
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 39 sec ago
FSF Adopts A Board Member Agreement, Code of Ethics For Board Members
Following the Richard Stallman situation, board members leaving, projects seeking greater transparency from the FSF, and other issues within the Free Software Foundation the past two years, the FSF has finally adopted a new governance framework for board members...
Latest Linux 5.17 Graphics Drivers: "Every Single Patchset In This PR Is Awesome"
Already a lot of DRM display/graphics driver changes have been queued into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window while now is the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next material. DRM-Misc maintainer Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE commented, "every single patchset in this [pull request] is awesome."..
Fedora & Debian Developers Look At Packaging ROCm For Easier Radeon GPU Computing Experience
When it comes to the Radeon ROCm GPU software support AMD only officially supports it on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, RHEL / CentOS, and Ubuntu LTS releases. But Arch Linux already makes it fairly easy to deploy with their third-party packages and now Fedora and Debian have developers also eyeing possible packaging of the Radeon Open eCosystem software for more easily deploying on those distributions...
AMD Launches The Accelerator Cloud To Try Out EPYC CPUs, Instinct GPUs + ROCm
AMD has made public the AMD Accelerator Cloud. No, they aren't getting into the cloud game per se, but rather allowing a place for customers to try out new EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators running with the latest ROCm software components...
CentOS Stream 9 Improves Performance For Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC
Earlier this month marked the general availability of CentOS Stream 9 as the bleeding-edge of Red hat Enterprise Linux 9 development. Since then I've been running benchmarks of CentOS Stream 9 and with modern hardware it's been offering some nice performance upgrades over CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8 especially with modern hardware platforms like Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" servers. Here are benchmarks of CentOS Stream8, CentOS Stream 9, Intel's Clear Linux, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 on both AMD and Intel servers.
An Optimization Proposed For GNOME + NVIDIA On High Refresh Rate Displays
GNOME-focused Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical has proposed an optimization that could help with running NVIDIA graphics on high refresh rate displays...
Sparse Mapping Improvements Help Radeon RADV Driver With Some Games
Adding to the growing list of Mesa 22.0 features are more Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements to help with gaming performance...
Intel Enabling Resizable BAR To Work With I/O Virtualization On Linux
Resizable BAR support (also known as ReBAR / AMD Smart Access Memory) has been popular with gamers for supported configurations for being able to improve GPU performance. Intel is now working on enabling the Linux kernel to support Resizable BAR when in the context of I/O Virtualization...
PAPPL 1.1 Open-Source Printer Framework Adds WiFi Configuration, IPP-USB
While CUPS 2.4 was recently released as the first big update in years and since OpenPrinting took over upstream development, CUPS founder Michael Sweet continues concurrently developing PAPPL as a modern, open-source printer appication framework. Wednesday marked the release of PAPPL 1.1...
Glibc 2.35 Bringing Improved Huge Pages Handling, New Tunable
Glibc 2.35 is introducing the new tunable glibc.malloc.hugetlb that can help with improving system performance for some workloads making use of this tunable, depending upon your kernel's hugepages configuration...
Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance For Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Valve yesterday introduced experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an alternative to the long-standing OpenGL path for running CS:GO on Linux. Curious about the performance implications of CS:GO with Vulkan, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
Intel CM Compiler Updated For New Platforms, Including Ponte Vecchio "XT"
Intel's CM Compiler for their "C for Metal" programming language has been updated for various new GPU targets, including not only Xe HPC "Ponte Vecchio" but also a Ponte Vecchio XT variant...
X.Org Server 21.1.2 Released With Security Fixes, Back To Pretending All Displays Are 96 DPI
Following yesterday's disclosure of four new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities that could lead to local privilege escalation, X.Org Server 21.1.2 is now available with those security fixes plus other changes...
Intel Posts "GSC" Linux Driver To Enable HDCP Media Protection For Discrete GPUs
Intel Linux engineers have posted a new set of patches enabling the Graphics Security Controller "GSC" support under Linux as a chassis controller for discrete graphics cards...
The End-Of-Year 2021 State Of Linux On Apple's M1 SoC
The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021...
Intel Raptor Lake S Graphics Ready For Linux 5.17, Alder Lake P Now Considered Stable
Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag...
Binary Blobs Continue To Prove Challenging For POWER10 Plus Very Expensive Motherboards
While POWER CPUs have generally been well received by the free software community for being open-source friendly especially with the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM's latest-generation POWER10 processors are continuing to be an upset...
QEMU 6.2 Released With Intel SGX VM Support, Apple Silicon Compatible For macOS Hosts
QEMU 6.2 is now officially available as the newest feature release for this widely used key open-source component to the Linux virtualization stack...
Microsoft To Make Windows Terminal The Default Choice On Windows 11
Back in early 2019 Microsoft announced Windows Terminal as a new terminal for Windows that seemed rather Linux-inspired and supported tabs and other modern functionality. Beginning in 2022, Microsoft will make Windows Terminal their default terminal program on Windows 11...
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Adds Experimental Vulkan Support
Following recent Steam database entries suggesting as much, Valve this evening formally pushed out a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive build introducing initial Vulkan API rendering support...