news
Kernel News and Graphics in Linux
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Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Facebook deploys the Steam Deck's Linux scheduler across its data centers — Valve's low-latency scheduler perfect for managing Meta's workloads at massive data centers
In a recent talk, Meta engineers detailed how they've been deploying a low-latency GNU/Linux scheduler originally developed by Valve for the Steam Deck across production servers.
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Zsolt Kacsandi ☛ The Linux kernel is just a program
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes.
In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
The experiments are designed so you can follow along if you have a Linux PC. But this is completely optional, the goal is to build a mental model about how Linux works, seeing how components of the system fit together.
But first let’s talk about what a kernel is.
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Stefano Marinelli ☛ Installing Void Linux on ZFS with Hibernation Support
FreeBSD continues to make strides in desktop support, but Linux still holds an advantage in hardware compatibility. After running openSUSE Tumbleweed on my mini PC for several months, I decided it was time to switch to a solution I could control more closely. Not because Tumbleweed doesn't work well - it works great! - but I prefer having direct control over what happens on my machine. And I want native ZFS, because I prefer it over btrfs and it allows me to manage snapshots, backups, and rollbacks just as I do on FreeBSD, using the same tools and procedures.
The choice of Void Linux comes from its BSD-like approach: modular and free of unnecessary complexity. This makes it an excellent solution for this type of setup.
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Linuxiac ☛ QEMU 10.2 Expands RISC-V, PowerPC, and s390x Emulation Capabilities
A notable change is a clarification of QEMU’s security policy. The project now explicitly defines which machine types fall under the “virtualization use case” when determining what qualifies as a security bug.
Several legacy components have been removed. The long-deprecated -old-param option is gone, and the Arm PXA CPU family has been fully removed.
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Graphics Stack
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WCCF Tech ☛ Linux 6.19 Improves Radeon HD 7950’s Performance By 30% With AMDGPU Driver
New benchmarks show that transitioning from Radeon to the AMDGPU driver brings a solid performance boost for ancient AMD GPUs.
Not long ago, new patches for transitioning ancient AMD GPUs to the newer AMDGPU driver module were submitted. As both GCN 1.1 (Sea Islands) and GCN 1.0 (Southern Islands) will now leave the Radeon driver and adopt the newer AMDGPU driver module, which is used for newer AMD GPUs, we will see the effects of the transition in real-world applications.
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Video Cardz ☛ Linux 6.19 boosts old AMD GCN HD 7900 GPU performance by ~30% with AMDGPU
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Legacy AMD GPUs receive 30% performance boost in Linux with new drivers — latest kernel update finally drops obsolete Radeon graphics driver after more than two decades
Linux 6.19 drops legacy Radeon DRM driver for the modern AMDGPU kernel driver, ushering performance uplifts up to 30% for AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 graphics cards.
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