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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Linux GPU Compute Performance Benchmarks
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Linux GPU Compute Performance Benchmarks
11 Hours Ago - Graphics Cards - 25 Comments

While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.

23 January

x86 32-bit Operating Systems Aren't Dead Yet: New Linux Patches Improve 32-bit PAE
x86 32-bit Operating Systems Aren't Dead Yet: New Linux Patches Improve 32-bit PAE
23 January 03:18 PM EST - Hardware - Linux x86 32-bit PAE - 35 Comments

The Linux x86 32-bit PAE kernel support for Physical Address Extensions allows addressing more than 4GB of memory for those still running 32-bit processors or otherwise opting to still run a 32-bit OS. While the Linux x86 32-bit specific code rarely sees new improvements in the past number of years, a set of patches were posted today in looking to enhance the x86 32-bit PAE mode.

Linux 6.14 Power Management: "Dominated By AMD P-State Driver Changes"
Linux 6.14 Power Management: "Dominated By AMD P-State Driver Changes"
23 January 12:31 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Power Management Updates - 2 Comments

All of the power management feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel were sent out earlier this week and subsequently merged. As we've been seeing with recent Linux kernel releases, AMD continues investing a lot into their AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for better power efficiency on Ryzen processors and since the prior kernel also now being used with the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors too.

Debian 15 Is Codenamed "Duke"
Debian 15 Is Codenamed "Duke"
23 January 10:04 AM EST - Debian - Debian 15 - 11 Comments

With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced.

Linux 6.14 Adds Support For The Microsoft Copilot Key Found On New Laptops
Linux 6.14 Adds Support For The Microsoft Copilot Key Found On New Laptops
23 January 06:56 AM EST - Hardware - Copilot Key - 21 Comments

Newer laptops pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows have begun adding a "Copilot" key for launching Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant or other "chatbot" software. With the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel, that key will be mapped out correctly so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop.

Red Hat Preparing Tuned 2.25 Daemon For Linux Monitoring & Adaptive Performance Tuning
Red Hat Preparing Tuned 2.25 Daemon For Linux Monitoring & Adaptive Performance Tuning
23 January 06:51 AM EST - Red Hat - Tuned 2.25 Release Candidate - 4 Comments

The Tuned software from Red Hat is a daemon for Linux monitoring and adaptive performance tuning as an alternative to the likes of power-profiles-daemon. Tuned ships with various profiles and allows different features for tuning the Linux system performance for HPC compute, enterprise storage, balanced battery for laptops, and dozens of other scenarios. Red Hat this week debuted the first release candidate of the upcoming Tuned 2.25.

22 January

AMD Radeon On Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0-devel vs. NVIDIA R565 Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance
AMD Radeon On Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0-devel vs. NVIDIA R565 Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance
22 January 12:00 PM EST - Display Drivers - 13 Comments

Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.

AMD Releases Orochi 3.0 For HIP & CUDA API Switching At Run-Time
AMD Releases Orochi 3.0 For HIP & CUDA API Switching At Run-Time
22 January 06:35 AM EST - AMD - GPUOpen Orochi 3.0 - 4 Comments

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released.

Important Changes To Intel TDX Coming With Linux 6.14
Important Changes To Intel TDX Coming With Linux 6.14
22 January 06:14 AM EST - Intel - Intel TDX - Add A Comment

Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors.

21 January

Wine 10.0 Released With Native Wayland Support, Better HiDPI
Wine 10.0 Released With Native Wayland Support, Better HiDPI
21 January 12:03 PM EST - WINE - Wine 10.0 - 83 Comments

As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver software.

Raspberry Pi Monitor Pairs Great With The Raspberry Pi 500 As A $100 Display
Raspberry Pi Monitor Pairs Great With The Raspberry Pi 500 As A $100 Display
21 January 11:30 AM EST - Monitors - 10 Comments

Along with recently announcing the Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard computer and the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB (review still forthcoming; the 16GB model only arrived last week), the Raspberry Pi Monitor debuted last month as their first foray into displays. For $100 USD you get a 15.6-inch 1080p display that is simple but pairs well with the Raspberry Pi 400/500 or just the single board computer or any other HDMI-connected device for that matter.

Linux 6.14 Thermal Drivers Get Ready For Intel Panther Lake
Linux 6.14 Thermal Drivers Get Ready For Intel Panther Lake
21 January 06:45 AM EST - Intel - Intel Panther Lake Thermal - Add A Comment

Intel's upstreaming work around the next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors continues for the Linux kernel. Among other code being prepped for submitting during the Linux 6.14 merge window, on Monday the thermal driver updates were focused on enabling support for Intel Panther Lake processors.

Linus Torvalds Adapts Linux User Address Masking To Use CMOV
Linus Torvalds Adapts Linux User Address Masking To Use CMOV
21 January 06:34 AM EST - Linux Kernel - CMOV User Address Masking - 7 Comments

In addition to merging a number of the pull requests yesterday for the start of the Linux 6.14 cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds did merge some of his own new code as well. While his time these days working on new kernel code itself is more limited with managing the ever-growing upstream kernel community, he has managed some notable items in recent times like addressing ARM64 kernel annoyances and some performance optimizations.

Bcachefs Changes Merged Without Issue For The Linux 6.14 Kernel
Bcachefs Changes Merged Without Issue For The Linux 6.14 Kernel
21 January 03:00 AM EST - Linux Storage - Bcachefs Changes Merged - 58 Comments

As a follow-up to yesterday's article around the on-disk format changes and other feature work on Bcachefs for Linux 6.14, the changes ended up being merged without issue for this next kernel version. That came after the Bcachefs changes were rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle due to a Code of Conduct (CoC) committee decision.

20 January

GNU Linux-libre 6.13-gnu Deals With More Questionable Code In The Kernel
20 January 07:29 PM EST - GNU - GNU Linux-libre 6.13-gnu - 36 Comments

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 6.13 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.13 is out today as this downstream kernel from FSF LA that strips out code pertaining to the ability to load non-free drivers/microcode and other elements not deemed within the standards of the Free Software Foundation, even when it means removing/disabling hardware support and features.

AMD Seeking Feedback Around What Radeon GPUs You Would Like Supported By ROCm
20 January 03:42 PM EST - AMD - More GPU Support - 55 Comments

An engineer from AMD by way of their Nod.ai acquisition is seeking feedback from the community around what other Radeon graphics cards you would like to see supported by the ROCm support on Linux. This community wishlist extends to ROCm Windows support as well but at least there the HIP Rutime/SDK on Windows already supports more consumer GPUs than Linux.

Wine 10.0 Expected This Week For Improving Windows Software On Linux
20 January 03:03 PM EST - WINE - Wine 10.0 - 21 Comments

After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here's a look at what's ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Bcachefs Sends In "The Last Big On Disk Format Upgrade" For Linux 6.14
20 January 01:31 PM EST - Linux Storage - Bcachefs - 32 Comments

Following the Bcachefs pull requests being rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle by the kernel's Code of Conduct committee, the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is kicking off with a big pull request so that the upstream kernel can get back into sync with the latest development code for this cycle. This pull also contains the last anticipated major on-disk format upgrade prior to the removal of the "experimental" flag for this copy-on-write file-system.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Arrives For Linux Testing
20 January 09:00 AM EST - Graphics Cards - 42 Comments

Earlier this month at CES was the announcement of the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series. Among the first of these consumer Blackwell GPUs is the GeForce RTX 5090 flagship graphics card that is set to retail for $1999 USD. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder's Edition graphics card arrived at Phoronix a few days ago to begin Linux testing.

Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q4 Adds Battlemage GPU Support
20 January 06:45 AM EST - Intel - Intel FFmpeg + Battlemage - 1 Comment

Intel software engineers overnight published their new quarterly release of the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel, the collection of the company's patches against this open-source multimedia library for enhancing the Intel GPU acceleration support while the patches work their way for upstream FFmpeg.

19 January

Linux To Allow Adjusting pid_max Per PID Namespace - Helping Old Software
19 January 06:53 AM EST - Linux Kernel - pid_max per namespace - 1 Comment

The pid_max tunable for the maximum number of process IDs allowed simultaneously was increased by default back in 2019 with systemd. But that increase breaks a long held assumption by some user-space software that pid_max or the process ID would not be greater than 65,535. To now better workaround such outdated user-space software, a set of patches for the Linux 6.14 kernel will allow adjusting the pid_max limit on a per PID namespace basis to help cope with such software hitting such artificial limits and without having to lower the overall system limit.

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