
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 17 min ago
Google Makes Public Their Open-Source PSP Security Protocol
Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production...
Upgraded Linux-Friendly Framework Laptop Shifts To Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake"
The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available...
Intel Announces SYCLomatic For Open-Source Conversion Of CUDA Code To C++ SYCL
Intel today has lifted the embargo on SYCLomatic, their new open-source tool to help migrate code-bases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA so they can be re-purposed to target C++ and SYCL -- thereby being able to leverage Intel's graphics processors and jiving with their oneAPI goals...
KDE Plasma 5.25 Beta Released With Many Improvements, Wayland Support Maturing
The KDE development community today announced the release of the Plasma 5.25 beta...
Intel's Clear Linux Outpacing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 36 & Other H1'2022 Distros
Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Fedora 36 among other recent OS updates, it's time for a fresh look at how various Linux distributions are performing. This Linux benchmarking bout is looking at the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P "Ice Lake" performance across Arch Linux, Debian, openSUSE, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Intel's Clear Linux.
RADV Vulkan Driver Continues At Full-Speed Preparing For RDNA3/GFX11 GPUs
Last week I wrote about how well known Mesa developer Samuel Pitoiset who is employed by Valve already started working on GFX11 (RDNA3) support for RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa that isn't officially supported by AMD but remains more popular than their own "AMDVLK" driver. More GFX11/RDNA3 preparation work remains ongoing and it's looking like if trends continue this open-source driver could be ready for RDNA3 graphics cards in time for launch...
POCL 3.0-RC1 Released For OpenCL 3.0 Implemented On CPUs
POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support...
MGLRU Revved Once More For Promising Linux Performance Improvements
Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) remains a very promising effort for enhancing Linux system performance and particularly about providing a superior experience when the Linux kernel is dealing with system memory pressure. MGLRU v11 was posted this week while we await to see if it will be mainlined come the v5.19 merge window...
Linux FAT File Creation/Birth Time Reporting, Proposal For Statx I/O Alignment Info
Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel...
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 GA Now Officially Available
Last week Red Hat announced at the Red Hat Summit that RHEL9 would be reach GA in the coming weeks while today it officially crossed that threshold...
Mesa 22.1 Released With Many Vulkan Improvements, Kopper For Zink, Imagination Driver
Mesa 22.1 is out today as the newest, quarterly feature update to the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack that also supports video acceleration and other GPU features on the Linux desktop...
Intel oneAPI Toolkits 2022.2 Released With ISPCRT, More Arc Graphics Preparations
Intel today published their latest update (v2022.2) to the oneAPI Toolkits, their collection of open-source software components for empowering modern workloads across the growing world of CPUs/GPUs/XPUs...
Intel Linux Driver Wiring Up New "vRAM Self Refresh" Feature For Arc Graphics Cards
With the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle appearing to be the point at which Intel's DG2/Alchemist Linux graphics driver support is settling down and may end up being the base version requirement for their forthcoming discrete graphics cards, we are seeing other non-core feature work happen for these Arc Graphics products. A new feature we've only seen mentioned today for the first time by Intel is "vRAM SR", short for vRAM Self-Refresh...
AMD Launches Xilinx + Linux Powered Robotics Starter Kit
AMD on Tuesday released the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit featuring a Xilinx Kria K26 System-on-Module and tailoring it for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communication/control use-cases while running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...
VirtualBox On Linux Affected By Security Vulnerability Leaking Host Data To Guests
Security researcher Jason Donenfeld who is known for leading the development of the WireGuard open-source software has outlined a new security vulnerability affecting the Oracle VM VirtualBox software...
Arch Linux Installer Preparing FIDO2 Support For Handling Disk Encryption
The Arch Linux installer "Archinstall" that makes it simple to quickly and easily get this popular distribution installed has prepared a new release candidate where they are introducing FIDO2 support...
Linux Kernel Patches Posted For USB Support With Realtek RTW88 WiFi Driver
Back in 2019 Realtek contributed the open-source "RTW88" WiFi driver to the Linux kernel for supporting their newer wireless chipsets on Linux. To date the mainline driver has just supported their PCI-based WiFi adapters while a patch series now out for review extends the driver to supporting their newer USB-specific chipsets...
Intel Releases SVT-AV1 v1.1 As It Continues Advancing Open-Source AV1 Encoding
It was just shy of one month ago that Intel and AOMedia released SVT-AV1 v1.0 and now Intel engineers have released SVT-AV1 v1.1 as the newest feature update to this CPU-based, open-source AV1 video encoder...
Lars Knoll Leaving The Qt Company, Starting New Chapter Outside Qt
After 25 years being heavily involved in the Qt toolkit development, Lars Knoll announced today he is leaving The Qt Company where he currently serves as CTO and also largely departing from active work within the Qt community to "try out something else" moving forward...
Valve's Gamescope Compositor Merges NVIDIA Image Scaling Support
Valve's Vulkan-powered Gamescope Wayland compositor has merged support for NVIDIA Image Scaling...