Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 9 min ago
GCC Compiler Developers Begin Considering C++20 Default
Compiler engineer Marek Polacek of Red Hat recently proposed making the C++20 language specification (or rather the GNU++20 dialect) the default C++ version when not otherwise specified...
EROFS File-System Continues Attracting More Industry Players
The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019...
Proton 10.0-3 Released For Steam Play With Dozens Of Fixes, More Games Working
Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-3 as the newest stable update to this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enabling countless Windows games to run often extremely well under Linux...
New Patch Moves AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs Over To AMDGPU Driver By Default
Following the recent patch proposal for moving AMD GCN 1.1 generation GPUs over to the AMDGPU Linux driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon driver, a similar patch has now been proposed for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are at parity with the AMDGPU driver to the Radeon driver while needing this newer kernel driver for enjoying RADV Vulkan support, better performance, and overall a better experience...
Bcachefs Rolls Out Metadata Version Reconcile "rebalance_v2" Feature
For those making use of the out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver, rolling out to the snapshot/nightly testing channel is the long-in-development "rebalance_v2" functionality now known as the "bcachefs_metadata_version_reconcile" feature...
Possible Setback For Linux x86_64 Laptops: Prominent Developer Joins Qualcomm
Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm...
The Incredible Evolution Of AMD EPYC HPC Performance Shown In The Azure Cloud
Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how they compare to prior generation HBv4 instances while this article is taking things further and putting the performance into perspective against the older HBv2 and HBv3 instances.
Linux Looks To Remove SHA1 Support For Signing Kernel Modules
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available...
NVIDIA CUDA 13.0 U2 Brings DGX Spark Performance Improvements
CUDA 13.0 Update 2 is now available as the latest incremental improvement to NVIDIA's compute stack...
RadeonSI OpenGL Mesh Shader Support Is Now Completed For Mesa 26.0
For next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It's been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it's in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver...
Linux Has Another Maintainer Now For Its DEC Alpha Port
The Linux kernel's port to the DEC Alpha processors remains alive over 30 years after these processors first appeared...
Intel Now Confirms Nova Lake Will Support AVX10.2 & APX Extensions
Recently when Intel contributed Nova Lake support for LLVM/Clang and the GCC compiler support there was not any AVX10 or APX support contrary to rumors and expectations. Intel has now published a new programming reference manual where they now confirm Nova Lake will in fact support AVX10.2 and APX...
Canonical To Now Provide Up To 15 Years Commercial Support For Ubuntu LTS Releases
Canonical announced today the expansion of the legacy add-on for Ubuntu Pro to provide total coverage of Ubuntu LTS releases up to 15 years...
Miracle-WM 0.8 Adds More Features For This Mir-Powered Wayland Compositor
Miracle-WM 0.8 was released on Wednesday as another step forward for this tiling Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir software. Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek continues driving new features into Miracle-WM as it works toward its v1.0 milestone...
Intel Finds Great Performance With PostgreSQL's AVX-512 Support
Back in April PostgreSQL added AVX-512 support for CRC32 computations. At the time the gains for CRC32 computations with this popular open-source database server were reported to be 50% to 3x faster for x86_64 CPUs able to leverage AVX-512. That AVX-512 support is found with PostgreSQL 18.0 that released in September and now Intel is praising this addition to PostgreSQL for which their developers also had a part in along with AWS and others...
Mesa 25.2.7 Ships The Latest Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Fixes
Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.2.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release for this stable set of open-source (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...
Valve Already Upstreams Support For The New Steam Controller To SDL3
Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library...
Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame
Valve just sent over the press release announcing three new Steam Hardware devices...
The State Of The Vulkan Renderer For Wayland's Weston 15.0 Compositor
With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path...
Framework Laptop 16 Upgrade To AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Benchmarks
Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware.
