Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 38 min 48 sec ago
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 6:12pm
While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 5:28pm
While not quite as exciting as yesterday's AMD XDNA driver publishing for Ryzen AI on Linux, a notable patch series out of AMD today on the Linux front is enabling AMD Core Performance Boost controls within their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 3:27pm
Red Hat announced today that beginning April they will be rolling out a new pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux use in the public cloud...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 3:13pm
As part of the renewed efforts around the Servo open-source web engine and making it usable for embedded purposes, the Servo engine has been tacking on a number of new features in recent weeks...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 3:03pm
Simon Ser just released Sway 1.9-rc1 as the newest test release for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 1:46pm
The uutils project providing a Rust-written Coreutils re-implementation has released v0.0.24 and it passes another 29 GNU test cases as the project nears its 1.0 release...
Fri, 26/01/2024 - 11:36am
AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 has dropped as AMD's first open-source Vulkan API driver release of the new year for Radeon graphics on Linux...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 11:09pm
With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 8:08pm
Following this morning's embargo lift on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 specification, Mesa merge requests were opened by Intel and RADV stakeholders in beginning to implement the new extensions for these Mesa Vulkan drivers and promoting existing extensions to their newly-minted state...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 8:00pm
While we are beginning to see AMD Zen 4C cores in client systems, these smaller cores have already proven themselves very interesting and capable with the AMD EPYC Bergamo high core count server processors and the extremely power efficient EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. For showing how far Zen has come in power efficiency, I thought it would be fun to show how the original flagship EPYC 7601 "Zen 1" processor with 32-cores / 64-threads compared to Zen 4C with the EPYC 8324P(N) 32-core processors. But as that isn't even the top-end Siena part, I also tossed in the 64-core EPYC 8534PN too for a top of stack look for the current EPYC 8004 line-up.
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 7:28pm
For the better part of two years we've seen Intel open-source software engineers working on preparing the Linux kernel for FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery for defining new transitions for changing privilege levels. Intel's been working hard on the FRED kernel plumbing for better performance, lower response times, and improved robustness and it's looking like FRED could be set to land come Linux 6.9...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 2:00pm
The Khronos Group today announced their Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone as a specification for their latest API features and meeting the needs of 2024 graphics processors and other hardware. Vulkan Roadmap 2024 builds upon Vulkan 1.3 and the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 specifications to deliver next-generation capabilities...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 11:51am
GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 11:41am
In addition to OBS adding AV1 VA-API support, some more good Linux video acceleration news this week is Valve enabling VA-API DRM hardware-accelerated video decoding when using Remote Play with the newest Steam beta...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 11:28am
Intel engineers on Wednesday released OpenVINO 2023.3 as the latest major update to this leading open-source AI toolkit. The OpenVINO 2023.3 brings "full support" for new Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake processors, other Intel hardware support improvements, and continuing to expand support around generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs)...
Thu, 25/01/2024 - 1:27am
Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series...
Wed, 24/01/2024 - 7:24pm
Earlier this month the GCC 14 compiler landed initial support for AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics processors as part of the GNU Compiler Collection's OpenMP device offloading support for GPU compute. That initial support was rather basic but a follow-up patch has the possibility of making the RDNA3 (GFX11) support "working for most purposes" and will hopefully still be merged in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release...
Wed, 24/01/2024 - 5:40pm
The Zed code editor being led by the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework have announced today that the Zed editor is being open-sourced...
Wed, 24/01/2024 - 2:00pm
AMD announced back during CES the Radeon RX 7600 XT as a $329 USD graphics card for 1080p/1440p gaming. Today that card goes on sale and the review embargo has lifted. Here is an initial look at the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT performance under Linux with AMD's open-source driver stack.
Wed, 24/01/2024 - 2:00pm
For going along with today's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features...