Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Mesa 24.3-rc2 Brings Fixes For Intel & NVK Drivers
Mesa 24.3-rc2 Brings Fixes For Intel & NVK Drivers
4 Hours Ago - Mesa - Mesa 24.3-rc2 - Add A Comment

Last week Mesa 24.3 was finally branched and Mesa 24.3-rc1 subsequently issued for getting the release process kicked off for this quarterly 3D graphics driver feature release. Out today is Mesa 24.3-rc2 with an initial batch of fixes.

Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance
Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance
8 Hours Ago - Computers - 37 Comments

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

RISC-V Motherboard For Framework 13 Pricing Starts At $368 In Early Access, $928 For Laptop
RISC-V Motherboard For Framework 13 Pricing Starts At $368 In Early Access, $928 For Laptop
10 Hours Ago - Hardware - $928 For Laptop - 26 Comments

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced.

GNU C Library Merges Support for getrandom vDSO
GNU C Library Merges Support for getrandom vDSO
11 Hours Ago - GNU - glibc getrandom vDSO - 1 Comment

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged.

12 November

Intel Idle Support For Granite Rapids D Going Into Linux 6.13
Intel Idle Support For Granite Rapids D Going Into Linux 6.13
12 November 04:17 PM EST - Intel - intel_idle - 6 Comments

The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged.

Early Benchmarks: AMD EPYC 9005 Performance & Power Efficiency To Lead Further With Linux 6.13
Early Benchmarks: AMD EPYC 9005 Performance & Power Efficiency To Lead Further With Linux 6.13
12 November 11:10 AM EST - Processors - 1 Comment

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

Mesa 25.0 Clover OpenCL Drops Support For NIR Drivers
Mesa 25.0 Clover OpenCL Drops Support For NIR Drivers
12 November 07:00 AM EST - Mesa - Go Rusticl Go - 8 Comments

As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers.

11 November

Microsoft Announces Open-Source Hyperlight For Embedded VMM Within Linux/Windows Apps
Microsoft Announces Open-Source Hyperlight For Embedded VMM Within Linux/Windows Apps
11 November 10:10 AM EST - Microsoft - Microsoft Hyperlight - 56 Comments

Microsoft last month announced the open-source Rust-written OpenHCL for running confidential Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP virtual machines. Today Microsoft is announcing another interesting open-source, Rust-based project in the virtualization space: Hyperlight. Microsoft's Hyperlight project is an embed-friendly, lightweight VMM for use within Linux and Windows applications.

Basic Support For Many Pre-M1 Apple Devices Coming To Linux 6.13
Basic Support For Many Pre-M1 Apple Devices Coming To Linux 6.13
11 November 09:52 AM EST - Apple - Linux 6.13 Apple Improvements - 32 Comments

While not as exciting as if it were Apple M3/M4 device support hitting the upstream mainline Linux kernel, but for those with some older Apple (pre-M1) devices around, support for a number of older SoCs and boards is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

Intel Adapting Energy Aware Scheduling "EAS" To P-State Driver For Lunar Lake
Intel Adapting Energy Aware Scheduling "EAS" To P-State Driver For Lunar Lake
11 November 09:15 AM EST - Intel - EAS + Intel P-State - 1 Comment

As another effort for boosting the energy efficiency and behavior of Intel Core platforms with a mix of energy efficient "E" and performance "P" cores, a set of patches were posted Friday night for adapting Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) to the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver with a focus on providing better energy efficient performance initially for Lunar Lake SoCs.

10 November

Debcow Optimizing Debian Packages For Copy-On-Write File-Systems
Debcow Optimizing Debian Packages For Copy-On-Write File-Systems
10 November 08:00 AM EST - Debian - Debcow - 33 Comments

Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems.

9 November

8 November

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