Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Qualcomm Linux Driver Prepares For New "AIC080" Lower-Cost Cloud AI Accelerator
Qualcomm Linux Driver Prepares For New "AIC080" Lower-Cost Cloud AI Accelerator
59 Minutes Ago - Hardware - Qualcomm Cloud AI 80 - Add A Comment

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost.

AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Dominates Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake Performance For Linux Developers & Creators
AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Dominates Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake Performance For Linux Developers & Creators
4 Hours Ago - Processors - 12 Comments

Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.

ZLUDA Takes On Third Life: Open-Source Multi-GPU CUDA Implementation Focused On AI
ZLUDA Takes On Third Life: Open-Source Multi-GPU CUDA Implementation Focused On AI
7 Hours Ago - Free Software - ZLUDA - 21 Comments

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.

Red Hat Engineer Working On DRM Panic Support For AMDGPU Driver
Red Hat Engineer Working On DRM Panic Support For AMDGPU Driver
10 Hours Ago - Radeon - DRM Panic - 11 Comments

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.

Zink Seeing VA-API Video Acceleration Implemented Over Vulkan Video
Zink Seeing VA-API Video Acceleration Implemented Over Vulkan Video
11 Hours Ago - Mesa - VA-API On Vulkan Video - 11 Comments

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath.

Servo Browser Adds Android Downloads, Improved Tabbing & More
Servo Browser Adds Android Downloads, Improved Tabbing & More
11 Hours Ago - Mozilla - Servo Browser - 12 Comments

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.

3 October

MRDIMM 8800MT/s vs. DDR5-6400 Memory Performance With Intel Xeon 6
MRDIMM 8800MT/s vs. DDR5-6400 Memory Performance With Intel Xeon 6
3 October 04:00 PM EDT - Memory - 9 Comments

Last week when kicking off the Intel Granite Rapids benchmarking with the Xeon 6980P processors there was particularly strong performance within HPC and other scientific computing workloads. Besides going now up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket, another reason for the especially strong generational uplift and against the current AMD EPYC competition is Xeon 6 Granite Rapids introducing Multiplexed Rank memory support. One of the areas I've been eager to explore is quantifying the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800MT/s performance difference and this article is dedicated to looking at that memory performance impact for the Xeon 6900P series.

Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" List Prices Top Out At $17,800 USD
Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" List Prices Top Out At $17,800 USD
3 October 02:30 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Xeon 6900P Pricing - 4 Comments

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD.

Fedora's Kernel Build Now Enabling Sched_Ext Support
Fedora's Kernel Build Now Enabling Sched_Ext Support
3 October 08:37 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora + sched_ext - 6 Comments

Now that sched_ext was upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the many great features in Linux 6.12, Fedora's kernel builds are prepared to enable this innovative scheduler feature that allows for new scheduling policies to be loaded via (e)BPF programs.

Giga Computing Announces GA On Their AmpereOne Servers
Giga Computing Announces GA On Their AmpereOne Servers
3 October 06:17 AM EDT - Arm - General Availability - 4 Comments

After years of AmpereComputing talking about AmpereOne AArch64 server processors, it looks like we are finally on the cusp of seeing broader availability of the processors and servers/motherboards for this ARM server platform up to 192 cores. At the end of August I finally received a temporary review system with the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship SKU. That server was the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR and is supposed to be seeing availability real soon. Now the latest on the AmpereOne front is Giga Computing (Gigabyte) announcing general availability of their servers.

2 October

Some Intel Linux Driver Maintainers Have Left The Company
Some Intel Linux Driver Maintainers Have Left The Company
2 October 02:23 PM EDT - Intel - Intel Layoffs - 18 Comments

With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.

Intel Xeon 6980P SNC3 vs. HEX Clustering Mode Performance
Intel Xeon 6980P SNC3 vs. HEX Clustering Mode Performance
2 October 11:10 AM EDT - Processors - 2 Comments

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors that launched last week there are SNC3 and HEX clustering modes for these new processors. The default Sub-NUMA Clustering 3 (SNC3) mode for the three compute dies while the HEX mode is like SNC1 mode formerly for all three compute dies acting as one NUMA node. Using the flagship 128-core Intel Xeon 6980P processors, I ran some benchmarks looking at the real-world performance difference for SNC3 vs. HEX clustering modes on Granite Rapids.

Notcurses Is Still Alive For Ramping Up "Terminal Bling" With Complex TUIs
Notcurses Is Still Alive For Ramping Up "Terminal Bling" With Complex TUIs
2 October 06:47 AM EDT - Programming - Notcurses - 25 Comments

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version.

Golang Now Enables Speedier getrandom() On Linux
Golang Now Enables Speedier getrandom() On Linux
2 October 06:34 AM EDT - Programming - Golang + getrandom vDSO - 5 Comments

The Linux 6.11 kernel introduced getrandom() in the vDSO for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. In addition to patches pending for Glibc to make use of getrandom() vDSO support, Golang is now another early user of this functionality.

1 October

Steam On Linux Percentage Receded A Bit Further In September
Steam On Linux Percentage Receded A Bit Further In September
1 October 08:21 PM EDT - Valve - Steam Survey - 62 Comments

Back in May Steam on Linux usage crossed the 2% threshold and remained that way until August when it dropped back below 2% for all Steam gamers. The September 2024 Steam Survey results were just published and point to another downward bump for Steam on Linux gaming.

Python 3.13 Sees Last Minute Delay Due To Performance Regression
Python 3.13 Sees Last Minute Delay Due To Performance Regression
1 October 01:41 PM EDT - Programming - Python 3.13-rc3 - 31 Comments

Python 3.13 had been scheduled for release today with a new interactive interpreter, experimental free-threaded build mode to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), an experimental JIT, and other shiny new features. But a performance regression has delayed the Python 3.13 release to next week and in turn an unexpected Python 3.13-rc3 final test release.

Kernel Recipes 2024 Slides & Videos Posted
Kernel Recipes 2024 Slides & Videos Posted
1 October 11:20 AM EDT - Linux Events - Kernel Recipes 2024 - 1 Comment

Taking place last week in Paris was the annual Kernel Recipes conference devoted to a variety of Linux topics and sponsored by Meta, Dell, Arm, AMD, and other organizations. The slides and videos from the different Linux/open-source talks are now online for those wanting to watch some interesting technical content.

Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne Server With R13SPD Motherboard
Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne Server With R13SPD Motherboard
1 October 10:34 AM EDT - Computers - 3 Comments

One of the interesting highlights of September was finally having our hands on an AmpereOne server! After years of being eager to test Ampere Computing's next-generation AArch64 server processors, Ampere sent over their 192-core flagship server processor for a few weeks of testing. The review server was comprised of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship model within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR 2U server.

AMD Announces EPYC Embedded 8004 Series
AMD Announces EPYC Embedded 8004 Series
1 October 09:52 AM EDT - AMD - AMD EPYC Embedded 8004 - 4 Comments

Building off last year's release of the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors featuring up to sixty-four Zen 4C cores, AMD today announced the EPYC Embedded 8004 series.

Reverse PRIME Now Works Nicely On Ubuntu 24.10
Reverse PRIME Now Works Nicely On Ubuntu 24.10
1 October 06:50 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Reverse PRIME + Ubuntu 24.10 - 12 Comments

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Linux 6.13 To Bring Big/Super Pages For The Raspberry Pi Graphics Driver - Better Performance
Linux 6.13 To Bring Big/Super Pages For The Raspberry Pi Graphics Driver - Better Performance
1 October 06:25 AM EDT - Raspberry Pi - Big + Super Pages - 8 Comments

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver.

WebKitGTK 2.46 Uses Skia Rather Than Cairo, More CPU/GPU Optimizations To Come
WebKitGTK 2.46 Uses Skia Rather Than Cairo, More CPU/GPU Optimizations To Come
1 October 06:17 AM EDT - GNOME - WebKitGTK 2.46 - 43 Comments

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come.

30 September

DOOM Ported To Run Atop AMD ROCm + LLVM libc
30 September 11:00 AM EDT - Radeon - DOOM ROCm Port - 36 Comments

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU.

Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Graphics Performance Disappoints On Linux
30 September 08:40 AM EDT - Graphics Cards - 50 Comments

While I have been very eager to test out the Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake series on Linux in part due to the new Xe2 integrated graphics, after several days of pushing a new Lunar Lake laptop on Linux the results have been very disappointing. Besides needing a very leading-edge software stack to enjoy the Xe2 accelerated graphics out-of-the-box, the performance currently is poor. It's a fraction of the Windows performance and currently falls behind the Meteor Lake graphics performance and in turn also being well behind the AMD RDNA3.5 competition with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops.

Cpufreq_ext Being Worked On For BPF-Based CPU Frequency Scaling
30 September 07:49 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - cpufreq_ext - 9 Comments

The newly-merged sched_ext allows for the Linux kernel scheduler to be made more extensible by allowing BPF programs to be loaded to affect the kernel's scheduling behavior. There's now a similar take on CPU frequency scaling: cpufreq_ext. There's a "request for comments" patch series on cpufreq_ext for making extensible CPU frequency scaling algorithm adaptations with BPF.

AMD Ryzen 9000 Series Excited Linux Users The Most In Q3
30 September 06:44 AM EDT - Hardware - Q3-2024 Recap - Add A Comment

With the third quarter drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source related content for the quarter. This quarter there's been more than 730 news articles and 50 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles all written by your's truly covering a range of areas.

29 September

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