Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

VKD3D-Proton Has Been Working On Emulating D3D12 Work Graphs, But The Tech Disappoints
VKD3D-Proton Has Been Working On Emulating D3D12 Work Graphs, But The Tech Disappoints
4 Hours Ago - Valve - Direct3D Work Graphs - 2 Comments

Back in March for GDC, Microsoft excitingly announced the official releases of Direct3D 12 Work Graphs for "enabling new types of GPU autonomy" for allowing more rendering work to be offloaded to the GPU. While this greater GPU-driven rendering with Work Graphs has been talked up by Microsoft and other parties, Valve engineers working on VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12 over Vulkan have found the new Work Graphs functionality to not be as nearly captivating.

Intel & AMD Form An x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group
Intel & AMD Form An x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group
5 Hours Ago - Intel - x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group - 26 Comments

Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD AOCC 5.0 Compiler On 5th Gen EPYC
Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD AOCC 5.0 Compiler On 5th Gen EPYC
8 Hours Ago - Software - 9 Comments

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, on the same day AOCC 5.0 was quietly released as the newest version of AMD's Zen-focused compiler derived from LLVM/Clang. With not only adding AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support but also additional vectorization improvements and other performance optimizations, I was eager to run some benchmarks of AOCC 5.0 against the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers. Here are those initial benchmarks using dual AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 processors.

Unvanquished Working On OpenGL 4.6 Renderer Support
Unvanquished Working On OpenGL 4.6 Renderer Support
12 Hours Ago - Linux Gaming - Unvanquished + OpenGL 4.6 - 5 Comments

It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.

ARM64 SMT Control Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
ARM64 SMT Control Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
12 Hours Ago - Arm - Toggling SMT On ARM - 1 Comment

While ARM-based SoCs with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) aren't too common, there do exist some such as select models of the Huawei Kunpeng server SoC with SMT or there HiSilicon Kirin 9000S. As such Huawei/HiSilicon engineers have been working to expose SMT controls on ARM64 for the Linux kernel.

14 October

NVIDIA Is Helping To Improve Linux's Dynamic Display Mux Support For Laptops
NVIDIA Is Helping To Improve Linux's Dynamic Display Mux Support For Laptops
14 October 01:00 PM EDT - NVIDIA - Better Dynamic Display Mux - 20 Comments

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

AMD EPYC 9755 DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Memory Performance
AMD EPYC 9755 DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Memory Performance
14 October 10:45 AM EDT - Memory - 2 Comments

With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.

CodeWeavers Working On Better Input Device Support For Proton Gaming
CodeWeavers Working On Better Input Device Support For Proton Gaming
14 October 07:00 AM EDT - Valve - CodeWeavers - 12 Comments

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

Corsair Void Headset Driver Expected For Linux 6.13
Corsair Void Headset Driver Expected For Linux 6.13
14 October 06:40 AM EDT - Hardware - Corsair Void Headset Driver - 5 Comments

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

Llamafile 0.8.14 Introduces New CLI Chatbot Interface
Llamafile 0.8.14 Introduces New CLI Chatbot Interface
14 October 06:14 AM EDT - Programming - Llamafile 0.8.14 - 6 Comments

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

13 October

Improvements To The Ad Experience
Improvements To The Ad Experience
13 October 10:00 AM EDT - Phoronix - Ad Tweaks - 43 Comments

As a result of user feedback and being able to reproduce some annoying ad experiences, particularly on mobile devices, I've been able to make some enhancements to hopefully improve the user ad experience when browsing Phoronix.

12 October

AMD XDNA Linux Driver Updated As It Nears The Upstream Kernel
AMD XDNA Linux Driver Updated As It Nears The Upstream Kernel
12 October 09:21 AM EDT - AMD - AMDXDNA - 10 Comments

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

11 October

AMD To Integrate "Project Caliptra" Into Products Beginning In 2026
11 October 08:50 PM EDT - AMD - AMD + Caliptra - 7 Comments

As another interesting AMD announcement this week following their Advancing AI event yesterday where they launched the EPYC 9005 series and other new hardware, they've continued with a few more soft announcements in the lead-up to the OCP Global Summit happening next week. The latest interesting tid-bit is their plans to incorporate Project Caliptra into their products beginning in 2026.

Arm Exploring IO_uring For Graphics Drivers For Better Performance & Synchronization
11 October 01:45 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - DRM Drivers + IO_uring - 14 Comments

The IO_uring asynchronous I/O API for Linux is quite novel and has proven performance benefits. With time IO_uring has been adapted to other areas of the kernel like networking and now with a proposal raised by an Arm graphics driver engineer, it could potentially be adapted for use by Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics drivers.

AVX-512 Performance With 256-bit vs. 512-bit Data Path For AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs
11 October 10:40 AM EDT - Processors - 21 Comments

Now past the launch day for the AMD EPYC 9005 series server processors and having delivered initial AMD EPYC Zen 5 benchmarks for the EPYC 9575F / EPYC 9755 / EPYC 9965 SKUs, it's onto one of my favorite areas of testing and that is the more focused benchmarks looking at different specific changes/features of new processors. Today under the benchmarking microscope is looking at the new AVX-512 512-bit data path capabilities of 5th Gen AMD EPYC compared to using a 256-bit data path or disabling AVX-512 entirely.

Intel Xe2 Ultra Joiner, GPU Temperature Reporting & Another Arrow Lake ID For Linux 6.13
11 October 09:28 AM EDT - Intel - Intel DRM Next - 3 Comments

The drm-xe-next pull request earlier this week began preparing open-source driver support for Intel Xe3 graphics to premiere with Panther Lake processors. That code is beginning to queue for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle. Today a drm-intel-next pull request was sent out to prepare for more Intel Linux kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 6.13.

AMD AOCC 5.0 Compiler Released With Zen 5 Support, New Optimizations
11 October 06:57 AM EDT - AMD - AMD AOCC 5.0 - 7 Comments

With 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors now launched, AMD provided a same-day release of their updated AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler "AOCC". This is AMD's downstream version of LLVM/Clang/Flang where they provide optimized AMD processor support with code that hasn't yet worked its way up into LLVM proper.

AMD Announces Commitment To "Open Security Technologies"
11 October 06:15 AM EDT - AMD - AMD Open Security - 5 Comments

After the AMD Advancing AI Event yesterday where they launched AMD 5th Gen EPYC processors, Instinct product updates, and new high-end networking gear, they also put out a blog post to affirm their "commitment to open security technologies in the data center."

10 October

AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver Posted For Linux
10 October 06:38 AM EDT - AMD - AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer - 31 Comments

AMD today quietly posted a new open-source Linux kernel driver for review... the AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver. This AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for Linux is intended to help optimize performance on systems sporting 3D V-Cache such as the AMD Ryzen "X3D" parts and the EPYC "X" processors.

Intel Begins Working On Next-Gen Xe3 Graphics With Linux 6.13
10 October 06:25 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Xe3 Graphics - 5 Comments

While Intel Xe2 graphics have just debuted with Lunar Lake and we are awaiting Battlemage discrete GPUs with Xe2, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun work enabling Xe3 graphics! Xe3 driver work is now underway for next-generation Intel graphics.

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