Vue lecture

Linux Proposal Aims To Overcome Kernel Limitation Affecting Various Gaming Peripherals

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation...
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Intel Core Ultra 7 255H Linux CPU Performance

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.
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15h.org Ships Updated Open-Source Firmware For Aging AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver Hardware

While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...
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How System76 & Red Hat Hope To Finally Improve The Linux Multi-GPU Experience

System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop...
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New Linux Patches To Expose AMD Ryzen AI NPU Power Metrics

New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU...
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Intel Xe Linux Driver Working Toward UALink & High Speed Fabrics Support

The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers' Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver...
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SDL3 Now Implements Render Batching For Direct3D, Metal & Vulkan

The SDL3 library that is popular with cross-platform games for abstracting various software/hardware features has implemented render batching for its built-in rendering API. This render batching is successfully wired up now for Direct3D 11/12, Apple Metal, and Vulkan APIs for more efficient graphics rendering...
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AMD Posts New "amd_vpci" Accelerator Driver For Linux

While there is already AMDXDNA as one of the few currently mainline drivers in the accelerator "accel" subsystem for supporting AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, another AMD accel driver is on the way: amd_vpci. The new amd_vpci driver patches were posted today for review as AMD continues to further expand their diverse offerings in the ecosystem...
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EasyEffects 8.0 Released In Porting From GTK4 To Qt / QML / Kirigami

EasyEffects is the open-source application formerly known as PulseEffects that transitioned to using native PipeWire filters for providing simple audio effects on the Linux desktop. EasyEffects makes it easy to apply different audio effects like bass enhancer, compressor, pitch shift, reverberation, and many more. With this week's release of EasyEffects 8.0, the user interface has been rewritten in Qt / QML / Kirigami rather than GTK4...
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Can openSUSE Tumbleweed Compete With CachyOS Performance?

Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution's select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it's been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.
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Patches Proposed For Radeon GCN 1.1 GPUs To Use AMDGPU Linux Driver By Default

For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing "Radeon" driver. This can mean better performance, Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using that older Radeon driver...
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