Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 48 min 24 sec ago
Awesome Changes Coming With Linux 6.9: Lots From Intel/AMD, FUSE Passthrough & More Rust
Depending upon how Linus Torvalds is feeling today, Linux 6.8 could debut today as stable and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.9 merge window... Otherwise it will be punted off by one week. In any event, there's a lot of interesting work queuing for Linux 6.9 as shared in today's preview...
Linux 6.9 To Allow AMD P-State With ACPI CPPC V2 For Threadripper 3000 Series CPUs
The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver works with Zen 2 and newer processors supporting ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) but to date this hasn't worked for Threadripper 3000 series processors with the TRX40 chipset. That though is finally being fixed up with Linux 6.9 thanks to a one-line code change...
Radeon Memory Visualizer Hooks Up With Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan Driver
Thanks to the nature of open-source and AMD making their Radeon Memory Visualizer "RMV" open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella, outside of AMD graphics drivers it's found usage elsewhere. Back in January I wrote how Intel's open-source Vulkan driver was adapted for being able to interface with the Radeon Memory Visualizer. Now this week the Qualcomm Adreno "TURNIP" Vulkan driver has also been wired up for enabling RMV integration...
Niri 0.1.3 Wayland Compositor Brings Touch Support, New Animations
Niri is an interesting scrollable tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM that has been gaining user interest in recent months. This weekend marked the v0.1.3 release of this Wayland compositor...
Linux 6.9 To Upgrade Rust Toolchain - Making More Features Stable
All of the Rust feature patches have already been submitted in a pull request to Linus Torvalds ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window...
Effort Continues To Remove Most Of The SPARC 32-bit CPU Support From Linux
Last year saw a lot of code clean-up work on the Linux kernel and working to remove support for obsolete hardware no longer being actively maintained within the mainline kernel tree for years. On the CPU side one of the efforts has been to remove unused SPARC 32-bit CPU support for old Sun workstations. The patches for removing unused SPARC32 code was updated this weekend and now undergoing review...
GNOME 46 Release Candidate Rolls Out Last Minute Fixes, VRR & Other Refinements
The GNOME 46 release candidate was officially rolled out today as the last chance to test the GNOME 46 desktop software ahead of its stable release later this month...
Linux 6.8 Is Very Exciting With Intel Xe Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics & New Hardware
Linux 6.8 could debut as stable as soon as tomorrow if all goes well... Linus Torvalds last week was unsure whether an extra release candidate would be needed after the quiet 6.8-rc7 release. This week's seen a continued flow of fixes land, so we'll see what Linus decides on Sunday but in any event there are already a number of early 6.9 pull requests...
GNOME Developers Continue Tweaking The Shell, Tuning For Performance
Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle...
NVK Lands Sparse Memory Support - Enabling More Games To Run On This Open-Source Driver
Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver for open-source NVIDIA support has merged sparse memory support. This is a big milestone as it's needed for running a number of newer games under Linux...
LXQt Desktop Now "100%" Ready For Wayland
The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world...
KDE Developers Are Currently Seeing 150~200 Bug Reports Per Day
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary outlining the interesting feature work and bug fixes to land in the KDE space. Being fresh off the recent Plasma 6.0 release, a lot of bug reports are still coming in while developers are already busy tackling new features for Plasma 6.1...
Wine 9.4 Released With VKD3D 1.11 Bundled, OpenGL Support For Wayland Driver
Wine 9.4 is out today as a rather notable bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...
AMD Squeezes In Additional GPU Enablement Code For Linux 6.9
While the Linux v6.8 kernel may debut as stable as soon as this weekend, a last-minute pull request of some new AMD graphics IP was submitted today to DRM-Next in aiming to make it for the imminent Linux 6.9 merge window...
Vulkan 1.3.280 Released With NVIDIA Ray-Tracing Validation Extension
Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API...
Ubuntu 24.04 Helping Achieve Greater Performance On Intel Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids
While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.
VirtualBox KVM Backend Adds Support For SR-IOV Graphics
Announced one month ago by Cyberus Technology was an open-source KVM back-end for VirtualBox. This work by Cyberus allows for using the KVM hypervisor with VirtualBox as opposed to its custom kernel module maintained by Oracle. That KVM back-end has now been extended to support SR-IOV graphics virtualization...
Improved Debugging Of Suspend/Resume For AMD Ryzen Laptops On Linux Coming With MP2 STB
AMD engineers and those debugging s2idle suspend/resume issues for Ryzen laptops under Linux will soon have more information at disposal for newer SoCs supporting MP2 STB functionality...
Improved Case-Insensitive File Handling Coming To Linux 6.9
The optional case-insensitive file/folder handling under Linux that's hooked up for various file-systems like EXT4 and F2FS will benefit from improved performance on the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...
Linux 6.8 Squeezing In Support For A Few Newer HP HyperX Controllers
Sent in today as part of the input subsystem fixes for the current Linux 6.8 kernel cycle are adding support for several more HP HyperX gaming controllers...