Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News (original) (raw)

Intel "Performance Tips" Published For Optimal Linux Graphics

64 Minutes Ago - Intel - Intel Performance Tips

Added today to the Mesa documentation for the open-source Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems is a set of "performance tips" for ensuring an optimal Intel Linux graphics 3D accelerated experience.

14 January

Rsync 3.4 Released Due To Multiple, Significant Security Vulnerabilities

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news.

Intel Arc B580 Linux Graphics Driver Performance One Month After Launch

9 Hours Ago - Intel - Arc B580 Vulkan

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

GNOME 48 Desktop Introducing An Official Audio Player: Decibels

14 January 12:19 PM EST - GNOME - GNOME Decibels Audio Player

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.

GCC Developers Consider Deprecating ARM64 ILP32 Support

14 January 11:01 AM EST - Arm - ARM64 ILP32

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support Still Poses A Challenge For Linux Laptops

14 January 10:11 AM EST - Intel - Intel IPU6 Web Cameras

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Lands More Performance Optimizations Ahead Of The B570

14 January 06:55 AM EST - Intel - Intel ANV Performance Tuning

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.

Haiku OS Gets The Iceweasel Web Browser Up & Running

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running.

JUring: Experimental IO_uring For Java With Big Performance Gains

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing.

Intel's Open Image Denoise Begins Preparing For Panther Lake Xe3 Graphics

14 January 06:09 AM EST - Intel - Open Image Denoise 2.3.2

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update.

13 January

OpenZFS 2.3 Released With RAIDZ Expansion, Fast Dedup, Direct I/O & Other Great Improvements

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features.

Fedora 42 Cleared To Ship WSL Images For Easy Windows Subsystem For Linux Use

13 January 08:25 PM EST - Fedora - Fedora 42 WSL

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment.

Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack

Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.

Oracle OLED Wants To Help Improve The Debugability Of The Linux Kernel

13 January 01:25 PM EST - Oracle - Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.

GNOME Shell 48 Alpha Introduces Screen Time / Health Breaks, Mutter 48 Alpha Out Too

13 January 11:50 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME 48 Alpha

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.

DXVK 2.5.3 Brings More Fixes For Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 On Vulkan

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.

Linux Attack Vector Controls Updated To More Easily Controlling CPU Security Mitigations

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.

A Microsoft-Contributed Change To Linux 6.13 Is Causing A Last Minute Ruckus

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.

Alibaba Engineers Work To Address Suspend/Resume Bugs With The AMD Graphics Driver

13 January 07:00 AM EST - Radeon - Suspend and Resume

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.

Intel Gigabit Ethernet Driver To Speed-Up With AF_XDP Zero-Copy For Linux 6.14

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Linux Patches Reworked In 4th Spin

13 January 06:20 AM EST - AMD - INVLPGB

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.

Hyprland Wayland Compositor Lands HDR / Color Management Support

13 January 06:05 AM EST - Wayland - Hyprland Goes HDR

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.

GCC 15 Compiler Enters Its Final Stage Of Development

13 January 05:51 AM EST - GNU - GCC 15

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.

12 January

Linux 6.13-rc7 Released: Linux 6.13 Stable Likely Next Week

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 Brings Auto-Detection For Intel Granite Rapids, Apple M4 & AMD Zen 5

12 January 10:58 AM EST - Programming - OpenBLAS 0.3.29

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs.

NTSYNC Driver Ready For Enhancing Windows Gaming With Linux 6.14

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

Enlightenment 0.27 Released For This 28 Year Old Window Manager / Compositor

12 January 06:39 AM EST - Desktop - Enlightenment 0.27

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!

Linux cpupower Utility To See Improved AMD Support With Linux 6.14 Kernel

12 January 06:31 AM EST - AMD - cpupower + AMD

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Niri 25.01 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Brings More Features

12 January 06:14 AM EST - Wayland - Niri 25.01

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts.

11 January

Fedora 42 Looks To Ship Optimized Executables For Different x86_64 Capabilities

11 January 01:00 PM EST - Fedora - Fedora Optimized Binaries

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Debian 12.9 Released With Various Security & Bug Fixes

11 January 10:32 AM EST - Debian - Debian 12.9

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages.

AMD Preps More GPU Driver Fixes For Linux 6.14, Cleaner Shader For RDNA2 dGPUs

11 January 08:54 AM EST - Radeon - AMDGPU

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

Intel Xe Driver Adding "RPa" Frequency Reporting With Linux 6.14

11 January 07:07 AM EST - Intel - RPa Information

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

GNOME Image Viewer Now Editing JPEGs, Other GNOME 48 Progress

11 January 06:45 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME 48

GNOME 48 is moving along with the GNOME 48 Alpha packages due this weekend followed by the beta in early February. GNOME 48 is still making good progress in its goal to release on 19 March.

Sony Proposes Changing LLVM Clang Default To C++20 Mode

11 January 06:33 AM EST - LLVM - C++20 Default Mode

Sony engineers are proposing that the LLVM Clang compiler changes its default C++ mode from C++17 to C++20. This coincides with Sony planning to soon upgrade their PlayStation 5 compiler downstream to C++20 by default.

KDE Plasma 6.3 Bringing A More Consistent Close Button, Other Last Minute Changes

11 January 06:13 AM EST - KDE - KDE Plasma 6.3

This week brought the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta as well as a number of last minute feature changes for this desktop update due for release in February.

10 January

Intel Open-Source Vulkan Driver Merges Initial AV1 Decode Support

10 January 08:37 PM EST - Intel - Intel ANV With Vulkan Video AV1 Decode

Merged this Friday night for Mesa 25.0 is initial Vulkan Video AV1 decode support for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.

Wine 10.0-rc5 Brings Another 31 Bug Fixes

10 January 04:53 PM EST - WINE - Wine 10.0-rc5

Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes.

Experimental Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" v2 Patches: I/O Throughput Lower By 70%

Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit.

Git 2.48 Released With Initial Support For The Meson Build System

Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system.

More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13

10 January 12:02 PM EST - Intel - Clearwater Forest Bits

Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors.

Lenovo Discovers Situation Of Linux Dropping PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs To Gen 1 Speeds

A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution.

Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.

VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 Brings A Few Fixes For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan

10 January 09:02 AM EST - Valve - VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.

Ubuntu Considers Taking It Easier On Software Updates Over Weekends

10 January 07:03 AM EST - Ubuntu - Less Weekend Updates

Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.

12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix

10 January 06:40 AM EST - Intel - Haswell Fix

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.

Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games

10 January 06:25 AM EST - Mesa - Faster Gaming Performance