Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel Arc B580 Linux Graphics Driver Performance One Month After Launch
Intel Arc B580 Linux Graphics Driver Performance One Month After Launch
5 Hours Ago - Intel - Arc B580 Vulkan - 1 Comment

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

GCC Developers Consider Deprecating ARM64 ILP32 Support
GCC Developers Consider Deprecating ARM64 ILP32 Support
10 Hours Ago - Arm - ARM64 ILP32 - 1 Comment

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support Still Poses A Challenge For Linux Laptops
Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support Still Poses A Challenge For Linux Laptops
11 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel IPU6 Web Cameras - 17 Comments

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.

13 January

Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack
Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack
13 January 02:52 PM EST - Display Drivers - 22 Comments

Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.

12 January

Linux 6.13-rc7 Released: Linux 6.13 Stable Likely Next Week
Linux 6.13-rc7 Released: Linux 6.13 Stable Likely Next Week
12 January 06:24 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.13 - 6 Comments

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

NTSYNC Driver Ready For Enhancing Windows Gaming With Linux 6.14
NTSYNC Driver Ready For Enhancing Windows Gaming With Linux 6.14
12 January 08:00 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.14 NTSYNC - 28 Comments

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

11 January

Fedora 42 Looks To Ship Optimized Executables For Different x86_64 Capabilities
Fedora 42 Looks To Ship Optimized Executables For Different x86_64 Capabilities
11 January 01:00 PM EST - Fedora - Fedora Optimized Binaries - 42 Comments

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Intel Xe Driver Adding "RPa" Frequency Reporting With Linux 6.14
Intel Xe Driver Adding "RPa" Frequency Reporting With Linux 6.14
11 January 07:07 AM EST - Intel - RPa Information - Add A Comment

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

10 January

Experimental Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" v2 Patches: I/O Throughput Lower By 70%
10 January 02:17 PM EST - Linux Security - Linux ASI v2 - 8 Comments

Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit.

Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support
10 January 09:50 AM EST - Free Software - Servo Dark Mode - 14 Comments

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.

12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix
10 January 06:40 AM EST - Intel - Haswell Fix - 8 Comments

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.

9 January

AMD Secure TSC Support Might Finally Be Ready For Landing In The Linux Kernel
9 January 04:42 PM EST - AMD - Secure TSC For SEV-SNP - 3 Comments

Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.

Microsoft's Azure Linux Introduces New AMD Graphics Driver Options
9 January 10:28 AM EST - Microsoft - Azure Linux + Latest AMDGPU - Add A Comment

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.

Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Model Launches For $120 USD
9 January 03:00 AM EST - Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi 5 - 60 Comments

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.

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