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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 41 min 21 sec ago

System76's New Linux Mini PC Pairs Intel Meteor Lake + Dual 2.5G Ethernet + Coreboot

Wed, 01/29/2025 - 00:06
System76 this morning announced the 2025 version of their Meerkat mini Linux PC. This new mini PC designed for Linux pairs an Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoC with dual 2.5G Ethernet and booting using Coreboot for a intriguing combination whether it's for a lightweight Linux desktop PC or a small office/home server...

Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Running Well For Larger Workloads, More Multi-Tasking

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 23:46
Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it's been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.

Thunderbolt 3 AltMode Driver & Other USB Improvements For Linux 6.14

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 23:13
In addition to sending out the char/misc pull request that completed work on the NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman yesterday also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt pull request for Linux 6.14. The USB/Thunderbolt updates include new hardware support, Chrome OS improvements, and other changes...

WavPack 5.8 Lossless Audio Compression Tools Now Enable Multi-Threading By Default

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 21:50
The open-source WavPack lossless audio compression format is out with a new release today for this BSD-licensed software around this audio code container...

LLVM 20 Promotes SPIR-V To Official Backend, Enabled By Default

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 19:47
Following a call by Intel developers last month for making the SPIR-V back-end an official target within LLVM as a promotion to its existing "experimental" backend status, the change has now been made ahead of the upcoming LLVM 20 release...

F2FS Improvements Merged For Linux 6.14

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 19:31
Last week saw the new Bcachefs features and Btrfs changes land along with XFS real-time improvements for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel while overnight the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes were merged for that other exciting and actively-advancing open-source file-system...

Z3fold Allocator Slated For Removal From The Linux Kernel

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 19:15
The Z3fold allocator for compressed pages was quietly deprecated several months ago with users encouraged to use zsmalloc instead. With no one vocally objecting, the Z3fold allocator code is now being positioned for removal from the Linux kernel source tree...

Hangover 10.0 Released For Running Windows Games/Apps On ARM64 Linux

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 19:05
Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0, Hangover 10.0 is now available as this adaptation for running Windows games and applications on ARM64 Linux and other non-x86_64 CPU architectures...

Completed NTSYNC Driver Merged For Linux 6.14: "Should Make Many SteamOS Users Happy"

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 09:25
The "char/misc" pull request was submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window and already merged to the Linux Git tree... As expected, the completed code around the NTSYNC driver has landed for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitves as a big win to Wine / Steam Play (Proton) Windows gaming on Linux...

Llama.cpp AI Performance With The GeForce RTX 5090

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 03:33
In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmarks delivered last week a number of readers asked about AI performance and in particular the Llama.cpp performance with the RTX 5090 flagship graphics card. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the GeForce RTX 5090 performance in Llama.cpp compared to prior RTX 40 and RTX 30 graphics cards.

AMD ZenDNN 5.0 Software For AI Delivers "400% Performance Uplift"

Tue, 01/28/2025 - 02:18
Released last November following the AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 as their deep neural network library optimized for EPYC/Ryzen processors. ZenDNN 5.0 is their updated version of their neural network library that is compatible with the APIs from Intel oneDNN/DNNL and in turn can be used with the likes of PyTorch. It turns out ZenDNN 5.0 is capable of delivering a 400% performance uplift over their prior ZenDNN software release on the same hardware...

Hyprland 0.47 Wayland Compositor Delivers Experimental HDR, GPU Hotplugging

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 22:51
Hyprland 0.47 is out to begin a new week with some exciting enhancements to this visuals-focused Wayland compositor...

GNOME Triple Buffering Now Works With Direct Scanout & VRR

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 21:50
It's still not looking like triple buffering will land for GNOME 48 with the feature freeze set for next weekend. But that Mutter dynamic triple buffering support has been improved upon and now at least is working for direct scan-out situations as well as variable rate refresh (VRR)...

Laptop Improvements & More AMD Driver Features Merged For Linux 6.14

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 19:58
The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. As usual the x86 platform driver updates are predominantly to benefit the many different Intel/AMD laptops out there with various OEM vendor features/functionality. Plus within the platform-drivers-x86 space is a growing number of AMD SoC drivers for not only laptops but also desktops/servers...

NAMD Molecular Dynamics Performance Improves Well With NVIDIA Blackwell / RTX 5090

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 19:46
With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend...

Reduced SquashFS Memory Use With The Linux 6.14 Kernel, More NILFS2 Fixes

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 19:32
In addition to all of the exciting "MM" changes for Linux 6.14 that were submitted by Andrew Morton's pull request, he also sent out the set of "non-MM" updates for the Linux 6.14 merge window...

Desktop Motherboards Continue Playing Catch-Up For Linux Monitoring Support

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 19:20
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. As happens with most kernel releases, there are a number of already-launched desktop motherboards beginning to see working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

Microsoft Announces Open-Source DocumentDB NoSQL Database

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 09:41
In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary...

Linux 6.14 To Switch From SHA1 To SHA512 For Module Signing By Default

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 09:27
While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security...

ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M Cooler For Ampere Altra 4U Servers/Workstations

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 05:46
For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

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