Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Tweaking SteamOS For Better Steam Deck Performance
Tweaking SteamOS For Better Steam Deck Performance
2 October 04:20 PM EDT - Linux Gaming - 6 Comments

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

Linux Will Finally Indicate Via /proc/cpuinfo If AMD SVM Virtualization Is Disabled
Linux Will Finally Indicate Via /proc/cpuinfo If AMD SVM Virtualization Is Disabled
2 October 03:18 PM EDT - AMD - AMD SVM Enabled? - Add A Comment

Checking for the presence of Intel virtualization (VMX) support and it being enabled can be easily achieved by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. But to this point AMD virtualization (SVM) has always been shown to user-space via /proc/cpuinfo even when the BIOS/platform has disabled SVM functionality. Finally for Linux 6.7 this oversight is being corrected.

Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7
Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7
2 October 06:38 AM EDT - Virtualization - LoongArch KVM - 7 Comments

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7.

1 October

Linux To Try Again To Disable All RNDIS Protocol Drivers
Linux To Try Again To Disable All RNDIS Protocol Drivers
1 October 02:52 PM EDT - Hardware - Disabling All RNDIS Drivers - 37 Comments

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

30 September

Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
30 September 12:35 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Bad Apps - 61 Comments

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

29 September

AMD FSR 3 Now Available - Open-Source Code To Come Soon
29 September 09:52 AM EDT - Radeon - FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 - 18 Comments

AMD announced today that the Windows games Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken are available today with their FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling technology. More games making use of FSR 3 are on the way and the open-source code drop of FSR 3 is coming at a later date.

28 September

Mesa 23.2 Stable Released For Improved Open-Source Vulkan & OpenGL Drivers
28 September 08:08 PM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 23.2.1 - 6 Comments

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

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