Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 8 min ago
AMD Zen 4 AVX-512 Performance Analysis On The Ryzen 9 7950X
While much of AMD's briefings for the Ryzen 7000 desktop series were focused on gaming and other consumer workloads, one of the most exciting aspects for me with the Ryzen 7000 series is AMD now supporting AVX-512. But rather going for a 512-bit FPU data path and the possibility of reduced clock frequencies and power/thermal concerns, they employed a 256-bit "double pumping" strategy. When getting the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in the lab, exploring the AMD Zen 4 AVX-512 performance was one of the areas I was most excited to evaluate. From the benchmarks about to be shown, AMD's initial AVX-512 implementation is promising and has me all the more excited for finding it on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors.
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X / 7950X Linux Gaming Performance
Today the review embargo expires on the AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. Over the past two weeks I have been testing the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors as the initial review samples (I should be receiving the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X CPUs this week, AMD is staggering their review seeding of the different models). In this article to get things started are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks with the Ryzen 9 7900X/7950X compared to an assortment of other AMD and Intel systems.
Experimental Patch Gets The ARM64 Linux Kernel Compiling Under macOS
Nick Desaulniers with Google who has been known for his contributions around compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang has recently taken to the challenge of being able to compile the Linux kernel under macOS...
A 20 Year Old Chipset Workaround Has Been Hurting Modern AMD Linux Systems
AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a ~20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems...
Rusticl Support For AMD RadeonSI Driver Being Worked On
Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D as a newer and modern-focused CL alternative to the existing "Clover" code may soon see mainline support for working with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting modern AMD graphics processors...
Linux 6.0-rc7 Released - Linux 6.0 Will Hopefully Release Next Sunday
Last week Linux 6.0-rc6 came in tiny due to many of the upstream kernel developers having been in Dublin for LPC 2022 and other events. Linus Torvalds had been fearing an uptick in activity this week as a result, but he's been pleasantly surprised that Linux 6.0-rc7 remains on the lighter side...
Btrfs Async Buffered Writes Slated For Linux 6.1 - 2x Throughput Improvement
Queued up in the Btrfs for-next Git repository ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window is support for async buffered writes that can offer a more than two times throughput improvement...
Archinstall 2.5.1 Released With A Number Of Fixes For The Arch Linux Installer
Over the past year and a half of being on the Arch Linux install media, archinstall has made it dramatically quicker and easier to get this popular Linux distribution installed. Out today is Archinstall 2.5.1 with a number of fixes and other changes for this easy-to-use Arch Linux installer...
New Car & Flight Controller HID Drivers Ready To Race With Linux 6.1
Two new HID drivers are set to premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window for car and flight simulators...
GNOME 43.1 To Support Wayland On The AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260
Earlier this year AMD-Xilinx announced a Linux-powered robotics starter kit making use of Xilinx's Kria KR26 SOM featuring a Zynq Ultrascale+ with four Cortex-A53 cores and Mali graphics. While robotics focused, there is a DisplayPort output and over the summer Canonical has been working to get this board playing nicely with a Wayland-powered GNOME desktop...
Generic EFI Compressed Boot Support Prepped Ahead Of Linux 6.1
Linux kernel developer Ard Biesheuvel has been working on a patch series implementing EFI generic compressed boot support that can be easily used by architectures like AArch64, LoongArch, and RISC-V...
Intel Habana Labs AI Driver Updates Readied For Linux 6.1
This week saw the Intel Habana Labs AI accelerator driver updates submitted to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.1 merge window...
OpenJDK Java's Native Wayland Support Progressing
OpenJDK/Java has been making progress on implementing native "pure" Wayland toolkit integration not dependent upon X.Org/X11 or XWayland for rendering of Java GUI applications...
Rust-Written Apple DRM Linux Kernel Driver Renders First Cube
The very early stage Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver being written in the Rust programming language to support the Apple M1/M2 graphics processor achieved the milestone of being able to render a cube...
AMDGPU Gang Submit Sent In For Linux 6.1
On Friday AMD submitted a feature pull request to DRM-Next of some last minute changes they would like to see as part of the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel...
A Lot Of Bug Fixing - Including For Wayland - Heading Into KDE Plasma 5.26
Following last week's release of KDE Plasma 5.26 beta, KDE developers have turned their focus to bug-fixing ahead of next month's stable release...
AMD RDNA3 GPUs Can Have A Lot More Vector Registers Than RDNA2
A code commit that was merged to LLVM's AMDGPU shader compiler back-end on Friday afternoon confirms that GFX11/RDNA3 GPUs can have a lot more vector registers than prior GFX10 (RDNA / RDNA2) GPUs...
Wine 7.18 Released With Unicode 15.0 Support, 20 Bug Fixes
Wine 7.18 has been popped this Friday afternoon as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source program to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...
Apple M2 Support Added To Upstream LLVM Along With The A15, A16
Upstream LLVM has added the compiler CPU targets for the Apple M2, A15, and A16 SoCs...
Linux NTFS Driver Preparing "nocase" Case-Insensitive Mount Option
The NTFS3 kernel driver providing read/write Microsoft NTFS file-system support on Linux, thanks to the code being open-sourced by Paragon Software, continues to see new improvements...
