
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 42 min ago
Linux 5.17 Will Have An Important Intel P-State Update For Alder Lake Mobile CPUs
Linux 5.17 will have a seemingly important fix for upcoming Intel Alder Lake mobile processors. Without this change/fix, you might not see the advertised one-core turbo frequencies being met for your processor depending upon the system and whether tuning your EPP...
Intel's IWD Wireless Daemon Preparing WiFi DPP Support (Wi-Fi Easy Connect)
Intel's open-source IWD modern wireless daemon that works with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and their own ConnMan has been preparing support for WiFi Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP)...
IO_uring Network Zero-Copy Transmit Continues Looking Great For Linux
Sent out last month were an early set of patches working on IO_uring zero-copy send support for the networking subsystem. This work to boost the throughput potential has evolved now into a second revision of the patches and continues looking very promising...
GIMP 2.10.30 Released With Better Adobe PSD Support, Improved Portals Integration
GIMP 3.0 still isn't ready for release and won't be in 2021 but the GIMP 2.10.30 release is out today in time for working on your Christmas photos or holiday cards...
AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U - Windows vs. Linux Performance
With the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 powered by the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U prior to blowing the default Microsoft Windows installation on the device I ran some benchmarks for seeing how the performance stacks up against various Linux distributions. Going up against Windows 11 on this AMD Zen 3 laptop were Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Arch Linux.
Linux 5.17 Will Add Ethernet Support For AMD Yellow Carp (Rembrandt)
AMD's Yellow Carp enablement has been going back to early summer for this next-generation APU that is better known as Rembrandt for the Ryzen 6000 mobile series. While there has already been the graphics support to land, sensor support, and various other functionality, only coming now with the next kernel cycle will be Ethernet support...
Raspberry Pi "V3DV" Vulkan Driver Now Works On Android
The open-source Broadcom "V3DV" Vulkan driver within Mesa that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi can now run on Android...
Zstd 1.5.1 Released With Even More Performance Improvements
Zstandard 1.5.1 is now available as the latest release of this widely-used data compression algorithm backed by Facebook that delivers on great performance. With the new release, performance is even better...
Mold 1.0 Released As A Modern High-Speed Linker Alternative To GNU Gold, LLVM LLD
Mold 1.0 is a production-ready, high-speed linker alternative to GNU's Gold or LLVM's LLD that currently is supported on Linux systems and written by the original LLD author...
LLVM's HIPSPV Coming Together For AMD HIP To SPIR-V For OpenCL Execution
Last week I wrote about the interesting HIPSPV back-end for LLVM to take AMD HIP code -- which generally starts off as NVIDIA CUDA code to begin with before the HIP-ification -- and to be able to output that from the LLVM compiler stack as the SPIR-V intermediate representation used across OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. The goal with this is to be able to take AMD HIP code and ultimately be able to run it on Intel graphics processors but potentially other vendors/drivers too given the vendor-neutral SPIR-V. More of that HIPSPV work is now hitting mainline LLVM...
Systemd 250 Piles On Yet More Features With New Release Candidate
It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow...
WXRD Is A New Wayland Compositor Focused On XR/VR Use-Cases
For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases...
Intel i9-12900K Alder Lake Linux Performance In Different P/E Core Configurations
One of the much requested Linux benchmarks since the debut of Intel Alder Lake last month has been for seeing the Core i9 12900K in different core configurations with its mix of P and E cores. Now that the Linux kernel activity has begun settling down around Alder Lake, here are those benchmarks for reference purposes with toggling Hyper Threading and different P and E core counts enabled.
Vulkan 1.2.203 Released With Many Documentation Updates, New Extensions
Vulkan 1.2.203 is out with many fixes/updates to the specification documentation to end out the year as well as introducing three new extensions...
helloSystem 0.7 Released With Big Improvements For This Leading Desktop BSD OS
For those with extra time around the end-of-year holidays, helloSystem 0.7 is now available as the newest update to this leading BSD-based desktop operating system that is inspired by Apple macOS but powered by FreeBSD...
AVX-Optimized SM3 Hashing For The Linux Kernel Nets Up To 38% Improvement
An Alibaba engineer is proposing a standalone SM3 crypto library within the Linux kernel and with optimizations for x86_64 AVX usage nets up to a 38% performance improvement for this crypto algorithm...
OpenBLAS 0.3.19 Released With Alder Lake & Sapphire Rapids Detection
OpenBLAS as the popular, open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library implementation posted its newest release on Sunday...
Linux 5.16-rc6 Kernel Released
Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.16 for testing this Christmas week...
AMD P-State CPU Frequency Control Driver Revised A 6th Time
Making a Sunday debut are the amd-pstate v6 patches as the latest iteration of this work for improving the AMD CPU frequency control behavior on Linux for more optimized power efficiency with modern Zen 2 / Zen 3 series (and future) processors...
Linux 5.17 Bringing New Driver For Some NZXT Lighting/Fan Controls & Monitoring
Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products...