Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend
XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend
18 March 04:05 PM EDT - Wayland - GBM Only - 34 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
18 March 11:20 AM EDT - Software - 10 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
18 March 10:12 AM EDT - Free Software - CoreCtrl 1.4 - 5 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
18 March 06:58 AM EDT - 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
18 March 06:42 AM EDT - 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
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
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
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

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.

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