Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend
XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend
7 Hours Ago - Wayland - GBM Only - 24 Comments

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess.

LLVM Clang Shows Off Great Performance Advantage On NVIDIA GH200's Neoverse-V2 Cores
LLVM Clang Shows Off Great Performance Advantage On NVIDIA GH200's Neoverse-V2 Cores
12 Hours Ago - Software - 5 Comments

With my recent NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU benchmarks carried out remotely via GPTshop.ai, besides looking at areas like the 64K kernel page size performance benefits I also ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance difference when the binaries were generated by LLVM Clang rather than the default GCC compiler on Ubuntu Linux. This article shows off the performance difference for the 72-core Neoverse-V2 server/HPC processor when leveraging LLVM Clang rather than the GNU Compiler Collection.

CoreCtrl 1.4 Brings Radeon RX 7000 Series Fan Curve Controls, Intel CPU Temperatures
CoreCtrl 1.4 Brings Radeon RX 7000 Series Fan Curve Controls, Intel CPU Temperatures
13 Hours Ago - Free Software - CoreCtrl 1.4 - 3 Comments

CoreCtrl 1.4 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source, independently-developed GUI utility for managing CPU and GPU performance characteristics and power/thermal monitoring under Linux, among other capabilities. CoreCtrl does a good job at offering basic GUI-driven controls and monitoring for CPUs and GPUs in the absence of any official GUI solutions by the likes of AMD and Intel.

AMD Zen 5 "Znver5" CPU Enablement Merged For GCC 14
AMD Zen 5 "Znver5" CPU Enablement Merged For GCC 14
16 Hours Ago - AMD - Znver5 - 6 Comments

Back in February AMD posted GCC compiler enablement support for Zen 5 with the new "znver5" target ahead of launch. Since then it's been rather quiet and nervous not seeing this support merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 14 stable release, but this morning it's finally happened: the AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks.

Linux 6.9 Continues Clearing Out Code For Intel's Defunct "Carillo Ranch" Platform
Linux 6.9 Continues Clearing Out Code For Intel's Defunct "Carillo Ranch" Platform
16 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel Carillo Ranch - 3 Comments

Last year Linux kernel developers began clearing out code for Intel's nearly two decade old "Carillo Ranch" platform that was a 90nm 32-bit single core processor for embedded devices in the sub 20 Watt space. It was a ~2007 product that never shipped but the Linux kernel code was left in the upstream tree until beginning to see it removed last year.

17 March

16 March

SDL Storage API Merged For SDL 3.0
SDL Storage API Merged For SDL 3.0
16 March 07:35 PM EDT - Linux Gaming - SDL_Storage API - 18 Comments

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0.

RadeonSI OpenGL CTS Tests Running ~30% Faster With Mesa 24.1
RadeonSI OpenGL CTS Tests Running ~30% Faster With Mesa 24.1
16 March 09:58 AM EDT - Radeon - Mesa Optimizations - 17 Comments

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

An Open-Source Driver Effort Has Begun For Rockchip's NPU
An Open-Source Driver Effort Has Begun For Rockchip's NPU
16 March 09:12 AM EDT - Hardware - Reverse Engineered - 4 Comments

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs.

15 March

The Performance Impact Of Intel's Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" Mitigation
The Performance Impact Of Intel's Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" Mitigation
15 March 03:00 PM EDT - Software - 15 Comments

Earlier this week on Patch Tuesday was the disclosure by Intel of the Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) vulnerability and mitigation via updated CPU microcode and a kernel patch. RFDS is around malicious user-space software potentially being able to infer stale register values from kernel space. Register File Data Sampling affects recent Intel Atom / E-core bearing processors including the latest Raptor Lake Refresh processors. In this article are some initial benchmarks of the RFDS performance impact under Linux when using the Core i9 14900K processor.

Bcachefs Sees Improved Journal Pipelining & More Efficient Discard With Linux 6.9
Bcachefs Sees Improved Journal Pipelining & More Efficient Discard With Linux 6.9
15 March 02:00 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Bcachefs + Linux 6.9 - 15 Comments

Earlier this week with the original Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.9 Linus Torvalds wasn't happy with some of the code pertaining to spinning out a new library code so that it could be re-used by at least the XFS file-system. A revised pull request was since submitted without that library spin-out and Torvalds today went ahead and merged that updated file-system driver.

Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC Support Upstreamed In Linux 6.9
Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC Support Upstreamed In Linux 6.9
15 March 06:16 AM EDT - Hardware - Mobileye EyeQ4 - Add A Comment

While Mobileye has already announced EyeQ6 and EyeQ7, being upstreamed in the Linux 6.9 kernel is finally support for the EyeQ5 SoC used for advanced driver-assistance systems in various automobiles. The EyeQ5 is a MIPS-based platform now capable of running an upstream kernel.

14 March

Harnessing Incredible AI Compute Power Atop Open-Source Software: 8 x AMD MI300X Accelerators On Linux
14 March 03:00 PM EDT - Graphics Cards - 25 Comments

A few days ago I had the chance to indulge on an incredible compute nirvana: eight AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators at my disposal for some albeit brief testing. Not only was it fantastic from the sheer compute performance, but for Phoronix fans, all the more exciting knowing it's atop a fully open-source software stack from the kernel driver up through the various user-space libraries (well, sans the GPU microcode). This first encounter with the AMD MI300 series was eye-opening in seeing how far the ROCm software stack has come and the increased challenges for NVIDIA going forward with the rising competitiveness of AMD's hardware and software efforts.

AMD Makes HIP Ray-Tracing Open-Source
14 March 02:29 PM EDT - AMD - HIP RT - 7 Comments

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available.

Rust-Tailored Slint GUI Toolkit Adding Python API
14 March 08:45 AM EDT - Programming - Slint 1.5 - 33 Comments

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API.

Mesa 24.1 Adds Support For The Intel Data Center GPU Flex 170G
14 March 06:43 AM EDT - Intel - Data Center GPU Flex 170G - 1 Comment

The current Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series products that were announced in 2022 built off Arctic Sound M are the Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Data Center GPU Flex 170 while now a new "170G" variant was added for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

13 March

LVFS/Fwupd Ponders 2025 Plans: Servers, Desktop Motherboards & More
13 March 09:37 AM EDT - LVFS - LVFS + Fwupd - 10 Comments

Richard Hughes of Red Hat who leads development of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd firmware updating utility is currently pondering plans for 2025. Among the ideas he's seeking input from the community is on whether the main focus should be on servers, desktop motherboards, laptops, or other removable hardware/peripherals.

Linux 6.9 Cleans Up Printk Code While Preparing For Atomic Consoles
13 March 08:52 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - printk - 7 Comments

The Linux work around atomic consoles and threaded printing remains ongoing. This work is particularly interesting as it's the last major blocker before real-time "RT" kernel support can land. This work sadly isn't ready for the new Linux 6.9 cycle but at least some printk clean-ups are landing for issues discovered during the atomic consoles effort.

Mesa 24.1 Enables Intel Xe Kernel Driver Support By Default
13 March 07:47 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Xe KMD - 7 Comments

While the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.8 as this modern DRM driver that is opt-in for current generation hardware and aims to be the default for Lunar Lake / Xe2, currently with Mesa you must build the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code with the "intel-xe-kmd" option to enable compatibility for this alternative kernel driver to i915. With Mesa 24.1 coming next quarter, that Intel Xe kernel driver support will be enabled out-of-the-box.

Blumenkrantz Picks His Next Battle: Mesa's DRI Interfaces
13 March 06:52 AM EDT - Mesa - Direct Rendering Infrastructure - 27 Comments

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces.

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