Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 26 min ago
VKD3D-Proton 2.5 Released With Experimental DXR 1.1, More Games working
VKD3D-Proton as Valve's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation for Steam Play's Proton is out with a big feature update...
Ubuntu 21.10 Radeon Gaming With KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell + Wayland vs. X.Org
With last week's release of Ubuntu 21.10, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux gaming performance on this new release while testing both the GNOME Shell 40 default desktop to that of its KDE Plasma 5.22 based option. Both the X.Org and Wayland sessions for KDE and GNOME were benchmarked for seeing how the Linux gaming performance compares with the Radeon open-source GPU driver stack.
Habana Labs For Linux 5.16 To Bring Peer-To-Peer Support With DMA-BUF
The drama around DMA-BUF code for the Habana Labs AI driver appears to be wrapping up with the Linux 5.16 cycle that is coming up...
Mesa 22.0 Lands Some Patches Toward OpenCL Image Support
Mesa 22.0-devel is one step closer to having OpenCL image support that is sought after by many individuals for allowing more OpenCL-enabled desktop software to work nicely with this open-source OpenCL component in Mesa...
Linux 5.15-rc6 Ticks Up In Size, Stops Using AMD SME By Default
Linus Torvalds is out with Linux 5.15-rc6 and its increase in size has him slightly worried...
Linux To No Longer Enable AMD SME Usage By Default Due To Problems With Some Hardware
Being sent in as a fix for the Linux 5.15 kernel this morning and to be back-ported to existing stable series is a behavior change that the Linux kernel will no longer use AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) by default on supported hardware but rather making it now opt-in due to shortcomings of some platforms...
Vortex86 Processors Finally Seeing Work In 2021 For Proper Handling Under Linux
The Vortex86 32-bit SoCs have worked under Linux for those distributions still maintaining 32-bit x86 support and where not hitting corner-cases of some i686 level features not being supported by some Vortex86 cores, but there is finally a pending kernel patch to provide proper CPU detection for Vortex86 hardware...
Axboe Achieves 8M IOPS Per-Core With Newest Linux Optimization Patches
It was just last week that Linux optimizations were leading to possible 6M IOPS per core and then at the start of this week new patches pushed Linux past 7M IOPS per-core with an ideal hardware configuration as well. In ending out the week, 8M IOPS has been reached!..
Rust-Based Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 Released With Improved Live Migration, Faster Boot Time
Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 debuted this week as the Intel-led open-source VMM focused on supporting modern cloud workloads and written in the Rust programming language while leveraging the Linux's KVM virtualization code or the Microsoft MSHV hypervisor on Windows...
Realtek 802.11ax WiFi Driver "rtw89" Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.16
Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver...
KDE's Plasma Wayland Session Continues Seeing More Crash Fixes
This week marked the release of Plasma 5.23 in celebrating 25 years of the KDE desktop project while celebrations didn't last long with developers already hard at work on the Plasma 5.23.1 point release, feature work for Plasma 5.24, and also improvements to the KDE Applications and KDE Frameworks...
Bareflank Hypervisor 3.0 Pre-Release Debuts With Many Changes
The open-source Bareflank Hypervisor project designed to prototype new hypervisors across Intel, AMD, and AArch64 platforms issued their long-awaited 3.0 pre-release on Friday...
Genode-Based Sculpt OS 21.10 Adds Intel GPU Acceleration, USB Web Camera Support
On Thursday in addition to the releases of Ubuntu 21.10 (plus its derivatives) and OpenBSD 7.0, the Genode OS Framework based Sculpt OS saw its 21.10 release...
OpenCL 3.0.9 Specification Released
The Khronos Group's OpenCL working group did a quiet Friday evening tagging of OpenCL 3.0.9...
PinePhone Pro Announced As New Linux Smartphone
The PinePhone Pro is being announced this morning as the organization's new smartphone building upon the successes and experience of the original PinePhone Linux smartphone...
Intel Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 Ships Updated DG1 Support
Intel's open-source engineers have shipped Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 as the newest version of this Linux compute stack enabling OpenCL and Level Zero support with their graphics processors...
AV1 Codec Library libaom v3.2 Brings More Performance Optimizations
Libaom 3.2 is now available as the latest version of the official AOMedia/Google-developed AV1 Codec Library. With libaom 3.2 comes compression efficiency improvements, perceptual quality improvements, and a variety of speed-ups and memory optimizations...
Cluster Scheduler Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.16
Cluster scheduler support has been queued up for landing in the Linux 5.16 kernel for AArch64 and x86_64 systems for improving the CPU scheduler behavior for systems that have clusters of CPU cores...
SALSA Back In Development As A Small ALSA Library For Linux Systems
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week...
AMD Finally Enabling PSR By Default For Newer Hardware With Linux 5.16
With it getting late into the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle, the focus is shifting by the Direct Rendering Driver maintainers from new feature work targeting the next cycle (5.16) to instead on bug fixes. AMD sent out a pull request of new AMDGPU Linux 5.16 material this week that is primarily delivering bug fixes but one notable addition is finally enabling PSR by default for newer GPUs...
