
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 11 min 36 sec ago
CentOS Hyperscale Workstation Sees Experimental OS Builds, More Changes Coming
One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing...
Linux Prepares For AMD Servers With Aldebaran GPU Nodes Sporting HBM2
The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory...
NVIDIA 470 EOL Drivers For Kepler Still Obliterating Open-Source Alternative
With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.
XWayland 21.1.2 Nears With NVIDIA Hardware Acceleration
Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment...
Linux 5.14 Ready With Light Sensor + Human Presence Detection For Newer AMD Laptops
The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 continue improving consumer device support from newer AMD Ryzen laptops to multi-touch improvements...
Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux Driver Released
AMD has issued their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux driver update as their quarterly packaged driver update intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics cards and former FirePro line-up...
The Big Set Of Networking Changes For Linux 5.14
Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features...
Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 Focuses On Gen12 Enhancements
In preparing to close out the second quarter, the Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 was released today as the company's open-source stack for supporting GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on Linux...
Intel P-State Driver Ready To Take On Alder Lake Hybrid Processors
Headlining the power management updates for the Linux 5.14 merge window is the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver now being adapted to handle hybrid processors...
OpenZFS 2.1-rc8 Brings Linux 5.13 Compatibility, More Fixes
The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes...
System76 Releases Pop!_OS 21.04 With New COSMIC Desktop
Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop...
Laptop Improvements With Linux 5.14 Benefit Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft Surface Devices
The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more...
Linux Formerly Affected By An AMD KVM Guest-To-Host Breakout Code Vulnerability
AMD-specific code within Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a KVM guest to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components...
AMD EPYC Milan Performance Across 11 Different 2021 Linux Distributions
After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.
Intel Confirms Q2'22 Ramp For Xeon Sapphire Rapids As Good News For Their Linux Bring-Up
While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022...
Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 Released
Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments...
Linux 5.14 Drops Its Legacy IDE Code
Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code...
Firewalld Prepares For Its Major 1.0 Release For Linux Firewall Management
The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release...
Btrfs With Linux 5.14 Has More Performance Tuning, Other Improvements
With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021...
Clang Profile Guided Optimizations Support Sent In For Linux 5.14
Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads...