
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 59 min ago
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Has Invested Over $24.9M In Open-Source In Two Years
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than €23 million (about $24.94M USD) into sixty open technologies...
Microsoft Open-Sources Rust-Written OpenHCL For Running Confidential Intel/AMD VMs
Microsoft announced today the new and now open-source OpenHCL paravisor for the virtualization stack for enabling Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with this Rust-written software stack. This effort by Microsoft has been five years in the making and is now open-source and will continue to be developed in the open...
Intel NPU Driver Being Updated To Handle Larger AI Workloads
Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads...
Exploring The Zen 5 SMT Performance With The AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" CPU
Continuing on with the testing around the AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors, today is a look at the Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) performance impact for Turin while using the AMD EPYC 9755 as the highest-end "Turin Classic" processor with 128 cores / 256 threads. Similar SMT on/off tests for "Turin Dense" with the EPYC 9965 192-core / 384-thread will also be coming in a future benchmarking comparison on Phoronix. These tests are mainly intended for reference purposes for those curious about the SMT benefits at such high core counts and what workloads may or may not still benefit from SMT especially when having so many threads while using 12-channel DDR5-6000 memory.
PyTorch 2.5 Released With Improved Intel GPU Support
PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library...
Red Hat Engineer Nikita Popov Now The Lead Maintainer For LLVM
Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack...
Linux 6.13 To Introduce Intel 5th Gen NPU Support For Panther Lake
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle...
The Maturing State Of Rusticl For Rust-Based OpenCL Within Mesa
Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented in Montreal last week at the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2024) on the current state of Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers within Mesa...
AMD Working On GPU Compute Virtualization Support With ROCm/HIP For VMs
Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack...
OGRE-Next 3.0 Released For This Open-Source 3D Engine
OGRE-Next 3.0 has debuted this week as the newest version of the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine Next Generation for serving as an open-source 3D graphics rendering engine...
AMD Releases AOMP 20.0-0 For Radeon/Instinct Compiler Offloading
Following last week's release of the LLVM/Clang-downstream AOCC 5.0 for optimized compiler support extended to Zen 5 CPUs, the GPU side of the house at AMD this week released AOMP 20.0-0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on GPU device offloading...
Qualcomm Announces Mesa VCL Driver For OpenCL Acceleration Within VMs
Qualcomm engineers have developed VCL as a new open-source OpenCL driver for use with VirtIO-GPU for providing OpenCL hardware acceleration within virtual machines...
Open-Source Radeon Vulkan Driver "RADV" Demonstrated On Windows
Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11...
Intel Lunar Lake vs. AMD Strix Point Platform Profile Performance Comparison
For those that have been eager to see more Intel Core Ultra Series 200V Lunar Lake Linux testing, here is the latest installment of testing as well as an update from Intel following my Lunar Lake Linux testing recent reports. Today's article is looking at Intel Lunar Lake versus AMD Strix Point across different ACPI Platform Profile configurations for whether you are after peak performance or the most power savings.
GCC Preparing To Set C23 "GNU23" As Default C Language Version
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified...
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2 Brings AMD ROCm + Instinct Tech Preview
Red Hat has announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2. RHEL AI was announced earlier this year as Red Hat's AI solution for a foundation model platform to develop / test / run Granite GenAI models. Not to be confused with the RHEL operating system itself, RHEL AI is all about building large language models for enterprise software with Granite LLMs and InstructLab tooling...
AMD Linux Graphics Driver To Switch To More Aggressive Power Heuristics By Default
It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default...
Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.8 Brings New Features
The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor...
New Patches Allow For Deleting Files ~54% Faster On F2FS
A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files...
Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 Adds Valkey, Enables Other New Features
Microsoft has released Azure Linux 3.0.20241005 as the "October 2024" update to the company's in-house Linux distribution...