Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago
Krita 5.1 Released With JPEG-XL Support, XSIMD For Better Paint Performance
Krita 5.1 is out today as the newest evolutionary update to this leading open-source, cross-platform digital painting program...
MGLRU Patches Picked Up By Andrew Morton's "mm-unstable" Branch Ahead Of Linux 6.1
Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" is one of the most exciting low-level kernel innovations in recent time and is already used by Google's Chrome OS and Android as well as having proven itself in various other downstream kernel builds. MGLRU is planned for upstreaming in Linux 6.1 and in preparation for that, Andrew Morton has now queued those patches into his "mm-unstable" branch for further vetting...
NTFS3 File-System Driver Sees Late Refactoring For Linux 6.0
NTFS3 as the modern Linux kernel read/write file-system driver for NTFS that was open-sourced by Paragon Software is seeing some late code refactoring and fixes for Linux 6.0...
VEIKK VK1200 Drawing Tablet With 11.6-inch 1080p Display Works On Linux For ~$169
VEIKK is a company I previously hadn't heard of that offers a range of pen displays and drawing tablets for digital artists. At first when they reached out around reviewing one of their drawing tablets, I questioned their Linux support but it turns out their graphics tablets do work across all major platforms. I've been trying out the VEIKK VK1200 the past few weeks and it's been working out decent as a 11.6-inch drawing monitor for just $169 USD.
Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board
Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer...
AMD PMF Driver Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.1 Later This Year
While Linux 6.0 won't be out for another month and a half, on deck already for Linux 6.1 is the AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver being queued into platform-drivers-x86.git...
Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller Support Being Worked On For Linux
Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller is intended for gamers with limited mobility and is intended as a control hub to making gaming more accessible. Linux support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller is being worked on...
RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Begins Landing Graphics Pipeline Library Support
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has started seeing support land for VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library thanks to the work of one of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers...
NVIDIA JetPack 5.0.2 Released With Production Support For AGX Orin
NVIDIA this week published JetPack 5.0.2 as their updated development environment and SDK for their Arm-powered Jetson modules and developer kits...
Linux Patch Sparks Differing Views Over External Monitor Handling With iGPU vs. dGPU
Canonical kernel engineer Kai-Heng Feng posted a patch on Tuesday for capable laptops to switch their external monitor connections to be routed through a laptop's discrete GPU rather than the integrated GPU. With select laptops this can be done with an ACPI call but raises questions among upstream developers rather this change is indeed desirable...
VFX & Animation Studios Urged To Upgrade To RHEL 9 Or Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux 9
VFX Reference Platform as a standards body that aims to help standardize software platforms in the realm of digital content creation (DCC) has published a detailed report for studios to consider in choosing their next Linux platform. Their new recommendations for visual effects and animation studios about moving to newer Linux distributions over the next year -- especially with many still relying on CentOS 7 -- is for moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 otherwise one of the downstreams like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Close behind in their recommendations and as a longer-term objective is also tossing some support behind Ubuntu Linux...
Proton 7.0-4 Released For Steam Play With Many Game Fixes, More Playable Titles
Valve has just released Proton 7.0-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying many Windows games on Linux with great success for the Linux desktop, the Steam Deck, and more...
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Memory Scaling Benchmarks On Linux
For those weighing whether to pursue the full eight memory channel configuration for the new Ryzen Threadripper 5000 series or starting out with just four or six memory modules, here are some reference benchmarks across four, six, and eight memory channels with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX 24-core processor while running Ubuntu Linux.
Microsoft + Canonical Announce Native .NET 6 For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers...
AMD CPU Microcode Loading On Linux Being Fixed Up To Be Per-Thread
Up to this point loading updated CPU microcode on AMD processors under Linux has checked just to ensure every physical CPU core was loaded with the new microcode but not sibling threads for SMT processors. While logically that makes sense, it turns out some AMD microcode updates do carry out per-thread modifications that means the microcode updating needs to be carried out on every thread. A Linux fix is on its way to the kernel to adjust that behavior...
NVIDIA Ampere GA103 Support For Nouveau Being Sent In For Linux 6.0
As part of today's "drm-misc-fixes" pull request, NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU support is set to be added to the Nouveau DRM driver with Linux 6.0...
Real-Time "PREEMPT_RT" Work Down To Just 50 Patches Atop Linux 6.0-rc1
Following Sunday's release of Linux 6.0-rc1, yesterday saw the release of 6.0-rc1-rt1 as the set of patches for providing real-time kernel support atop the upstream code-base. There is just roughly 50 patches to go until the PREEMPT_RT functionality is mainlined!..
OpenSUSE Developers Continue Discussing x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels
Ahead of the upcoming openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), whether to raise the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level required by the Linux OS continues to be evaluated and what options there are for making use of newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without necessarily forcing tightened CPU requirements / eliminating old hardware support...
Lenovo Yoga C630 Snapdragon Laptop Seeing Fresh Linux Improvements
When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements...
LZ4 v1.9.4 Achieves 20~70% Speedups For Some CPUs & Configurations
LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm...
