Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Raspberry Pi 5 Benchmarks: Significantly Better Performance, Improved I/O
Raspberry Pi 5 Benchmarks: Significantly Better Performance, Improved I/O
8 Hours Ago - Computers - 81 Comments

After a difficult few years of global supply chain woes leading to limited available and heightened retail pricing on the Raspberry Pi single board computers, today there is finally an update to the family. Four years after the Raspberry Pi 4 shipped, today the Raspberry Pi 5 is launching with a much improved SoC leading to significant performance gains. Additional improvements with the Raspberry Pi 5 make this a very nice generational upgrade.

27 September

CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 23.5 With A Focus On Boosting macOS Gaming
CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 23.5 With A Focus On Boosting macOS Gaming
27 September 10:20 AM EDT - WINE - CrossOver 23.5 - 12 Comments

CodeWeavers -- in addition to contributing significantly to upstream Wine and being involved with Valve on Proton for Steam Play -- continues to offer CrossOver as a premium Wine-based software solution for enjoying Windows games and applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe products on Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS. Out today is CrossOver 23.5 as the latest evolution of this Wine-based commercial software.

26 September

Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux
Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux
26 September 09:00 PM EDT - Computers - 34 Comments

The past few weeks I've been putting the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD mobile workstation through its paces that is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U SoC. Besides uncovering one BIOS issue that is in the process of being resolved, this latest-generation AMD-powered laptop that features 64GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and integrated Radeon graphics with 2.8K OLED display has been working out well on modern Linux distributions. Here's a look at this AMD Zen 4 laptop running on Linux and plenty of performance benchmarks for this laptop.

TuxClocker 1.0 Released As An Alternative Way Of NVIDIA GPU Overclocking On Linux
TuxClocker 1.0 Released As An Alternative Way Of NVIDIA GPU Overclocking On Linux
26 September 08:01 PM EDT - Hardware - TuxClocker 1.0 - 10 Comments

TuxClocker has been in development for several years as another open-source GPU overclocking GUI for Linux. TuxClocker initially provided a Qt5-based user interface for GPU overclocking and ultimately established a D-Bus API as well with the new release. TuxClocker 1.0 was finally released today as the latest update to this Linux GPU overclocking software.

Limited Support For The AMD Pensando Elba SoC Might Finally Land Upstream In Linux 6.7
Limited Support For The AMD Pensando Elba SoC Might Finally Land Upstream In Linux 6.7
26 September 11:33 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Pensando Elba - 10 Comments

For a year and a half now Pensando has been working on enabling their Elba SoC support for the mainline Linux kernel - a process that coincidentally began just days after AMD announced it was acquiring Pensando. Over the past 18 months the AMD-Pensando Elba SoC enablement work has now been through 16 rounds of code review but still isn't over the finish line yet but some of the initial enablement code might finally land with Linux 6.7.

Intel Has Another Series Optimizing Linux Performance With PCP High Auto-Tuning
Intel Has Another Series Optimizing Linux Performance With PCP High Auto-Tuning
26 September 08:10 AM EDT - Intel - PCP High Auto-Tuning - 1 Comment

Intel's open-source software engineers are known for many great performance optimizations to the Linux kernel. Over the years Intel has contributed countless performance optimizations to the kernel and related Linux components that have made significant improvements not only for Intel hardware but x86_64 as a whole and at times CPU architecture independent improvements. One of their newest performance optimizing patch series is around Per-CPU Pageset (PCP) high auto-tuning.

Intel's Habana Labs Driver Quietly Drops References To The Greco AI Processor
Intel's Habana Labs Driver Quietly Drops References To The Greco AI Processor
26 September 06:40 AM EDT - Intel - No More Greco? - 2 Comments

Announced last year at the Intel Vision conference was the Habana Labs Gaudi2 and Greco AI hardware. Since then we've seen a lot of Linux kernel driver work happen for enabling the Gaudi2 second-generation training and inference AI processor while there hasn't been anything real in the way for Greco, which was the successor to the Goya AI processor. Now references to Habana Labs Greco are being removed from the driver.

OCRmyPDF 15.0 Released For Optical Character Recognition Of PDF Files
OCRmyPDF 15.0 Released For Optical Character Recognition Of PDF Files
26 September 05:52 AM EDT - Free Software - OCRmyPDF - 2 Comments

A major update to OCRmyPDF is now available, the open-source project that can work on scanned PDFs and other PDF documents to add an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to files for allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted. OCRmyPDF makes it a breeze in dealing with scanned PDF text files and now with OCRmyPDF v15 is even better.

25 September

Linux 6.7 Adding New Feature To Btrfs For The Steam Deck
Linux 6.7 Adding New Feature To Btrfs For The Steam Deck
25 September 03:08 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Btrfs Temp-FSID - 23 Comments

Queued up into the Btrfs file-system driver's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.7 cycle is the Temp-FSID (Same-FSID) feature that is being pursued for use by Valve's Steam Deck game console. The functionality is to overcome a limitation of allowing Btrfs to mount two different devices holding the same file-system image and therefore the same file-system ID.

Reminder: The 2023 Phoronix Premium Oktoberfest/Autumn Special
Reminder: The 2023 Phoronix Premium Oktoberfest/Autumn Special
25 September 12:00 PM EDT - Premium - Friendly Reminder - Add A Comment

This is just a friendly reminder that if you wish to go ad-free on this site while supporting the ongoing Linux operations at Phoronix, enjoy native dark mode, and view multi-page articles on a single page, there remains an ongoing "Oktoberfest" sale for our Phoronix Premium subscription service.

Intel Continues GCC Compiler Preparations For AVX10 & APX
Intel Continues GCC Compiler Preparations For AVX10 & APX
25 September 11:28 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Compiler Contributions - 5 Comments

Since announcing the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10 back in July, Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been busy preparing the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchains for these major CPU extensions to be found with future Intel processors.

The Downfall Mitigation Impact For Xeon E-2300 Series On Linux 6.5
The Downfall Mitigation Impact For Xeon E-2300 Series On Linux 6.5
25 September 10:40 AM EDT - Software - 2 Comments

Last month the Downfall CPU security vulnerability was disclosed that impacts various AVX/AVX-512 workloads. Now that there's been a few weeks for the Linux kernel code to settle around the mitigation and the latest Intel CPU microcode becoming more broadly available, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Downfall mitigation on affected AVX workloads.

KDE Making It Easier To Find Or Offer "Sponsored Work"
KDE Making It Easier To Find Or Offer "Sponsored Work"
25 September 06:38 AM EDT - KDE - KDE Sponsored Work - 19 Comments

If you are particularly annoyed by a bug or missing feature with the KDE desktop, there's a new and easier means of advertising your interest in sponsoring work to get a bug or feature addressed. Similarly for experienced KDE developers a more centralized means of finding sponsored work opportunities.

24 September

Linux's Multi-Grain Timestamps Short-Lived: Removed From The Kernel After A Few Weeks
24 September 06:54 AM EDT - Linux Storage - Multi-Grain Timestamps - 11 Comments

One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel.

Intel's DAOS 2.4 Storage Engine Released
24 September 06:40 AM EDT - Intel - DAOS 2.4 - 5 Comments

While Intel divested its storage business and Intel Optane was sadly discontinued, one of the interesting open-source software projects from its storage efforts has been DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage engine. Version 2.4 of the DAOS software-defined object store designed for high-speed storage was released this past week.

23 September

Cairo 1.18 Released - First Stable Release In Five Years
23 September 12:24 PM EDT - Free Software - Cairo 1.18 - 27 Comments

Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo.

Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster
23 September 08:35 AM EDT - GNOME - GPU-Accelerated Terminals Much Faster - 63 Comments

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

Intel Arrow Lake's NPU/VPU Very Similar To Meteor Lake - Linux Driver Patch Posted
23 September 06:48 AM EDT - Intel - Arrow Lake VPU/NPU Driver Support - 4 Comments

With Meteor Lake comes the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) that is now marketed by Intel as the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Recent versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver to support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU while now a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors.

Wayland Color Management Protocol Posted For Weston
23 September 06:36 AM EDT - Wayland - Wayland Color Management - 63 Comments

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor.

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