Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 58 min 41 sec ago
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 7:54pm
Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 5:40pm
In a Valentine's Day blog post, System76 has outlined how they are nearing the release of their alpha build of the COSMIC desktop environment that they have been developing as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 4:47pm
The Asahi Linux project working on the AGX Gallium3D driver for Mesa has now managed to achieve OpenGL 4.6 conformance as well as OpenGL ES 3.2. This is a big upgrade for the Linux OpenGL support on the Apple M1 as previously only OpenGL 4.1 was exposed...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 3:22pm
Earlier this month at FOSDEM in Brussels was a presentation by developers Brendan Abolivier, Ikey Doherty, and Sean Burke on the Thunderbird mail client beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within its codebase...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 1:50pm
As an important notice to those with new TUXEDO laptops such as the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 powered by the Ryzen 7 7840HS, installing their DKMS-based driver package can be very important if aiming to achieve maximum performance.
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 11:55am
While there is already the work underway on allowing the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel in part to leverage its memory safety potential, a proposal was sent out this morning for a new "SandBox Mode" for the Linux kernel to also increase the memory safety of C code within the kernel...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 11:42am
A new feature coming with the display engine on Intel Lunar Lake's Xe2 graphics is an adaptive sharpening filter that has minimal power and performance impact...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 11:28am
With the Nouveau driver support for using the NVIDIA GSP (GPU System Processor) that was added in Linux 6.7, that is only used by default on the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada" GPUs and moving forward where otherwise there is no accelerated support. The NVIDIA GSP is present in the GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" and RTX 30 "Ampere" hardware too, but not used by default unless setting a module option to enable the mode. However, a new patch is pending that would allow kernel builders to optionally enable the GSP mode by default...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 11:16am
Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library used for building deep learning applications is preparing another release that continues going heavy on performance optimizations and preparing for future Intel hardware generations...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 1:24am
In development the past several months has been patches to allow changing the compression algorithm used by the hibernation images of the Linux kernel while preserving the system memory contents. With using LZ4 yields faster system restore times from hibernation than the current de facto compression algorithm used of LZO. This work is now queued for introduction in Linux 6.9...
Wed, 14/02/2024 - 12:55am
While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 4:28pm
Adding to the list of features slated for the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle is allowing RISC-V kernel builds to be compiled with Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) enabled...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 2:16pm
Kicking off what may end up being a fairly busy Patch Tuesday are two WiFi authentication vulnerabilities being made public that affect Intel's IWD daemon as well as the WPA_Supplicant software -- between the two they are the most common solutions for wireless daemons on Linux systems...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 2:03pm
A new blog post was posted by the Redox OS team that is working on their Rust-written micro-kernel designed open-source operating system. Their latest post lays out their porting strategy for getting more Linux and BSD user-space software running on this Rust-based OS...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 11:56am
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 11:33am
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for providing open-source OpenGL support on Linux systems has implemented indirect draw generation. For software relying heavily on indirect draws will see a "massive boost" in performance...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 6:00am
The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software...
Tue, 13/02/2024 - 5:00am
As noted in prior Phoronix articles for months, FreeBSD 14 is likely to be the last for supporting prominent 32-bit systems. On the FreeBSD mailing list more details on the FreeBSD 32-bit deprecation process was posted this week...
Mon, 12/02/2024 - 9:03pm
It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements...
Mon, 12/02/2024 - 2:00pm
While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.