
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 2 min ago
RadeonSI Lands Another "Very Large" Optimization To Further Boost SPECViewPerf
In recent months we have seen a lot of RadeonSI optimizations focused on SPECViewPerf with AMD seemingly trying to get this open-source OpenGL driver into very capable shape moving forward for workstation GL workloads. Hitting Mesa 22.0-devel today is yet another round of patches for tuning SPECViewPerf...
CentOS Project Chair Karanbir Singh Steps Down
Karanbir Singh who had served as the CentOS Project Leader and involved with the community-based RHEL distribution since 2004 has stepped down from his roles...
Google Cloud Tau VM Instances Delivering Better Performance, Value Than Graviton2 M6g
Announced earlier this year for Google Cloud was a new family of virtual machines called Tau VMs. The initial T2D instances are powered by AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors to deliver leading performance and are also positioned to deliver great value in going up against the likes of Amazon's Graviton2 instances. Tau VM instances are now available as a preview and Google has provided us with gratis access to the new instance types for benchmarking.
Vendors Including NVIDIA Talk Up New OpenCL Extensions For Vulkan Interop, NN Inference
Last Friday night we spotted OpenCL 3.0.9 with several new extensions included. Today The Khronos Group is formally announcing these latest OpenCL additions focused on Vulkan interoperability as well as neural network inferencing...
Google Developing "SiliFuzz" For Fuzzing CPUs To Uncover Electrical Defects
With OSS-Fuzz for continuous fuzzing of open-source projects and along with working on the various sanitizers for compilers, Google has been doing a lot for proactively uncovering software defects in key open-source projects. Now though a group of their engineers have been working on SiliFuzz for software aiming to discover new CPU defects...
RadeonSI Enables NGG Shader Culling For Navi 1x Consumer GPUs
As another possible performance win for RadeonSI Gallium3D as AMD's open-source Radeon OpenGL driver on Linux systems is enabling of NGG culling for Navi 1x consumer graphics processors rather than limiting it only to newer Navi 2x (RDNA2) GPUs...
Early Progress Made On Porting Radeon Vulkan Driver To BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS
After successfully getting Mesa's software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to Haiku...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" Begins Development
Canonical today formally opened the "Jammy" archive for development for what will be the next version of Ubuntu, 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish"...
Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up
Apple today announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max as their most powerful SoCs ever built by the company. The new chips feature up to a 10-core processor, 32-core GPU, and up to 64GB of unified memory...
Valve Launches "Steam Deck Verified" Program For Games That Run Well On The Steam Deck
Valve is introducing a Steam Deck Verified system for helping gamers find out what games have been verified to work well on their forthcoming AMD+Linux-powered handheld game console...
VKD3D-Proton 2.5 Released With Experimental DXR 1.1, More Games working
VKD3D-Proton as Valve's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation for Steam Play's Proton is out with a big feature update...
Ubuntu 21.10 Radeon Gaming With KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell + Wayland vs. X.Org
With last week's release of Ubuntu 21.10, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux gaming performance on this new release while testing both the GNOME Shell 40 default desktop to that of its KDE Plasma 5.22 based option. Both the X.Org and Wayland sessions for KDE and GNOME were benchmarked for seeing how the Linux gaming performance compares with the Radeon open-source GPU driver stack.
Habana Labs For Linux 5.16 To Bring Peer-To-Peer Support With DMA-BUF
The drama around DMA-BUF code for the Habana Labs AI driver appears to be wrapping up with the Linux 5.16 cycle that is coming up...
Mesa 22.0 Lands Some Patches Toward OpenCL Image Support
Mesa 22.0-devel is one step closer to having OpenCL image support that is sought after by many individuals for allowing more OpenCL-enabled desktop software to work nicely with this open-source OpenCL component in Mesa...
Linux 5.15-rc6 Ticks Up In Size, Stops Using AMD SME By Default
Linus Torvalds is out with Linux 5.15-rc6 and its increase in size has him slightly worried...
Linux To No Longer Enable AMD SME Usage By Default Due To Problems With Some Hardware
Being sent in as a fix for the Linux 5.15 kernel this morning and to be back-ported to existing stable series is a behavior change that the Linux kernel will no longer use AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) by default on supported hardware but rather making it now opt-in due to shortcomings of some platforms...
Vortex86 Processors Finally Seeing Work In 2021 For Proper Handling Under Linux
The Vortex86 32-bit SoCs have worked under Linux for those distributions still maintaining 32-bit x86 support and where not hitting corner-cases of some i686 level features not being supported by some Vortex86 cores, but there is finally a pending kernel patch to provide proper CPU detection for Vortex86 hardware...
Axboe Achieves 8M IOPS Per-Core With Newest Linux Optimization Patches
It was just last week that Linux optimizations were leading to possible 6M IOPS per core and then at the start of this week new patches pushed Linux past 7M IOPS per-core with an ideal hardware configuration as well. In ending out the week, 8M IOPS has been reached!..
Rust-Based Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 Released With Improved Live Migration, Faster Boot Time
Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 debuted this week as the Intel-led open-source VMM focused on supporting modern cloud workloads and written in the Rust programming language while leveraging the Linux's KVM virtualization code or the Microsoft MSHV hypervisor on Windows...
Realtek 802.11ax WiFi Driver "rtw89" Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.16
Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver...