Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

More HDR Preparations Merged In Time For GNOME 47
More HDR Preparations Merged In Time For GNOME 47
10 Hours Ago - GNOME - Display HDR Prepping - 12 Comments

Following the recent Mutter 47 beta release that also marks the feature freze point for GNOME 47, there still are some High Dynamic Range (HDR) display preparations being merged ahead of this next stable desktop release due out in September.

AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance
14 Hours Ago - Processors - 49 Comments

This could quite well be my simplest review in the past twenty years of Phoronix. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.

6 August

NVMe 2.1 Specifications Published With New Capabilities
NVMe 2.1 Specifications Published With New Capabilities
6 August 12:49 PM EDT - Standards - NVMe 2.1 - 7 Comments

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.

Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs Offer Great Performance For Servers
Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs Offer Great Performance For Servers
6 August 11:07 AM EDT - Storage - 7 Comments

Solidigm today is formally announcing the D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs for the data center. The new D7-PS1010 solid-state drives offer phenomenal performance for PCIe Gen 5 servers as I've enjoyed in testing out a few of these D7-PS1010 SSDs the past several weeks and their leading performance that should be especially appealing for modern AI and HPC servers.

Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down
Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down
6 August 10:38 AM EDT - Radeon - Open-Source AMD CUDA - 94 Comments

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.

NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux Driver Delivers Various Fixes
NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux Driver Delivers Various Fixes
6 August 10:17 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 560.31.02 - 6 Comments

Following last month's NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta release where the open GPU kernel modules are used by default with Turing GPUs and newer, the NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux driver has debuted today in stable form for the R560 series.

QNAP TS-433 Making For A Nice Open-Source & Mainline Linux NAS Experience
QNAP TS-433 Making For A Nice Open-Source & Mainline Linux NAS Experience
6 August 09:53 AM EDT - Hardware - QNAP TS-433 - 7 Comments

While there is no shortage of consumer network attached storage (NAS) devices these days, those able to run a mainline Linux kernel, open bootloader, and other open/mainline software components is a bit more challenging. Thanks to the work of open-source developer Heiko Stuebner, the QNAP TS-433 is looking to be an interesting candidate for those wanting a nice 4-bay NAS while being able to load it with a mainline Linux kernel build and other upstream open-source software.

5 August

AMD XDNA Linux Kernel Driver For Ryzen AI Updated
AMD XDNA Linux Kernel Driver For Ryzen AI Updated
5 August 02:19 PM EDT - AMD - AMDXDNA v2 - 3 Comments

At the start of the year AMD posted an open-source XDNA Linux driver to GitHub for supporting the Ryzen API NPU IP found within their newest Ryzen mobile SoCs. It wasn't until last month though in mid-July that AMD began the process of submitting the driver for review so that it can work its way toward the mainline Linux kernel within the "accel" accelerator subsystem. Today brings a second revision to that driver.

Trying Out The Ubuntu "-O3" Optimized Build For Greater Performance
Trying Out The Ubuntu "-O3" Optimized Build For Greater Performance
5 August 12:30 PM EDT - Operating Systems - 46 Comments

Canonical engineers on Friday announced they are evaluating "-O3" compiler optimized package builds for Ubuntu Linux. As part of this evaluation of using GCC's -O3 compiler optimization level rather than -O2 when compiling Ubuntu packages, experimental Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs are available for testing with this change. Excitingly I ran some initial benchmarks over the weekend in looking at the performance difference.

4 August

The Open-Source AMD GPU Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Nears 5.8 Million Lines
The Open-Source AMD GPU Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Nears 5.8 Million Lines
4 August 10:47 AM EDT - Radeon - AMDGPU Line Count - 47 Comments

Last August I wrote an article about the open-source AMD GPU kernel driver crossing 5 million lines of code -- including their overzealous header files -- and following the recent Linux 6.11 merge window curiosity got the best of me with how much larger the kernel driver is now that the initial RDNA4 support is merged... Well, it's about to cross 5.8 million lines, or about a 16% increase just over the past year.

New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement
New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement
4 August 06:58 AM EDT - Intel - Intel P-State Scheduling - 2 Comments

Building off some "request for comments" patches sent out in April, a new set of patches appeared on Friday for the Intel P-State Linux driver for setting the asymmetric CPU capacity on hybrid systems. This is another attempt at helping to improve the Linux kernel scheduler behavior in ensuring optimal task placement between Intel Core processors having a mix of P and E cores. This patch series in particular helps when SMT / Hyper Threading support is disabled or like with upcoming Lunar Lake processors where there is no HT support.

3 August

Linux 6.12 To Drop Old Code That Slows Down CPU Frequency Polling
3 August 01:00 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - LATENCY_MULTIPLIER - 14 Comments

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year has a change coming that will impact users of the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. This change is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER" that has been within the kernel code the past two decades to slowdown how frequent the CPU frequency evaluation occurs. In turn the revised logic can allow for that CPUFreq frequency re-evaluation to occur more often.

2 August

Canonical Evaluating -O3 Optimized Packages For Ubuntu Linux
2 August 05:02 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu -O3 Compiler Optimizations - 30 Comments

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the engineers at Canonical began focusing more on the performance of Ubuntu and establishing a performance team at the company. This work is ongoing and for Ubuntu 24.10 they are exploring another exciting area: leveraging "-O3" compiler optimizations for Ubuntu packages. Available today is an experimental build of the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs that are compiled for the -O3 optimization level.

AMD Releases ROCm 6.2 With New Components, Improves PyTorch & TensorFlow
2 August 02:52 PM EDT - Radeon - ROCm 6.2 - 24 Comments

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

Etnaviv NPU Driver Support Working Well For The NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC
2 August 05:50 AM EDT - Hardware - Etnaviv NPU - Add A Comment

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who has been working on supporting Vivante NPU IP within the reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver has been much time recently focused on enabling the Vivante NPU found within the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. While not yet upstreamed, he's been successful in this effort and seeing good performance for object detection with this hardware.

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