Showing headlines posted by bob

Mesa has supported on-disk shader cache for years to help speed-up game load times and overall system efficiencies. They had shifted from a multi-file cache layout to a single file cache for greater space savings. Steam also added support for the single-file cache. But now upstream Mesa is shifting back from the single-file cache default to the multi-file cache over performance issues...

The latest bit of hardware enablement coming out of Asahi Linux and queued for introduction in the mainline kernel the next cycle is PCI Express (PCIe) support for the Apple M2 Pro SoC...

Package management is at the heart of every Linux system. It’s what makes installing, updating, and managing software on Linux-based distributions not just possible but streamlined and elegant. For users of Debian and its popular derivative Ubuntu, two powerful tools often stand at the center of debate: apt-get and aptitude. Though both are capable of managing packages effectively, they have unique characteristics that make them better suited to different use cases.

At the end of last year the upstreaming efforts began for a Raspberry Pi HEVC decoder driver for getting H.265/HEVC accelerated decode working on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers with the mainline kernel. Nearly a half-year later that effort is still ongoing but yesterday brought the third iteration of this driver...

AMD has published as open-source their "GPU-IOV Module" used for virtualization with Instinct accelerators. It's also reported on their roadmap for bringing virtualization support to their client (Radeon) discrete GPUs...

Watch your partitions – GPT and dual-boot don't always mix. While The Reg FOSS desk was on spring break, both the latest interim Ubuntu and latest Fedora debuted.…

Back in March some ideas were talked about by Canonical engineers for Ubuntu Linux to move to Rust Coreutils and other Rust-written system components. Some of this is likely to materialize for the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out in October to allow for sufficient testing ahead of the all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release next year. Today the more solidified plans have been laid out for moving to the Rust Coreutils as a replacement to GNU Coreutils with Ubuntu 25.10...

The newest open-source Linux driver being worked on by AMD engineers is a Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) solution for their Pensando networking hardware...

Earlier this month Canonical announced Ubuntu Linux support for the Orange Pi RV2 as a low-cost RISC-V developer board. The Orange Pi RV2 with eight RISC-V cores and 8GB of RAM costs just around $64 USD. The price point and specs were interesting that I ordered one and have been running performance benchmarks on it since for seeing how capable this is as finally an interesting, low-cost and readily available RISC-V board.

The April 2025 ISO update is out today for CachyOS, the Arch based Linux distribution known for its aggressive out-of-the-box performance on modern hardware...

Following a lot of work in this direction toward the end goal of removing GNOME X11 support, this milestone may finally be acheived for the Fedora 43 cycle due out by the end of the year. A change proposal has been filed for removing the GNOME X11 packages in the repository and in turn making the GNOME desktop Wayland-only on Fedora Linux...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver had been Vulkan 1.4 conformant for Turing and newer GPUs, but now with Mesa 25.2-devel it's Vulkan 1.4 conformant going back to Maxwell GPUs. This change is exported to be back-ported to the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release as well for those interested in using this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver...

With the Linux 6.15 kernel settling down nicely, I've been testing out the current Linux Git state on more systems in looking for any performance changes. Unfortunately this week I ran into a large performance regression affecting the Nginx HTTP(S) web server. Here's a look at that problem currently affecting Linux Git.

Merged yesterday to Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is an improvement for the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing code with an eye on next-gen Xe3 graphics hardware...

Chrome will keep third-party cookies, a loss for privacy but a win for web ad rivals. After six years of work, Google's Privacy Sandbox, technology for delivering ads while protecting privacy, looks like dust in the wind.…

Running GenAI models is easy. Scaling them to thousands of users, not so much Hands On You can spin up a chatbot with Llama.cpp or Ollama in minutes, but scaling large language models to handle real workloads – think multiple users, uptime guarantees, and not blowing your GPU budget – is a very different beast.…

Today's Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has evolved since its launch last October. Taking the launch-day benchmarks from October with the same hardware, we are revisiting the Intel Arrow Lake performance under Linux today using the newest system BIOS and the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 for seeing how the performance has evolved roughly over the past half-year.

Last year a patch was raised for the Linux kernel that would report outdated CPU microcode versions as a security vulnerability. With Intel routinely issuing new CPU microcode updates for security vulnerabilities and addressing other functional issues, the Linux kernel would begin warning users when recognizing that outdated CPU microcode is deployed for a given processor. That patch has now been queued into a tip/tip.git branch and thus looking like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

MicroPython has reached a major milestone with the release of version 1.25.0, delivering significant enhancements after over three years of development. This update introduces the long-anticipated ROMFS (Read-Only Memory File System), new processor support, TLS improvements, and expanded board compatibility across multiple architectures. One of the most notable additions is ROMFS, a read-only, memory-mappable, extensible […]

Merged last year in Linux 6.11 was getrandom() support in the vDSO for x86/x86_64 and then in Linux 6.12 was extended to LoongArch and ARM64. With the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle, this support for faster while still secure RNG for user-space is set to come to RISC-V...