Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

AMD EPYC Milan Still Gives Intel Sapphire Rapids Tough Competition In The Cloud
AMD EPYC Milan Still Gives Intel Sapphire Rapids Tough Competition In The Cloud
7 Hours Ago - Processors - 8 Comments

While waiting for AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" instances to become available via the major public cloud providers, I was curious to see how existing AMD EPYC Milan instances compare to Intel's new Sapphire Rapids instances in public preview on Google Cloud. While expecting some friendly competition, at the same vCPU size EPYC Milan was managing to deliver not only better performance-per-dollar but also even better raw performance in numerous workloads against the Google Cloud C3 Sapphire Rapids.

29 March

Intel Linux Kernel Optimizations Show Huge Benefit For High Core Count Servers
Intel Linux Kernel Optimizations Show Huge Benefit For High Core Count Servers
29 March 01:00 PM EDT - Software - 19 Comments

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel engineers working on more big optimizations to the Linux kernel with a focus on enhancing the kernel's performance at high core counts. The numbers shared then were very promising and since then I've had more time looking at the performance impact of Intel's stellar software optimization work and its impact on real-world workloads. Here is a look at how Intel's pending kernel optimization patches are a huge deal for today's high core count servers.

AMD Releases HIP Ray Tracing 2.0
AMD Releases HIP Ray Tracing 2.0
29 March 12:13 PM EDT - AMD - AMD HIP Ray-Tracing 2.0 - Add A Comment

AMD today published HIP Ray-Tracing 2.0 "HIP RT" as the newest version of their open-source ray-tracing library built for use with their latest-generation GPUs for leveraging hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Trend Micro Uncovers Yet Another X.Org Server Vulnerability: CVE-2023-1393
Trend Micro Uncovers Yet Another X.Org Server Vulnerability: CVE-2023-1393
29 March 08:30 AM EDT - X.Org - CVE-2023-1393 - 52 Comments

For over a decade now the X.Org Server has been seeing routine security disclosures in its massive codebase with some security researchers saying it's even worse than it looks and security researchers frequently finding multiple vulnerabilities at a time in the large and aging code-base that these days rarely sees new feature work. Today another disclosure was made by the folks with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

28 March

Ubuntu Cinnamon Becomes An Official Flavor For Ubuntu 23.04
Ubuntu Cinnamon Becomes An Official Flavor For Ubuntu 23.04
28 March 03:30 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.04 - 27 Comments

Since 2019 there has been Ubuntu Cinnamon as an unofficial remix of Ubuntu paired with Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. After the three years of progress, Ubuntu Cinnamon has now been granted an official status with next month's Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release.

Fedora 38 Beta Performance Mostly Flat, Few Regressions
Fedora 38 Beta Performance Mostly Flat, Few Regressions
28 March 01:00 PM EDT - Operating Systems - 10 Comments

For those curious how the performance of Fedora 38 is looking ahead of its official release at the end of April, here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at the performance of this leading-edge Linux distribution as of the Fedora 38 Beta milestone last week. On both Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X "Zen 4" desktop systems, the Fedora 37 performance was compared to that of Fedora 38 Beta.

QNX Support Restored For SDL3
QNX Support Restored For SDL3
28 March 06:50 AM EDT - Linux Gaming - SDL3 + QNX - 7 Comments

When SDL3 development kicked off last November for this open-source library that is widely used by cross-platform games and other software, QNX support was removed alongside other old targets. Just months later, the QNX platform support is being revived.

Intel Releases GPGMM v0.1 GPU Memory Management Library
Intel Releases GPGMM v0.1 GPU Memory Management Library
28 March 06:06 AM EDT - Intel - GPGMM v0.1 - 1 Comment

Intel has published v0.1 of its GPGMM software, the open-source General-Purpose GPU Memory Management Library. This library is intended to be used by modern software employing the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs for helping application developers deal with low-level video memory management.

27 March

Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games
Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games
27 March 02:00 PM EDT - Radeon - RADV Memory Optimization - 24 Comments

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones
Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones
27 March 12:50 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal - 11 Comments

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

Intel Sapphire Rapids Performance With Google Cloud Compute Engine C3
Intel Sapphire Rapids Performance With Google Cloud Compute Engine C3
27 March 12:00 PM EDT - Processors - 1 Comment

Back in October Google announced their Compute Engine C3 instances in private preview that featured 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors as well as making use of Google's custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Since then, back in January, was the big Sapphire Rapids launch with the likes of the Xeon Platinum 8490H being released. Last month meanwhile Google promoted the C3 VMs to public preview state. The Sapphire Rapids C3 VMs remain in "public preview" from Google Cloud during which time there are no charges involved for the CPU costs. For those wondering about the core-for-core performance of Sapphire Rapids in Google Cloud, here are my initial benchmarks of the C3 series.

AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13
AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13
27 March 10:39 AM EDT - GNU - AmpereOne Optimizations - 12 Comments

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table.

XWayland Lands Fix For At Least One Game Hanging It & Causing 100% CPU Usage
XWayland Lands Fix For At Least One Game Hanging It & Causing 100% CPU Usage
27 March 07:02 AM EDT - X.Org - Resident Evil Causes XWayland Evil - 78 Comments

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title.

OBS Studio Lands AV1 & HEVC RTMP Streaming Support
OBS Studio Lands AV1 & HEVC RTMP Streaming Support
27 March 06:44 AM EDT - Multimedia - AV1 + HEVC RTMP Streaming - 20 Comments

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix
FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix
27 March 06:30 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 - Add A Comment

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system.

26 March

Linux Will Stop Randomizing Per-CPU Entry Area When KASLR Is Not Active
26 March 11:40 AM EDT - Linux Security - Avoids Randomizing When KASLR Off - 2 Comments

With the Linux 6.2 release kernel developers addressed "a tasty target for attackers" after it was realized that the per-CPU entry data was not being randomized, even in the presence of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The per-CPU entry area randomization has been present since Linux 6.3 but then was realized it's being activated even if KASLR was disabled, so now that is changing to avoid possible confusion.

25 March

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