Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News (original) (raw)
Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental "LEO"
6 Minutes Ago - Intel - Intel Nova Lake
Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.
Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency
A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.
Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system.
Wine Wayland Lands Fractional Scaling Support
2 Hours Ago - WINE - Wine Wayland + Fractional Scaling
Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver.
Linux 7.2 Continues Removing Old i486 Code Remnants, Adds Rugged Panther Lake
The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.
XFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2
The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag.
Linux 7.2 Power Management Adds New Hardware Support While Dropping AMD Elan
5 Hours Ago - Hardware - Linux 7.2 Power Management
The power management changes merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel are aplenty as usual. New hardware support, dropping obsolete hardware support, and various bug fixes and other enhancements throughout this important area of the kernel.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements
6 Hours Ago - KDE - Plasma 6.7
Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.
Linux 7.2 Drops Driver For The 40+ Year Old Hercules Monochrome ISA Graphics Card
6 Hours Ago - Hardware - Hercules Monochrome ISA
After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers, there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play.
15 June
Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code
In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage.
FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements
15 June 08:56 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 15.1
After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system.
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners
15 June 05:22 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0
The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July.
Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations
15 June 04:15 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Performance Skills
The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux.
FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
15 June 03:08 PM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD + AI
The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI.
GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
15 June 02:51 PM EDT - GNU - GCC + WebAssembly
Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC.
Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR
15 June 12:43 PM EDT - Arch Linux - Arch Linux AUR
After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware, the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages.
Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI
15 June 11:15 AM EDT - Mozilla - Firefox 152
The Firefox 152.0 release binaries are now available ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling. With Firefox 152 there is now the JPEG-XL support code being compiled by default for the release albeit still disabled at run-time by default behind a preference for now.
Reading /proc/filesystems Is Surprisingly Done Very Often & Now As Much As 444% Faster
Reading /proc/filesystems for obtaining a list of file-systems supported by the running kernel is done frequently on Linux. Namely due to being read by the SELinux library (libselinux), reading of /proc/filesystems is done more often than one would typically expect and now the Linux 7.2 kernel is optimizing for it to yield much better performance.
Framework Computer Making Progress On Coreboot For Their Modern Intel-Powered Laptops
15 June 09:05 AM EDT - Coreboot - Framework Computer + Coreboot
While we have seen Coreboot work-in-progress support for older Ryzen-powered Framework Laptops, it seems there is a recent uptick in development around supporting Coreboot on Framework Computer's modern Intel-powered wares.
Cache Aware Scheduling Merged For Linux 7.2 For Boosting Modern Intel & AMD CPUs
15 June 08:31 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - Cache Aware Scheduling
The scheduler updates were merged this morning for the Linux 7.2 kernel and it's exciting. Cache Aware Scheduling has finally been merged! This is a win for especially modern Intel and AMD processors with multiple last level caches (LLCs).
Linux 7.2 Introducing The Rust Zerocopy Library To Eliminate More "Unsafe" Code
Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel.
Linux 7.2 To Better Communicate File-System Casefolding For Helping Windows NFS & More
Newly-merged code for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel will now expose the case-folding (case insensitive) behavior of local file-systems so that Linux file servers and others can properly report the actual behavior rather than guessing if case-folding is actually used/supported.
GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal
15 June 05:55 AM EDT - GNU - GNU Linux-libre 7.1
Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom.
14 June
Linux 7.2 To Raise LLVM/Clang Compiler Requirement, Add Support For Distributed ThinLTO
Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today's Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates.
Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics
Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it's coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.
Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack
14 June 06:32 AM EDT - Arch Linux - Arch Linux AUR Malware
Just a day after Arch Linux developers believed they got their malware AUR incident under control with 1,500+ packages affected by malware, another round of of AUR malware is now being discovered. This latest round is more sophisticated as with code obfuscation to better conceal the intent.
Revised AVX-512 xor_gen() Implementation For Linux RAID Yielding More Performance Gains
A few days back I wrote about Google's Eric Biggers spearheading an AVX-512 implementation of xor_gen() as the Linux kernel function used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5/RAID6. That initial implementation was yielding up to 41% better performance while a new implementation has now been posted for scoring some additional victories.
pkgcli As PackageKit's Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface
Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.
13 June
Wine-Staging 11.11 Released With 289 Patches Atop Upstream
13 June 08:52 PM EDT - WINE - Wine-Staging 11.11
Following Friday's exciting release of Wine 11.11 with Wayland driver improvements, Wine-Staging 11.11 is now available for this experimental/testing derivative that continues carrying nearly 300 patches atop the upstream codebase.
Intel Ending Development Of BigDL: An Open-Source AI/LLM Effort Getting Axed
13 June 10:38 AM EDT - Intel - Intel BigDL
Among Intel's ongoing reduction in open-source projects they maintain, their BigDL open-source project focused on running large language models across Intel XPUs from Core Ultra laptops to discrete GPUs to cloud / data center hardware all in a low-latency manner, is being ended.
Fedora 45 Considering A Lightened GRUB Bootloader For Confidential Compute
13 June 08:22 AM EDT - Fedora - GRUB Light
Among the changes being considered for the in-development Fedora 45 is a lightened version of the GRUB UEFI bootloader that would focus on being a minimal implementation suitable for confidential computing.
Intel Thermald 2.5.12 Released... With Initial Support For ARM
13 June 06:47 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Thermald Comes To ARM
Released on Friday was the newest version of Intel Thermald, the thermal daemon developed by Intel for their processors on Linux for monitoring and helping control temperatures across modern Intel-powered laptops and desktops. Catching me immediately by surprise was Intel Thermald 2.5.12 introducing support for ARM.
GCC 17 Merges Function Multi-Versioning For APX & AVX10.2
13 June 06:20 AM EDT - GNU - Optimize That Code
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel working on function multi-versioning support for APX and AVX10.2 with the GCC compiler. This allows developers to write optimized code paths specifically targeting Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) or Advanced Vector Extensions 10.2 capabilities of future processors while being able to otherwise fall-back to generic or other optimized code paths for other ISA target features. This work is now merged for GCC 17.
Haiku OS Now Enables AVX-512 Support, Other Hardware Improvements
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Sees Last Minute Fixes Ahead Of Next Week's Release
13 June 05:46 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 6.7 Next Week
Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.
12 June
Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages
12 June 08:55 PM EDT - Arch Linux - Arch Linux AUR
The day started out with Arch Linux's AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages.
OpenZFS 2.4.3 Released With Many Bug Fixes
OpenZFS 2.4.3 is out today as the newest stable point release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation as well as point releases for the OpenZFS 2.3 and 2.2 series too.
Wine 11.11 Released With Wayland Improvements
12 June 05:13 PM EDT - WINE - Wine 11.11
Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.11 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for running Windows games and applications under Linux as well as other platforms.
AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform
12 June 03:34 PM EDT - AMD - AMD Ryzen AI Halo
AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux.
Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks.
Red Hat Releases Second Developer Preview Of RHEL 10 For RISC-V
12 June 11:56 AM EDT - Red Hat - RHEL 10.2 For RISC-V
Last year when releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, Red Hat announced a RHEL 10.0 developer preview for RISC-V. Since then that RISC-V developer preview hadn't been updated but now Red Hat has published a new developer preview snapshot based on RHEL 10.2.
Ever since AMD announced openSIL in early 2023 for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA and enhance their Coreboot support, I have been eager to try it out. The openSIL code drops to date though have just focused on select reference platforms with only aiming for production status in the Zen 6 timeframe. But thanks to 3mdeb porting openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte server motherboard, it's now possible to try out openSIL+Coreboot right now on Zen 5 hardware.
The Best Features Of Linux 7.1: FRED, New NTFS Driver & More Performance
On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1.
Ubuntu 26.10 Reaffirms Plans For Switching To Dbus-Broker
12 June 11:26 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu + Dbus-Broker
Among the many new features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 is switching the default D-Bus implementation over to using the high performance Dbus-Broker drop-in replacement.
New NTFS Linux Driver Being Improved For Windows Native Symbolic Links
12 June 09:00 AM EDT - Linux Storage - Windows Native Symbolic Links
One of the exciting additions to the Linux 7.1 kernel is the introduction of the new NTFS file-system kernel driver. While in good shape already and proving advantageous over other NTFS open-source driver options, one of the initial limitations on it is around Windows native symbolic link handling but that is now in the process of being resolved.
AVX-512 Optimization For Linux RAID Showing Up To 41% Improvement On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Linux cryptography subsystem expert Eric Biggers Eric Biggers of Google worked on some pretty nice Intel/AMD x86_64 optimizations over the years. Especially around AVX-512 optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto code has been one of his many nice improvements to the kernel in recent times. Today he's out with another enticing AVX-512 optimization and this time it's for the software RAID code.
Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware
The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised.
Wine Wayland Driver Lands Alpha Modifier Support For Opacity Handling
12 June 06:15 AM EDT - Wayland - alpha-modifier-v1
The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces.
Qt 6.12 Beta Released With Qt Quick 3D XR Apps Now Able To Run On 2D AR Glasses
12 June 06:06 AM EDT - Qt - Qt 6.12 Beta
The first beta release of the Qt 6.12 toolkit is now available for testing. Qt 6.12 is packing a number of refinements and new features compared to earlier Qt6 releases. For paying Qt commercial customers, Qt 6.12 is also going to be the latest Qt6 Long Term Support (LTS) release.
GCC 15.3 Compiler Brings Nearly A Year Worth Of Bug Fixes
12 June 05:53 AM EDT - GNU - GCC 15.3
For those relying on last year's stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes.
11 June
Mesa 26.2 Preps For AMD GFX1156 For New, Post-Strix-Halo RDNA 3.5 Graphics
11 June 01:34 PM EDT - Radeon - GFX1156
Being submitted on the kernel side with the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is initial support for the GFX 11.5.6 graphics IP block along with several other newer IP blocks such as SDMA 6.4, NBIO 7.11.5, IH 6.4, HDP 6.4, MMHUB 3.4.2, SMU 15.0.5, ATHUB 3.4.2, and VPE 2.2. Now in user-space for the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers is the GFX1156 (GFX 11.5.6) support being prepared too.
Git 2.55-rc0 Released With Rust Enabled By Default
Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default.
Khronos Releases glTF 2.1 To Make This 3D Asset Standard Work Well For Large Scenes
It's crazy realizing that glTF 2.0 is already nine years old for this API-neutral 3D runtime and asset delivery format. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group today extended that with the debut of glTF 2.1 as a backward-compatible revision to the specification.
YSERVER: Modern X11 Server Written In Rust With The Help Of Claude Code
11 June 09:46 AM EDT - X.Org - YSERVER
Open-source developer Jos Dehaes wrote in to Phoronix today in announcing a new X11 server he has been working on from scratch that has been quietly developed to this point but now ready to announce to the world... The YSERVER.
OpenJPH 0.28 Up To 1.9x Faster With New AVX2 Optimizations For High-Throughput JPEG2000
OpenJPH as an open-source implementation of high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (or JPH or HTJ2K) is now significantly faster for both encode and decode operations thanks to new AVX2 optimizations for Intel and AMD processors.
Intel's Open Image Denoise 2.5 Delivers Solid Performance Improvements For GPUs
11 June 06:04 AM EDT - Intel - Open Image Denoise 2.5
Intel's Open Image Denoise is the open-source project providing a high performance denoising library for ray-tracing and used by the likes of Blender and other renderers/creative apps for powerful denoising capabilities. Released last week was Open Image Denoise 2.5 with some very nice performance improvements for Intel GPUs.
GNOME Foundation Announces First Participants Of Fellowship Program
11 June 05:50 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME Fellowship
Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced.
Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY Driver Coming To Linux 7.2
One of the new network drivers destined for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window is for supporting the Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY.