
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 51 min ago
Transparent Hugepages Are Coming To RISC-V On Linux
The Linux kernel's RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14...
NVIDIA Confirms Plans To Drop "Kepler" GPU Driver Support
Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA...
Intel Alder Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 Support For Linux 5.14
Intel's Linux engineers continue squaring away the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid processor support. In addition to continued graphics driver work and other platform device IDs being added for the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel, it looks like ADL's Thunderbolt/USB4 support will be merged too...
Linux Kernel Prepares For Intel Xeon CPUs With On-Package HBM Memory
Last year Intel's updated ISA extensions reference guide was updated with references to Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" having High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) given new HBM-related error codes. Now it's even more clear there are Xeon CPUs coming to market with onboard HBM memory as Intel has begun submitting Linux kernel driver changes...
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti / RTX 3080 Ti Compute + Renderer Performance Benchmarks
With last week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and this week's launch of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti there have been plenty of Linux gaming benchmarks on Phoronix. But for those interested in these new RTX 30 Ampere graphics cards for GPU compute or rendering workloads, in this article are many benchmarks on that front compared to various RTX 20 and RTX 30 series graphics cards.
Real-Time Support "PREEMPT_RT" For Linux Held Up Due To Lack Of Funding
While there was kernel talk of merging the PREEMPT_RT code in 2020 for this real-time functionality for the Linux kernel, among other times in the past that has yet to happen. These "RT" patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding...
OpenZFS 2.1 Gets More Cleanups, Better Documentation Ahead Of Release
The seventh release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing while it looks like soon it will cross the finish line as the latest feature release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...
AMDVLK 2021.Q2.5 Released As A Minor Radeon Vulkan Driver Update
Following the last AMDVLK update at the end of May, AMD has released AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 as their newest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release...
Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor 16 Adds ARM64 ACPI + UEFI Support, Better Live Migration
Following the bump in April from Cloud-Hypervisor v0.14.x to v15, Cloud-Hypervisor 16.0 was released on Thursday for this Intel-led open-source hypervisor that is leveraging Rust and focused on cloud and security use-cases...
Old Motorola 68000 Systems Can Finally Move Away From Linux's Deprecated IDE Code
Earlier this year was talk of Linux finally removing its legacy IDE subsystem that has been deprecated for years in favor of just maintaining the still-supported libata code for IDE support. The libata path is much better supported and matured for nearly two decades, but one of the holdouts was some Motorola 68000 series hardware -- like early Macintosh computers -- not being supported outside of the legacy context. That is finally set to change with Linux 5.14 so in turn the legacy IDE code will likely be able to be removed soon...
Linus Torvalds Encourages Kernel Developers & Everyone To Get Vaccinated
Linus Torvalds is known primarily in the past for his colorful scripture on the Linux kernel mailing list while today he does have a passionate and important read on the LKML around vaccinations for COVID-19...
Intel Reportedly Interested In Acquiring RISC-V Firm SiFive
Back in March during the announcement of Intel Foundry Services it was mentioned that SiFive and Intel were working together to allow RISC-V chips to be fabbed within Intel's facilities. Additionally, Intel Capital previously invested in SiFive during prior funding rounds. Now it turns out Intel is reportedly positioning to potentially acquire SiFive...
Panfrost Gallium3D Driver For Open-Source Arm Mali Graphics Now Has OpenGL ES 3.1
Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics...
System76 Launch - A Very Well Built, Highly Configurable, Open-Source Keyboard
Last month System76 launched their Launch Configurable Keyboard. They sent over this new open-source keyboard for some brief testing and I must say the build quality has been top notch and while this is their first keyboard they are bringing to market, with their US manufacturing expertise that began with their Thelio computer cases, it has carried forward with their Launch keyboard. This keyboard is beautifully crafted and among the most durable (and heaviest) keyboards I've used in the past two decades. It reminds me of the IBM Model M from a quality perspective but with its own unique advantages.
AMD Has Yellow Carp Ready For Linux 5.14, More Smart Shift Updates + Display Fixes
Along with Intel having wrapped up their graphics driver feature work for Linux 5.14, AMD sent in another pull request too with more feature code they have ready for their AMDGPU kernel driver in 5.14 and will likely be their last major pull for this cycle too...
Amazon Working On New Proactive Memory Reclamation For The Linux Kernel
For over a year Amazon engineers have been working on DAMON as a new means of monitoring data accesses under Linux. That patch series has yet to be mainlined but continues being worked on with the intention of getting it upstreamed when ready. More recently the engineers involved have been working on a DAMON-based page reclamation implementation for the Linux kernel in dealing proactively dealing with systems having high memory load...
GRUB 2.06 To Be Succeeded By... GRUB 2.11 Bootloader Next Year
Following this week's release of the big and long overdue GRUB 2.06 bootloader release, there is already development talk and action for the next release. Succeeding GRUB 2.0, GRUB 2.02, GRUB 2.04, and GRUB 2.06 is now going to be a bit of a version shakeup with GRUB 2.11 to be the next release...
Intel Publishes A Bunch Of Code Samples For Helping To Optimize For Their Latest CPUs
Intel has maintained a lengthy "Optimization Reference Manual" for showing developers how to optimize code for their latest CPU microarchitectures, but accompanied by their latest manual update is now a lot of actual code samples for easing the process of learning about Intel's optimization techniques for taking full advantage of their latest processors...
Linux 5.13 To Allow Controlling The Second Fan On The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9
For those thinking about picking up a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 laptop powered by Intel's latest-generation "Tiger Lake" processors, that model will see its second fan now properly supported by the current Linux 5.13 cycle...
Google Working On Open-Sourcing Their Fibers User-Space Scheduling Framework
For a number of years Google has developed Fibers (not to be confused with Google Fiber, their fiber Internet service) as a user-space scheduling framework. While it hasn't been open-source, the few public papers and talks on Google Fibers has been quite interesting for great performance and a novel design. Finally though Google is working towards open-sourcing Fibers and hoping to get the necessary Linux kernel modifications upstreamed...