
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 27 min ago
GNU Portability Library's Tool Rewritten In Python For 8~100x Better Performance
The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation...
Acer Aspire One ARM Laptop To Have "Almost Full" Support With Linux 6.10
The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will feature "almost full" support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered laptop. The downside though it's now a three year old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to the market this year...
EROFS Eyes Zstd Compression, Intel QAT/IAA Accelerator Support, & Experimental Rust Code
The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system...
Linux 6.9-rc5 Picking Up Fixes For Intel FRED, BHI & GFNI/VAES Checks
Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week's batch of "x86/urgent" fixes were sent out this morning...
Niri 0.1.5 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Adds New Animations
Niri as an innovative, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor is out today with its newest feature release...
GNOME Working To Make Key Rack A Viable Password Manager, Better Printing For Flatpaks
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines ongoing exciting work to the desktop thanks to the additional funding from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund plus a variety of other ongoing desktop/app enhancements...
Linux BHI Mitigation Being Tweaked Following 12% Database Performance Hit
A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors...
Open-Source "Terakan" Vulkan Driver For Radeon HD 6000 Series Shown On Windows
The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows...
AMD Sends In More Kernel Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 6.10
Following last week's AMDGPU pull to DRM-Next preparing more next-gen GPU support and other updates for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window, another batch of feature changes were sent out on Friday ahead of this next kernel cycle...
KDE Developers Work Through More Bug Fixes & Features For Plasma 6.1
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week...
Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements
Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms...
Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries
While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change...
Git 2.45 Begins Landing Code For SHA1 & SHA256 Interoperability For Repositories
Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories...
Godot's Vulkan Backend Seeing Better Performance, 10~20% Reduction In Frame Times
The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users...
Miracle-WM 0.2 Released For Mir-Based Wayland Compositor
Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management...
Linux 6.10 Preps A Kernel Panic Screen - Sort Of A "Blue Screen of Death"
While systemd 255 last year introduced a "blue screen of death" inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it's not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set to be introduced now with Linux 6.10 is a parallel "blue screen of death" like error presenting experience with the introduction of the DRM panic handler...
Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 Brings Improved OpenCL/OpenGL Sharing
As the first new release to Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes...
Tow-Boot 2023.07 U-Boot Distribution Released With New Board Support
It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader...
Rockchip NPU Open-Source Driver Taking Shape, Will Aim For Upstream Accel Driver
It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort...
Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 Brings VP9 Fix & AV1 Refinements
Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection...