Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 53 min ago
AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 Released With Two More Extensions Added
Just one week after AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 is now another update to this open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems...
M1RACLES: Apple M1 Exposed To Covert Channel Vulnerability
Apple's shiny new in-house M1 Arm chip is the latest processor challenged by a security vulnerability. The "M1RACLES" vulnerability was made public today as a covert channel vulnerability by where a mysterious register could lead EL0 state...
Fedora Cloud 35 Looking To Use The Btrfs File-System By Default
Fedora Workstation has been defaulting to the Btrfs file-system since F33 while other editions of Fedora Linux have continued using their defaults. With Fedora Cloud 35, this cloud spin of Fedora is now also looking to migrate to Btrfs...
BLAKE3 Cryptographic Hash Implementation Preparing For v1.0 Release
The BLAKE3 high performance crypto hashing function that is much speedier than MD5, SHA-1/SHA-2/SHA-3, and the former BLAKE2, is nearing its v1.0 release for its official Rust and C implementations...
Chrome 91 Released With Gravity Sensor API, JSON Modules, WebAssembly SIMD
Google has released Chrome 91 as a rather exciting feature update to their open-source, cross-platform web browser...
Linux 5.14 To Allow Hot Unplug Of AMD Radeon GPUs
Linux 5.14 to debut later in the summer will allow for hot unplugging of AMD Radeon graphics cards such as when using an external GPU enclosure or passing back a GPU from a virtual machine to the host. Up until now the AMDGPU kernel driver hasn't cooperated nicely with the Radeon GPU for hot unplug events...
Half-Double: A New DRAM Rowhammer Vulnerability
The Rowhammer security exploit affecting DRAM memory modules has a new chapter with Google now detailing "half-double" as a new technique for exploit of system memory...
DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Is Performing Very Well Against Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD 13.0
Earlier this month in our initial benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0 we found DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performing much better than DragonFlyBSD 5.8, but how does that put its performance up against FreeBSD 13.0 and Ubuntu Linux for reference? Here are such benchmarks in our latest benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0, FreeBSD 13.0 (with both GCC and Clang), and Ubuntu Linux.
Linux 5.14 To Support F2FS Read-Only Feature
With the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should land its new "RO" feature read-only mode...
Arm Announces The Cortex-X2 Armv9 Flagship CPU, Cortex-A710, Cortex-A510
Arm today announced the Cortex-X2 as their new flagship Armv9 processor design...
Intel Protected Xe Path Code Updated, Now Defaults PXP Code To Disabled
Intel's open-source driver engineers remain very active on bringing up their discrete graphics card support under Linux with restructuring of the kernel driver to handle local/dedicated memory among a variety of other changes needed. Plus there are new features with the latest generation of Intel graphics such as the Protected Xe Path (PXP) for hardware-protected sessions for multi-user / multi-process scenarios. The Intel PXP code for their Linux driver has been in the works since last year and the latest revision now submitted...
GNOME 40's Shell Theme Code Is Rather Expensive But Optimization Pursued
It's been a while since last having any major/exciting optimizations to the GNOME desktop to report on by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt that is known for his performance work over the past few years, but some optimizations are forthcoming...
LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha 1 Released For This Open-Source Office Suite
The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release of this open-source office suite update in August...
Linux 5.14 To Bring Intel IGC Driver Support For AF_XDP Zero-Copy
After Intel originally proposed zero-copy capability for the Linux kernel's AF_XDP high performance packet processing code years ago and implemented for their higher performance network hardware/drivers, with Linux 5.14 the common Intel "IGC" Gigabit Ethernet driver is set to introduce AF_XDP zero-copy support...
Inkscape 1.1 Released With Command Palette Feature, More Export Options
Following the earlier release candidate, Inkscape 1.1 is now officially available as the latest feature update to this leading open-source vector graphics application...
OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC Released With LLVM 12 Toolchain, Linux 5.12 Kernel
Following February's release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2, the release candidate to Lx 4.3 is now available for testing...
Intel P-State Driver Begins Preparing For Hybrid Processors (Alder Lake)
Intel's Linux preparations for Alder Lake -- and more broadly the concept of hybrid x86_64 CPUs with a mix of large Core and small Atom cores -- continues with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver seeing new work to prepare for Intel's hybrid era...
Red Hat Scores A Huge DM Optimization For Linux 5.14
Red Hat engineers have scored an impressive performance optimization to the DeviceMapper (DM) code that is now queued up for merging with the Linux 5.14 cycle...
Intel AMX Support Continues Being Prepped For The Linux Kernel
Intel engineers have been publishing open-source/Linux enablement patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for nearly one year now. While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" with AMX support is expected around the end of this year, one of the key pieces yet to land is the Linux kernel support...
Intel Open-Source Stack Enables oneAPI Level Zero For Rocket Lake, Alder Lake S
A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel's engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support...