
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 52 min ago
Linux 5.17 Adds Support For "The First Usable, Low-Cost RISC-V Platform"
In addition to the prompt support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, another exciting milestone for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing mainline support for the StarFive JH7100, which has been trying to make its debut as the first usable and low-cost RISC-V platform...
GCC 12 Shifting To Stage 4 Development - No Sign Of AMD Zen 4 Support
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler...
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Sees Timely Support With The Mainline Linux 5.17 Kernel
Qualcomm only announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and X65 platforms at the end of November but already they have managed to provide timely mainline support for these latest high-end SoCs. This is great to see compared to the days of slow to materialize mainline support for new Arm SoCs, which still persists among some vendors with either belated mainline support or only focusing on vendor downstream kernels. The big batch of Arm SoC/platform changes have landed for Linux 5.17...
One-Line Patch To Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Can Help Modern Games By A Few Percent
A patch merged into Mesa 22.0 on Tuesday for Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is helping bump up the perforrmance in modern games...
CXL Memory Hotplug Support Ready To Plug Into Linux 5.17
Over the past two years work has been ramping up a lot on Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel and with the in-development Linux 5.17 there is more feature code landing...
GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Alpha With Exciting Improvements
The GNOME Shell and Mutter have checked in their new development releases for the imminent GNOME 42 Alpha milestone...
Linux 5.17: Quicker Mount Times For XFS, Few New Features For EXT4
In addition to the Btrfs updates, the EXT4 and XFS file-system maintainers submitted their feature changes already for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel...
BOLT Merged Into LLVM To Optimize Binaries For Faster Performance
Merged into LLVM's mono repository minutes ago was BOLT! This is the Facebook-developed tool for optimizing the layout of binaries in the name of delivering greater performance. Facebook (now Meta) already has been using BOLT internally to great success with production workloads, it's continued advancing in the public as open-source for a while, and is now upstream in LLVM for fostering its future development...
Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda Installer Shifting To A Web Based UI
The Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda installer for carrying out new operating system installs is in the early stages of a major rewrite to its user-interface and moving forward will be web-based...
PCIe 6.0 Specification Released With 64 GT/s Transfer Speeds
While PCIe 5.0 adoption is only in its infancy, the PCI-SIG today announced the PCIe 6.0 specification...
NVIDIA 510.39.01 Linux Beta Brings Vulkan Dynamic Rendering, AV1 VDPAU Decode & More
In addition to announcing the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card this morning, NVIDIA has published their first public beta of the new NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series...
Radeon RADV Optimizations In Mesa 22.0 Improve PRIME/Hybrid GPU Performance
While RADV is not AMD's official Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems, for Mesa 22.0 they have contributed a set of optimizations to improve the "DRI_PRIME" performance for hybrid GPU setups such as the growing number of AMD powered notebooks with discrete graphics...
DXVK 1.9.3 Released With NVIDIA DLSS Integration, Many Game Fixes
DXVK 1.9.3 is out as its first release of 2022 for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for allowing Windows games to enjoy good performance when running atop Linux via Valve's Steam Play...
Intel Lands 20~40% Performance Optimization For Arc Graphics In Mesa 22.0
Intel's pixel pipeline optimization work focused on speeding up DG2/Alchemist graphics cards with their open-source graphics driver has managed to land in Mesa 22.0...
New AMD P-State Driver Headlines The Power Management Updates For Linux 5.17
The power management subsystem updates were sent out yesterday and already mainlined for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel. Most notable with the power management changes for this new version of the Linux kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver developed in cooperation with Valve for the Steam Deck but stands to help CPU/SoC power efficiency across Zen 2 and newer hardware...
Microsoft Lands D3D12 Compute Support In Mesa 22.0
Following Microsoft working on shader storage buffer object support for their Gallium3D D3D12 back-end within Mesa, they've been working on OpenGL compute and OpenGL ES 3.1 support for this controversial component to allow OpenGL/GLES/OpenCL to work atop Windows' Direct3D 12 drivers such as for Windows Subsystem for Linux...
Linux 5.17 Adds Sensor Monitoring Support To Many More ASUS Motherboards
The Linux 5.17 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates include the new NZXT driver, new drivers to greatly expand sensor coverage on modern ASUS desktop motherboards, temperature monitoring for next-gen AMD Zen processors, and more...
Firefox 96 Yields Less Load On The Main Thread, WebP Encoder For Canvas
Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser...
Btrfs Seeing Nice Performance Improvements For Linux 5.17
With the Btrfs file-system popularity ticking back up, that seems to be helping upstream enthusiasm and development efforts as with Linux 5.17 there is yet more exciting work...
Intel Announces New Leader Of Client Computing Group
Intel announced new leadership changes today as 2022 gets started for what is expected to be an eventful year at the company with Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake, and Intel Arc graphics ahead...