Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 57 min ago
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...
Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT Announced With Greater Power Capability For $20
Raspberry Pi's Power over Ethernet HAT is beginning to face production challenges caused by the supply chain crisis so now the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the PoE+ HAT that is not only easier to produce but also can provide more power in conjunction with supported switches...
Linux 5.13-rc3 Released With The UMN Reverts+Fixes But Otherwise Small
Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 5.13-rc3 kernel as expected as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.13...
Toggling Spectre Mitigations On Xeon Scalable Ice Lake Show Little Runtime Difference
As usual when getting my hands on a new processor family, I was curious about the performance difference if booting the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors with the Spectre security mitigations disabled at run-time. Ultimately there was very little difference when using the standard "mitigations=off" option for these new Intel server processors...
Intel Tiger Lake Performance On Ubuntu 21.04 Benchmarks
With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04...
The Forge Rendering Framework Adds Runtime API Switching, New Shader Translator
The Forge rendering framework that picked up Vulkan and Linux support a few years back is out this week with a new release...
Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards
Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form...
CentOS SIG To Help Get Community CentOS Stream Features Into Next RHEL Releases
With CentOS Stream to be the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux moving forward, a CentOS special interest group is being formed that is driven by Red Hat stakeholders in helping to ensure technically interesting CentOS Stream changes made by community members are evaluated and primed for inclusion into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases...
Mumblings Of A "Big New" Open-Source GPU Driver Coming...
It's sounding like a vendor is readying to publish a "big" new open-source driver, likely a GPU driver, for the Linux kernel...
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines Being Updated For GTK4, Other Modern Features
GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" are in the process of being updated around the GTK4 tool-kit and new components like libadwaita and libhandy...
VirtIO-GPU/Graphics Support Is Improving In QEMU But Slowly
There continues a lot of work going into Virgl for 3D guest acceleration with the open-source Linux virtualization stack as well as most recently Vulkan driver activity. However, much of that work driven by Google these days is focused on Chrome OS with "Crosvm" rather than the venerable QEMU...
Fork Brute Force Attack Detection/Mitigation Still Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel
A security module continues to be worked on for being able to detect and mitigate against fork/execute brute force attacks to Linux systems...
KDE Introduces KCommandBar For HUD-Style Popups
Following the introduction of KHamburgerMenu, the latest KDE user-interface element being introduced is KCommandBar for expert-focused, HUD-style pop-ups...
RHEL 8.4 Released With Tiger Lake Graphics, Expanded eBPF Support
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 has reached general availability (GA) status as the latest iteration of RHEL8...
Wine 6.9 Released With More Improvements For Running Windows Apps/Games On Linux
Wine 6.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other Unix-like platforms...
SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V Developer Boards Begin Shipping
Announced last year was the HiFive Unmatched as the most compelling RISC-V development board to date. Following supply chain issues and everything else brought on by the pandemic, this very interesting RISC-V developer board is now shipping to customers...