Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

GNOME Executive Director Steps Down After Four Months
GNOME Executive Director Steps Down After Four Months
29 August 03:46 PM EDT - GNOME - Steven Deobald - 20 Comments

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director.

28 August

Linux 6.17 Showing Off Some Nice Gains For 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Performance
Linux 6.17 Showing Off Some Nice Gains For 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Performance
28 August 04:37 PM EDT - AMD - Linux 6.17 - 3 Comments

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.15 LTS through Linux 6.17 Git kernel performance using the latest stable and development kernels compared to the Long Term Support (LTS) kernels over the past four years. For having hardware support back to Linux 5.15 I was using an AMD EPYC Milan-X server. In those benchmarks there were some nice gains and even from Linux 6.16 to 6.17 Git was around a 3% geo mean improvement. So I was curious to run some benchmarks on the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors to see if there was similar uplift there.

AMD ISP4 Driver Updated As It Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel
AMD ISP4 Driver Updated As It Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel
28 August 10:31 AM EDT - AMD - AMD ISP4 - 4 Comments

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list was the patch series for introducing the AMD ISP4 driver to the mainline kernel. This supports the image signal processor IP that to date is found with HP's Strix Halo powered ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. With time, future AMD Ryzen laptops will also likely be leveraging this ISP technology for offloading more webcamera work from the CPU, but for now the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is the main beneficiary of this open-source driver.

Linux Patches To Unconditionally Enable Architecture-Optimized BLAKE2s Support
Linux Patches To Unconditionally Enable Architecture-Optimized BLAKE2s Support
28 August 06:34 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - Arch-Optimized BLAKE2s - 3 Comments

While Linus Torvalds doesn't too often like new kernel options being enabled by default, one area where it has proven beneficial and otherwise an oversight by those configuring their own kernel builds is the architecture-optimized crypto algorithm implementations. Some will enable support for different kernel crypto algorithms only to forget or be unaware that there are CPU architecture specific implementations that can also typically be enabled for much better performance over the common code. Google engineer Eric Biggers has been cleaning this up and BLAKE2s is the latest receiving treatment.

Agama 17 OS Installer Preps For SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0
Agama 17 OS Installer Preps For SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0
28 August 06:22 AM EDT - SUSE - SUSE Agama 17 - 5 Comments

Ahead of the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 release, SUSE engineers are busy finishing up work on their new "Agama" operating system installer. Agama 17 is now available as what will be the installer powering SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 installations or a version very similar to this latest milestone.

27 August

x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Aligning On FRED, AVX10 & APX
x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Aligning On FRED, AVX10 & APX
27 August 03:58 PM EDT - Hardware - x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group - 27 Comments

Last year Intel and AMD formed an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group "EAG" in collaboration with key partners. The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group is to collaborate and innovate further around the x86_64 ISA. With AMD and Intel in agreement, FRED (Flexible Return Event Delivery), AVX10, and Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) are some of the early areas where they are finding common ground and interest.

Mesa 25.1.9 Released To End Out The Mesa 25.1 Series
Mesa 25.1.9 Released To End Out The Mesa 25.1 Series
27 August 02:42 PM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 25.1 - 1 Comment

With Mesa 25.2.1 recently having been released, the prior quarter's Mesa 25.1 series is now drawing to a close. Excellent Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.9 as one last point release for Mesa 25.1 before ending this branch.

Framework Desktop Power Mode Tuning For Better Performance Or Power Efficiency
Framework Desktop Power Mode Tuning For Better Performance Or Power Efficiency
27 August 11:00 AM EDT - Computers - 4 Comments

Continuing on with our Framework Desktop benchmarking powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo", today we are looking at the performance and power impact of power mode tuning for this review sample powered by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SoC. A wide variety of benchmarks were done across the power saver / balanced / performance power modes for looking at the impact on performance as well as thermals and power consumption.

RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Untyped Pointers Support
RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Untyped Pointers Support
27 August 08:30 AM EDT - Radeon - RADV + VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers - 2 Comments

Introduced earlier this month with the Vulkan API 1.4.325 spec update was the introduction of the untyped pointers extension with VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers and SPIR-V's underlying SPV_KHR_untyped_pointers for providing an alternative option to strongly-typed pointers. As of yesterday the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now supporting this untyped pointers extension.

The Former Lead For Apple Graphics Drivers On Linux Is Now Working At Intel
The Former Lead For Apple Graphics Drivers On Linux Is Now Working At Intel
27 August 06:29 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Graphics Drivers - 61 Comments

There's a follow-up to yesterday's surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She's now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers.

Latest NOVA Patches From NVIDIA Get The GSP Booting To RISC-V Active State
Latest NOVA Patches From NVIDIA Get The GSP Booting To RISC-V Active State
27 August 06:15 AM EDT - NVIDIA - RISC-V GSP - Add A Comment

The NOVA open-source kernel graphics driver continues getting slowly built-up for the NVIDIA RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs that sport the GPU System Processor (GSP) for easing the hardware initialization and management of modern NVIDIA GPUs within the mainline kernel. This Rust-written kernel driver now has patches pending for booting up the NVIDIA GSP to its RISC-V active state.

26 August

With Apple M1/M2 Graphics Driver Code Working, Alyssa Rosenzweig Stepping Away From Asahi Linux
26 August 08:30 PM EDT - Apple - Alyssa Rosenzweig Leaving Asahi Linux - 110 Comments

As another very unfortunate setback for the Asahi Linux project moving forward after Hector Martin left the project as did Asahi Lina pausing work on open-source Apple driver development, Alyssa Rosenzweig announced today that she is stepping away from the project following the successes in bringing up Apple M1 and M2 graphics drivers for Linux.

Rusticl vs. Intel Compute Runtime Performance For OpenCL On Battlemage
26 August 12:00 PM EDT - Display Drivers - 18 Comments

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks of Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver against AMD ROCm on Strix Halo. Those benchmarks caught many by surprise with how well that Rust-based open-source OpenCL driver was working on AMD GPUs for being a generic OpenCL implementation built atop Mesa's Gallium3D. For those curious about the potential of Rusticl on the Intel graphics side, here are some Battlemage benchmarks for Rusticl up against Intel's official Compute Runtime driver stack.

Open-Source R300 Driver Adds New OpenGL Extensions For Two Decade Old Radeon GPUs
26 August 09:08 AM EDT - Radeon - Radeon R300 - 13 Comments

While the ATI Radeon 9000 / X300 / X500 / X600 series "R300" GPU support has long been unmaintained on the Microsoft Windows driver side, thanks to the open-source community the Linux driver support keeps going for the old ATI R300 GPUs with that driver also supporting the X700 / X800 "R400" and X1000 "R500" series graphics cards too. Two more OpenGL extensions are now wired up for the old R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa.

AMD & IBM Team Up For Quantum-Centric Supercomputing
26 August 06:28 AM EDT - AMD - AMD + IBM For Quantum Computing - 3 Comments

AMD and IBM announced a joint collaboration today around quantum-centric supercomputing. IBM's quantum computing expertise is to be paired with AMD's AI and HPC technology like their Instinct accelerators to help accelerate quantum-centric supercomputing.

Greenboot Rust Rewrite Approved For Fedora 43
26 August 06:00 AM EDT - Fedora - Greenboot In Rust - 12 Comments

Red Hat engineers have been rewriting Greenboot in the Rust programming language to replace the Bash-written version of this generic health check framework for systemd, bootc, and RPM-OSTree based Linux environments. That Rust rewrite of Greenboot is now cleared for appearing in the Fedora Linux 43 release.

25 August

GhostBSD Ships "Gershwin" Desktop Environment For A macOS Like Experience
25 August 08:54 PM EDT - BSD - GhostBSD + Gershwin - 34 Comments

GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 was announced this evening as the newest incremental update to this FreeBSD 14 based operating system focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box desktop experience. Notable with this new GhostBSD release is now shipping a Gershwin community preview for this desktop environment focused on providing a Mac OS X like user experience, complete with GNUstep usage.

Meson 1.9 Released With New Rust Features, Adds Swift/C++ Interoperability
25 August 06:39 AM EDT - Programming - Meson 1.9 - 19 Comments

Meson 1.9 released this weekend as the newest feature update to this build system / build automation tool that works well across different software platforms. With Meson 1.9 there is enhanced Rust support, introducing Swift and C++ code interoperability, and other enhancements to this increasingly used alternative to the likes of CMake and Autotools.

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