Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

8 vs. 12 Channel DDR5-6000 Memory Performance With AMD 5th Gen EPYC
8 vs. 12 Channel DDR5-6000 Memory Performance With AMD 5th Gen EPYC
12 Hours Ago - Memory - 6 Comments

As I wrote about last week within the Supermicro H13SSL-N EPYC Turin motherboard review, one of the factors leading me to purchasing that EPYC 9005 series motherboard was that this board offered support for full 12 channel DDR5-6000 memory performance compared to some of the other lower-cost Socket SP5 motherboards offering just 8 memory channels. For those wanting to quantify the performance difference between eight and twelve memory channels with AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, here are some benchmarks for showing the workloads that can really benefit from all 12 memory channels and other workloads where eight memory channels can be largely sufficient if looking to minimize costs.

Multigrain Timestamps Try Again For Linux 6.13 - Now With Less Performance Impact
Multigrain Timestamps Try Again For Linux 6.13 - Now With Less Performance Impact
18 Hours Ago - Linux Kernel - VFS Multigrain Timestamps - 8 Comments

Merged last year for Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps to address the current coarse-grained timestamps when updating creation time and modification time that a lot of I/O activity can happen in the once-per-jiffy timestamp. Just a few weeks in the Linux 6.6 kernel, multi-grain timestamps were removed due to bugs. The multigrain code went back to be reworked and now just over one year later the code has been re-merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

19 November

Red Hat & Microsoft Bringing RHEL To WSL
Red Hat & Microsoft Bringing RHEL To WSL
19 November 08:45 AM EST - Red Hat - RHEL On Windows Subsystem For Linux - 56 Comments

The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.

WayVNC 0.9 Released For Wayland VNC Server With New Features
WayVNC 0.9 Released For Wayland VNC Server With New Features
19 November 08:29 AM EST - Wayland - WayVNC 0.9 - 4 Comments

WayVNC 0.9 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server catering to wlroots-based Wayland compositors. WayVNC makes it easy to get a VNC server up and running on Sway and other wlroots-based compositors while with today's update is much more capable.

Intel SNC6 Sub-NUMA Clustering Support With Linux 6.13
Intel SNC6 Sub-NUMA Clustering Support With Linux 6.13
19 November 06:22 AM EST - Intel - Intel SNC6 - Add A Comment

A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu Continues Dealing With More Blobs In The Kernel
GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu Continues Dealing With More Blobs In The Kernel
19 November 06:04 AM EST - GNU - GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu - 4 Comments

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

18 November

Linux 6.13 Quadrupling Workqueue Concurrency Limit
Linux 6.13 Quadrupling Workqueue Concurrency Limit
18 November 04:32 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.13 Workqueues - 1 Comment

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.

Ubuntu Praises 5~7% PGO Compiler Optimization Performance Benefits
Ubuntu Praises 5~7% PGO Compiler Optimization Performance Benefits
18 November 03:34 PM EST - Ubuntu - Profile Guided Optimizations - 13 Comments

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.

New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5
New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5
18 November 10:56 AM EST - Software - 7 Comments

At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.

17 November

Linux Fixes Hosts Randomly Rebooting During Virtualization With Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs
Linux Fixes Hosts Randomly Rebooting During Virtualization With Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs
17 November 09:56 AM EST - AMD - VMLOAD/VMSAVE On Zen4 Client - 35 Comments

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 -- and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions -- is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted.

Archinstall 3.0 Overhauls The Text-Based Arch Linux Installer
Archinstall 3.0 Overhauls The Text-Based Arch Linux Installer
17 November 05:33 AM EST - Arch Linux - Archinstall 3.0 - 13 Comments

Archinstall is the convenient text/CLI-based installer for Arch Linux that allows getting the Linux distribution easily installed in a matter of minutes. Released today is Archinstall 3.0 that overhauls the Arch Linux installer with now using the curses library for rendering of the text interface.

16 November

TUXEDO Computers Relicenses Some Of Their Drivers To GPLv2
16 November 09:51 AM EST - Hardware - GPLv3 To GPLv2 - 34 Comments

Following the proposed patches this week to adjust the Linux kernel's module loader to treat the TUXEDO Computers drivers as proprietary due to being GPLv3 licensed rather than GPLv2 to jive with the rest of the upstream kernel code, some of the TUXEDO drivers have now been re-licensed.

Linux 6.13 Introducing New Rust File Abstractions
16 November 06:52 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Rust File Abstractions - 12 Comments

Alongside the VFS pull requests on Friday for case insensitive Tmpfs support and atomic writes for EXT4 and XFS, Christian Brauner also submitted a pull request for introducing some new file abstractions for the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.

15 November

Valve Releases Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update
15 November 08:14 PM EST - Valve - Half-Life 2 - 33 Comments

In commemorating twenty years since the release of the highly acclaimed Half-Life 2 game, Valve today released the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary update with various fixes and other refinements. Half-Life 2 is also being made free-to-own through November 18th for those that never experienced this legendary game.

Tmpfs Adding Case Insensitive Support For Wine / Steam Play & Flatpaks
15 November 01:44 PM EST - Linux Storage - Tmpfs With Linux 6.13 - 54 Comments

In addition to the EXT4 and XFS atomic write support, another interesting pull request sent in today by Microsoft's Christian Brauner is adding case-insensitive file/folder support for the Tmpfs file-system to benefit use-cases like Wine / Steam Play compatibility layers and sandboxing/container facilities like Flatpak.

Linux 6.13 To Expand Atomic Write Support To EXT4 & XFS
15 November 11:41 AM EST - Linux Storage - VFS Untorn Writes - 8 Comments

Prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner with Microsoft has begun sending out various pull requests of VFS feature changes for the imminent Linux 6.13 merge window. One of the interesting early pull requests is the VFS untorn writes series with getting atomic writes support enabled for the EXT4 and XFS file-system.

Linux 6.12 Preps For Release With Real-Time, Sched_Ext, Stable Xe2 & Raspberry Pi 5
15 November 09:30 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.12 LTS - 7 Comments

The Linux 6.12 kernel is expected to be released this coming Sunday, 17 November, barring any last minute issues that would force the stable kernel to be diverted to the following Sunday. Linux 6.12 is delivering many exciting new features and beyond that it's all the more exciting with it expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

AMD Releases ZenDNN 5.0 For Deep Neural Network Library Optimized For Zen 5 EPYC
15 November 06:50 AM EST - AMD - ZenDNN 5.0 - 4 Comments

AMD ZenDNN 5.0 was rolled out this morning as the newest version of this deep neural network library that is compatible with Intel's oneDNN APIs and infrastructure. ZenDNN 5.0 is now optimized for AMD Zen 5 processors such as the EPYC 9005 series. ZenDNN 5.0 also ships performance enhancements for generative large language models (LLMs) with its PyTorch plug-in.

GCC 15 Adds Option For Arm Guarded Control Stack "GCS" Code Generation
15 November 06:39 AM EST - GNU - Guarded Control Stack - 4 Comments

GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality.

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