Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 32 min 46 sec ago
More AMD RDNA3 Code Prepared For Linux 5.19, RADV Begins Landing Task Shaders
While open-source fans this morning are celebrating NVIDIA finally publishing open-source kernel driver code as a step to opening up their driver, open-source AMD Radeon driver developers are proceeding as normal and undeterred by NVIDIA's open kernel-only approach. Another batch of AMD graphics code was sent in this morning to DRM-Next and then over in user-space Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed more task shader code...
Microsoft Releases CBL-Mariner 1.0 May 2022 Linux Distro Update
While this week Microsoft issued a production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as its in-house Linux distribution, they are continuing to maintain CBL-Mariner 1.0 for the time being and have overnight issued its newest monthly release...
NVIDIA CUDA 11.7 Brings Lazy Loading, Open GPU Kernel Driver Compatibility
Released on Wednesday alongside the R515 NVIDIA Linux driver beta and the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver announcement was the launch of CUDA 11.7...
NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver
The day has finally come: NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. Here's the scoop on this landmark open-source decision at NVIDIA.
More AMD RDNA3 / GFX11 Enablement Patches Merged Into LLVM 15.0
AMD's graphics driver engineers continue being very active in volleying new open-source driver patches for GFX11 and other blocks making up their next-generation RDNA3 graphics processors...
Intel Announces "Project Amber" For Verifying The Trustworthiness Of Clouds
Following yesterday's Intel Vision 2022 announcements there is a bit more news today. In particular, Intel is announcing Project Amber...
Qt 5.15.4 LTS Release Now Available As Open-Source
Back in March marked the release of Qt 5.15.3 as open-source, one year after it was released to commercial customers of The Qt Company. Today a similar Qt 5.15.4 open-source release is now available, one year after its commercial release...
Intel Gets Back To Working On Linear Address Masking Support For The Linux Kernel
Back in December 2020 Intel's programming reference manual was updated to cover Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a future CPU feature and there was some GNU toolchain activity around LAM while not much to report on the effort since then -- until today. A revised "request for comments" has been posted on the Intel Linear Address Masking enabling for the Linux kernel that allows for using untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata...
Mesa 22.1-rc5 Released With Dozens Of Fixes For Zink, RADV & Intel Vulkan Drivers
There was hope that Mesa 22.1 would have been released this week but instead it's been diveted to at least next week due to more than 90 patches flowing in the past week. As such, today we have Mesa 22.1-rc5 for another week of testing...
Open-Source Firmware For The MSI Alder Lake Motherboard Taking Shape
Last month was the surprising news of open-source Coreboot working on a readily available Intel Alder Lake motherboard. That work for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard is being carried out by independent firmware consulting firm 3mdeb and using the Dasharo open-source firmware distribution with Coreboot...
Intel oneAPI Level Zero Loader 1.8 Released For Supporting New L0 Features
Another Intel (open-source) software update coinciding with the company's Vision 2022 conference is a new oneAPI Level Zero Loader release...
RHEL9 Reaching GA Shortly, RHIVOS Woos GM For Software-Defined Vehicles
Today at the Red Hat Summit is word of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 reaching general availability status in the coming weeks...
Intel Releases New CPU Microcode For Latest Security Advisory (CVE-2022-21151)
In addition to all the product announcements made for Intel Vision 2022 in Texas, today marks patch Tuesday with a new round of security disclosures from Intel. This month there are 16 new advisories for addressing 41 vulnerabilities affecting their software and hardware. 76% of these vulnerabilities were found by Intel engineers...
Vulkan 1.3.213 Released With Minor Ray-Tracing Update, Other New Extensions
Vulkan 1.3.213 is out today that on top of the usual specification clarifications/corrections are also four new extensions, including VK_KHR_ray_tracing_maintenance1...
MIPS Claims "Best-In-Class Performance" With New RISC-V eVocore CPUs
MIPS Tech is no longer working on their MIPS CPU instruction set architecture but has been taking on RISC-V based designs. Today the company made the bold announcement for their new eVocore P8700 and I8500 multiprocessor IP cores that they offer "Best-In-Class Performance and Scalability."..
Intel Kicks Off Vision 2022 With Habana Gaudi 2, Greco, 12th Gen Core HX, IPUs
Intel is kicking off their inaugural "Intel Vision" event today in Texas by making several prominent hardware and software announcements.
AMD Launches The Radeon RX 6650 XT / RX 6750 XT / RX 6950 XT
AMD today is launching the "refined" AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card line-up with new 2022 models being the RX 6650 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6950 XT graphics cards.
Dbus-Broker 30 Released For High Performance Linux Message Bus
In the absence of the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism that appears stalled that was started after the failed KDBUS effort, Dbus-Broker has been taking off as the high performance, reliability-enhanced Linux message broker in user-space retaining compatibility with the reference D-Bus implementation...
AMD Updates Linux Patches For Lowering Idle Exit Latency
Last month an AMD engineer began posting Linux kernel patches so the kernel prefers the MWAIT instruction over HALT for lowering the CPU idle exit latency. Preferring MWAIT over HALT has been something Intel CPUs on Linux have preferred going back to the Core 2 days and indeed with modern AMD CPUs there is significant advantages to lowering the exit latency in doing so for the idle code. This morning the latest iteration of the work was posted...
Fedora 36 Is A Terrific Release Especially For Linux Enthusiasts, Power Users
Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35...
