Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 1 min ago
Sound Open Firmware 2.11 Adds AMD ACP 7.0 Strix Point & Intel Panther Lake Support
Sound Open Firmware 2.11 is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware infrastructure and SDK project backed by Intel, AMD, and other IHVs/ISVs. With SOF 2.11 comes support for new hardware from both AMD and Intel...
Upstream Linux 6.12 Makes It Easier To Build A Debug Kernel For Arch Linux
The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel introduced the ability to easily produce a Pacman kernel package for Arch Linux with the new "make pacman-pkg" target. With Linux 6.12 new additions to the Kbuild code make it easy to also produce a debug kernel build for Arch Linux systems...
Blumenkrantz Seeks Clear Policy How Wayland Protocol Changes Can Be Rejected
As part of his new hope for helping to accelerate Wayland protocol development, Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve proposed an "experimental" protocol development area within Wayland-Protocols. He's also laid out a proposal for seeking to solidify the means by which suggested protocol changes can be rejected...
BusyBox 1.37 Adds "getfattr" Along With Other Improvements
BusyBox 1.37 has been released as the first feature release in one and a half years for this "Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux" systems. With BusyBox 1.37 comes some new options, many fixes, and other enhancements...
Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported "severe" unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score... The embargo has now lifted with the details on this nasty issue...
Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC Power Efficiency / Performance-Per-Watt Benchmarks
Earlier this week in the launch-day Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids review/benchmarks I unfortunately wasn't able to provide any CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt benchmarks due a Linux kernel issue and the minimal time ahead of launch for testing. I've now repeated the Xeon 6980P benchmarking on the Linux 6.8 kernel of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with power monitoring working and have those power efficiency numbers to share today for how Granite Rapids compares to prior Emerald Rapids / Sapphire Rapids / Ice Lake and against the current AMD EPYC Bergamo/Genoa(X) competition.
PostgreSQL 17 Released With AVX-512 Optimization & Up To 2x Better Write Throughput
PostgreSQL 17 is out today as the newest annual feature release to this widely-used SQL database server. Notable with PostgreSQL 17 is having an AVX-512 optimized bit_count function along with several other heavy hitting performance optimizations...
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 2 Desktop Packages
Following the release of the COSMIC Alpha desktop in early August, System76 is closing out September by issuing the second alpha release of their Rust-based open-source desktop environment...
Linux 6.12 Brings 9p Network USB Gadget Driver To Ease Embedded Device Development
The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window along with the other areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman. A new USB driver is the 9p network gadget driver that has been in development for quite a while and aims to help ease embedded Linux device development...
RISC-V Wires Up More Kernel Features With Linux 6.12
The RISC-V architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle. More RISC-V CPU ISA extensions are being supported along with enabling some additional kernel features for this CPU architecture...
VirtIO Vsock Performance To Improve With Linux 6.12
The VirtIO Vsock guest/host communication interface using virtual sockets will see better performance with the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...
DXVK 2.4.1 Released With Many Improvements, More Robust Direct3D 8
It's been nearly three months since the last DXVK release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop Vulkan for Steam Play (Proton) / Wine. That changed today with Philip Rebohle having just released DXVK 2.4.1...
Vulkan 1.3.296 Released With VK_EXT_device_generated_commands
Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands...
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development...
ChipStar 1.2 Released For Compiling & Running HIP/CUDA On SPIR-V/OpenCL Hardware
ChipStar 1.2 has been released as the open-source software enabling HIP/CUDA programs to be compiled and run atop SPIR-V whether it be OpenCL or Vulkan drivers...
Intel Working To Improve Virtualization Handling For P/E-Core Hybrid CPUs
While Intel has been making steady progress around enhancing the Linux kernel handling for CPUs with a mix of P and E cores for proper task placement and power optimizations, one area that still is less than desirable for these hybrid Intel Core processors is around virtualization. But Intel engineers are now actively working on improving the Linux virtualization infrastructure for being able to convey the P/E core differences among vCPUs so that the guest VMs can better behave in such environments...
Rust In Linux 6.12 Prepares For Rust Binder, Supports Sanitizers & CPU Mitigations
Miguel Ojeda has submitted all of the Rust toolchain and infrastructure changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...
Cloudflare Goes With AMD EPYC Genoa-X For Their Next-Gen Servers
Cloudflare's always-interesting technical blog laid out their details today concerning their next-gen "12th Generation" in-house servers that will be powering their vast web infrastructure. With these next-gen Cloudflare servers they are going with AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X processors...
Mesa 24.3 Finishes The Years Long Effort To Phase Out The Old GLSL IR Linker
Timothy Arceri with the Valve Linux graphics team has merged the code for Mesa GLSL to convert to NIR at compile-time and in turn dropping the old GLSL IR linker with this being a multi-year effort now wrapped up for Mesa 24.3...
Linux 6.12 NFS Adds LOCALIO Protocol For "Extreme" Performance Boost
The Network File System (NFS) changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.12 development cycle. Notable this time with NFS is adding LOCALIO protocol extension support that can lead to fairly "extreme" performance improvements in scenarios where the NFS client and server are on the same host...