Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 40 min ago
AMD Zen 2 Improvements For LLVM Have Been Held Up For Months By Code Review
Back in February for LLVM Clang 9.0 was the initial AMD Zen 2 "znver2" enablement, but like the GCC support at the time it was the very basics. With time GCC picked up Zen 2 scheduler improvements and other work while sadly in the case of LLVM the improvements are still pending...
Paragon Looks To Upstream Their Microsoft exFAT Driver For The Linux Kernel
With the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel release there is now an exFAT file-system driver based on an old Samsung code drop of their exFAT driver support for mobile devices. This comes after Microsoft made the exFAT specification public recently and gave their blessing for a native Linux driver for the file-system. The Linux developers acknowledge though the current exFAT code is "horrible" and a "pile of crap" but is within the staging area...
Wine-Staging 4.18 Released With Fix For League of Legends
Fresh off yesterday's Wine 4.18 release, Wine-Staging 4.18 is now available for those preferring the more experimental blend of Wine that incorporates various testing patches atop Wine...
kwin-lowlatency 5.17 Brings A Better Experience To The KDE Desktop
Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 5.17, a new release of the independent kwin-lowlatency code has been re-based against version 5.17...
FreeBSD 12.1-RC2 Has Update For UEFI 2.7A, Various Bug Fixes
We are getting mighty close to the release of FreeBSD 12.1 as the next installment of FreeBSD 12 for 2019. It's looking like FreeBSD 12.1 will indeed be ready to set sail in early November...
Linux 5.4 Lands A Number Of Memory Management Fixes
While mid-way through the Linux 5.4 development cycle with RC4 due out on Sunday, a number of memory management fixes just hit the mainline kernel...
Wine 4.18 Released With Many Bug Fixes, Some Feature Work
While three weeks have passed since the previous Wine development release compared to the usual two week cadence, Wine 4.18 is out today and isn't too busy on the feature front but there are more than three dozen bug fixes...
Rewriting Old Solaris C Code In Python Yielded A 17x Performance Improvement
While we normally hear of rewriting code from Python and other scripting languages into C/C++ when its a matter of performance, in the case of Oracle Solaris it was taking old C code and modernizing it in Python 3 to yield a ~17x performance improvement...
DXVK 1.4.3 Works On State Cache Improvements, Lowering CPU Overhead
As another release in time for weekend gamers, DXVK 1.4.3 was released today as the newest update for this library mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for accelerating the Wine/Proton-based Linux gaming experience...
The Spectre Mitigation Impact For Intel Ice Lake With Core i7-1065G7
For those wondering if -- or how much -- of a performance impact mitigations still make regarding Spectre for Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Ice Lake processors, here is the rundown on the mitigation state and the performance impact.
WireGuard Restored In Android's Google Play Store After Brief But Controversial Removal
After Google dropped the open-source WireGuard app from their Play Store since it contained a donation link, the app has now been restored within Google's software store for Android users but without the donation option...
Cascade Lake vs. Rome With MrBayes, dav1d 0.5, OSPray, SVT-VP9, OIDn + Other Benchmarks
While swapping around CPUs for the AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake testing of Facebook's RocksDB enterprise workload testing, I also took the opportunity for running some other recently updated test profiles on these EPYC/Xeon parts under test...
Xfce4-Panel Adds Dark Mode Preference
As a change for next year's Xfce 4.16, the xfce4-panel now exposes a preferences option for those preferring "dark modes" of GTK themes...
AMDGPU DC Looks To Have PSR Squared Away - Power-Savings For Newer AMD Laptops
It looks like as soon as Linux 5.5 is where the AMDGPU kernel driver could be ready with Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support for enabling this power-savings feature on newer AMD laptops...
Pensando Systems Exits Stealth Mode With Plans To Take On Amazon AWS
While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined...
Gallium3D's Mesa State Tracker Sees "Mega Cleanup" For NIR In Mesa 19.3
AMD developer Marek Olšák has landed a "mega cleanup" to the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker code around its NIR intermediate representation handling...
Fedora 31 Release Held Up By Installer + DNF Bugs
Fedora developers had been trying to ship Fedora 31 for their original release target of next Tuesday, 22 October, but that isn't going to happen due to remaining blocker bugs...
Ubuntu 19.10's Kernel Ships With A DoS / Arbitrary Code Execution Bug In The IPv6 Code
If you are planning to run the newly-released Ubuntu 19.10, among the initial round of stable release updates is an important kernel fix...
Ubuntu 19.10 Available For Download With Its GNOME 3.34 + Experimental ZFS Experience
Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" has hit mirrors today for an on-time release of this six-month non-LTS installment to Ubuntu Linux...
NVIDIA 440.26 Beta Linux Driver Brings HDMI 2.1 VRR, VP9 VDPAU Decode + Much More
NVIDIA today introduced their first beta driver in the 440 Linux branch and it's quite an exciting release!..
