Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 11 min ago
Asahi Gallium3D Driver Enables Mesa Shader Disk Cache Support
A number of patches were merged this week to Mesa 23.1 around the Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver that continues progressing on open-source OpenGL support for Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics...
AMD Makes Progress On Their RDNA3 User-Mode Queues For Linux Driver
Just prior to Christmas there was a "request for comments" (RFC) patch series sent out working on RDNA3 user-mode queue support for their AMDGPU kernel driver. That work has now advanced post-RFC with an updated patch series having been sent out on Friday...
NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Adds GPL Group Handles To Help VKD3D-Proton DXR
NVIDIA on Friday released the v525.47.07 Linux driver beta with their latest Vulkan driver enhancements along with the NVIDIA 528.50 driver on the Windows side...
Servo Web Engine Publishes Its 2023 Roadmap
Back in 2020 Mozilla moved Servo to the Linux Foundation for the Rust-written web engine after it laid off the Servo developers. Servo development is now community/volunteer-driven and a road-map was published yesterday outlining some of their hopes for this calendar year...
More Feature Work Begins On KDE Plasma 6.0 As Plasma 5.27 Nears Release
KDE Plasma 5.27 is due for release on Valentine's Day (14 February) as what will also be the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series. With the imminent 5.27 release, more feature work on Plasma 6.0 has been getting underway...
memtest86+ 6.10 Released With UEFI Secure Boot Signing, Headless EFI
Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as the first major update to this bootable, open-source RAM testing software in nearly a decade. The memtest86+ 6.0 release marked a rewrite of the software while out today is the first update to that widely-used RAM testing software...
Proton 7.0-6 Released With More Windows Games Playable On Linux
Valve has just published Proton 7.0-6 as the newest version of this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Proton 7.0-6 had been available in testing and release candidate form since the end of last year while now has been promoted to stable...
Intel TPMI Linux Driver Published To Enhance Power Management Handling
Intel engineers this week published new Linux open-source driver code for TPMI, the Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface. Intel TPMI for seemingly future processors will allow for more streamlined power management handling and other enhancements over the way the Intel power management drivers currently function...
CentOS Stream & Clear Linux Achieve Greater Performance On 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids, EPYC Genoa
As part of other ongoing performance tests of Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" testing, I was curious to see how the more well-tuned Linux distributions are performing with the flagship Xeon Platinum 8490H processors relative to the common Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are those benchmark numbers alongside AMD's flagship Genoa server platform with two EPYC 9654 processors.
Proposed Linux Patch Would Allow Disabling CPU Security Mitigations At Build-Time
A proposed Linux kernel patch would provide a new Kconfig build time option of "CONFIG_DEFAULT_CPU_MITIGATIONS_OFF" to build an insecure kernel if wanting to avoid the growing list of CPU security mitigations within the kernel and their associated performance overhead...
Many Small Updates To The Radeon RX 7000 Series / AMD RDNA3 Support Land In Mesa
For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support...
OpenMPI 5.0 Ready To Say "Goodbye" To 32-Bit Support
The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release...
Red Hat's Display/HDR Hackfest Scheduled For April
As mentioned a few weeks back, Red Hat has been working to arrange a developer "hackfest" to further work out plans and development around HDR display support on the Linux desktop. They are aiming to bring together graphics driver developers, desktop developers, and other Linux stakeholders -- including possibly the likes of Valve -- to work out planning of high dynamic range monitor support over the next year or two for the Linux desktop. That Red Hat HDR hackfest has now been organized to happen in late April...
Dbus-Broker 33 Released With Few Changes
A half-year has passed already since Dbus-Broker 32 was released for this drop-in replacement to the reference D-Bus implementation that is focused on providing better performance and reliability. Today that's been succeeded by Dbus-Broker 33 as a relatively minor update to this software from the BUS1 project...
Wine 8.1 Released - Now Exposed As "Windows 10" For New Prefixes
Following the release of Wine 8.0 stable from a week and a half ago, Wine 8.1 is out today as the first bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. These Wine 8.x development snapshots will then culminate with the release of Wine 9.0 next year...
Work Revived On Parallel CPU Bring-Up To Boot Linux Faster On Large Systems/Servers
Originally posted two years ago were Linux kernel patches for bringing up of CPU cores in parallel to speed-up the Linux boot process. With the growing core counts of servers and even high-end desktops / HEDT platforms, this parallel bring-up can lead to significant time savings at boot. The work, unfortunately, stalled but has now been revised...
systemd 253-rc2 Released With More Changes To This System & Service Manager
Following last month's release of systemd 253-rc1 with many new features and changes in tow, out today is a second release candidate and is piling yet more features into this Linux system and service manager...
Experimenting Underway To Support Mesa Vulkan Drivers Written In Rust
While there is Rusticl as the first Rust language code within Mesa as a modern OpenCL implementation in Gallium3D, for possible future driver efforts there is some initial exploratory work being done around coming up with bindings to support writing of Vulkan drivers with Rust...
GNU Debugger Adds Support For Debugging AMD ROCm / HIP Code
The GNU Debugger "GDB" has landed initial support for being able to debug AMDGPU/ROCm platform code with a preliminary focus on HIP programs...
RPM Lands Support For x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels
The RPM package manager code has added support for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels that allow for newer baseline targets than conventional x86_64. This support in RPM allows for installing RPMs built for newer feature levels on capable hardware...
