforms or board designs from hyperscalers. But over the past several months the folks at the 3mdeb consulting firm have carried out a terrific feat: porting their "Dasharo" downstream of Coreboot to a modern and readily available Intel desktop motherboard. I've been trying this out and it has worked out surprisingly well. Here are my experiences and benchmarks of Coreboot/Dasharo on this Intel Alder Lake motherboard.
Linux 5.20 Intel Graphics Driver Begins Wiring Up For Ponte Vecchio, Resume Speed Faster
Intel has sent in their latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes to DRM-Next of their i915 kernel graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.20. In addition to a lot of code churn still around DG2/Alchemist, the open-source Intel driver for Linux 5.20 is also making more preparations for Ponte Vecchio enablement...
Intel Continues Meteor Lake Preparations For Coreboot
Earlier this month Intel began committing Meteor Lake code to Coreboot for beginning to enable what will be the 14th Gen Core processors under this open-source system firmware solution used by Google Chromebooks and other use-cases. Intel engineers are ending out June with more Meteor Lake enablement code landing ahead of these processors expected to launch in 2023...
Raspberry Pi Pico W Launches For $6
The newest member of the Raspberry Pi family is the Pico W and will set you back $6...
Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
To this point Fedora out-of-the-box has been restricted to a filtered subset of Flathub packages when enabled via GNOME Software or GNOME Initial Setup. However, legal has now cleared Fedora for allowing unfiltered/unrestricted access to Flathub, allowing a far greater selection of Flatpaks to become available on Fedora Linux with the plan for this to begin with Fedora 37...
Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 Released - Still Based On Ubuntu 16.04, Adds Support For FM Radios
Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is out today as the newest Ubuntu mobile operating system update for smartphones from the folks at UBports that continues maintaining the code-base left by Canonical and now pushing ahead in their own direction...
Benchmarking The Linux Kernel With An "-O3" Optimized Build
Stemming from last weeks Linux kernel patches suggesting an -O3 experimental option for all CPU architectures and Linus Torvalds rather quickly shooting it down, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance when the kernel image is rebuilt with the -O3 optimization level rather than -O2.
AMD ROCm 5.2 Released With New rocWMMA Library
AMD has released ROCm 5.2 as the newest version of its open-source GPU compute stack...
Radeon Software For Linux 22.20 Driver Prepared With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, RHEL 9.0 Support
For consumer Radeon GPUs the "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver version has been on the 22.10 series since the end of March. For AMD Radeon PRO professional/workstation graphics the advertised "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise on Linux" driver is still the 21.Q4 driver from last December. AMD appears to be finally prepping to release the "22.20" packaged driver as the next feature release to this packaged AMD Linux driver stack for those not relying just on the upstream kernel and Mesa...
Microsoft's "Dzn" Vulkan-On-D3D12 Adds Working Pipeline Cache
The Microsoft Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa that allows for the Vulkan API to be implemented atop Direct3D 12 for benefit on Windows now has a working pipeline cache implementation...
LLVM 15.0 Planning For Early September Release - Important For RDNA3 Graphics Support
LLVM release manager Tom Stellard of Red Hat has laid out the planned LLVM/Clang 15.0 release schedule for this next major version of this open-source compiler stack...
Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress
Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux...
Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client
After what has felt like years of neglect and little progress in advancing this open-source mail/communications client, Thunderbird 102 is out today with some shiny new features and a lot of UI refinements...
AMD GPUOpen Working On A New "gpurt" Open-Source Project
AMD's GPUOpen team quietly setup a new GitHub repository for "gpurt", presumably a new ray-tracing related software effort...
Arm Cortex-X3 + Cortex-A715 Announced As Second-Gen Armv9 CPUs
Arm today announced their second-generation Armv9 CPU designs with the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715. Arm also refreshed the Cortex-A510 to allow for more cores and a power reduction...
Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance...