Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

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 - 26 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 - 19 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

Google Axion CPU With GCE C4A vs. AWS Graviton4 Performance
8 November 09:00 AM EST - Processors - 4 Comments

Last week Google announced the general availability of their C4A instances powered by their in-house Axion processors. I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.

7 November

Linux 6.13 To Allow Controlling Zero RPM Feature For Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs
7 November 10:19 AM EST - Radeon - Zero RPM Fan Control - 27 Comments

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.

Mesa RADV Driver Delivers Conformant Vulkan 1.3 Support For Old AMD GFX6/GFX7 GPUs
7 November 06:56 AM EST - Radeon - Vulkan 1.3 Conformance - 21 Comments

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

OpenCL Headers & SDK Updated For OpenCL 3.0.17
7 November 06:19 AM EST - Programming - OpenCL 3.0.17 - 1 Comment

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.

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