Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 10 min ago
Godot 4.3 Game Engine To Feature Native Wayland Support
The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux...
XDG Top-Level Drag Protocol Approved For Wayland
Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation...
Wine On Wayland This Year Aims For OpenGL Support, Window Minimization
While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux...
AMD Releases HIP RT 2.2 With Multi-Level Instancing
AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP...
Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 Released With Per-Contact Ringtones, Built-In Theme Switching
For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...
Ubuntu Generic vs. Low-Latency Linux Kernel Benchmarks For HPC & Desktop
With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems...
GNOME Project Handbook Launches To Help New Contributors
The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment...
Linux's x86_energy_perf_policy Utility Being Extended To AMD CPUs
For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors...
ChipStar 1.1 Released For Compiling & Running HIP/CUDA On SPIR-V
ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero...
Radeon R300 Open-Source Driver Continues Seeing New Improvements In 2024
As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed...
LLVM 18.1-rc1 Released For Enabling New Intel CPU Features, More C23 & C++23
Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack...
GCC 14 Lands Working Support For AMD RDNA2 & RDNA3 GPU Offloading
As a follow-up to last week's article around the GCC compiler seeing patches for AMD RDNA3 GPU support so that it's "working for most purposes", that code has now been merged and it's also been confirmed to also bring the RDNA2 support up to a working state...
A Linux Hardware Vendor Is Valuing Itself At $75,000,000 USD
Linux hardware vendor Purism that is known for their crowd-funded Librem 5 smartphone effort, Linux-loaded laptops, and other privacy-minded wares announced a first public offering of Purism stock on the StartEngine platform...
RHEL's Source Code Access Change Is Causing Issues For CentOS SIGs
It looks like the Red Hat change restricting access to RHEL sources that was announced last year is having the unintended consequence of causing some headaches for CentOS special interest group (SIG) projects...
GNU Binutils 2.42 Brings Support For New Intel CPU Extensions: APX, AVX10.1 & More
Nick Clifton with Red Hat announced today the release of GNU Binutils 2.42, the newest feature release to this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and Unix-like systems as part of the compiler toolchain...
AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux Performance
Today the review embargo lifts on the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G desktop APUs. Announced back during CES, the Ryzen 8000G series pairs Zen 4 CPU cores with RDNA3 graphics and now also boasting Ryzen AI support too. Today's launch article is focusing on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux performance.
SDL 3.0 Adds Colorspace Concept, More Code Coming From Valve Around HDR
Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software...
New Linux Driver Posted For Latest NZXT AIO CPU Coolers
Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there is already a NZXT Kraken Linux driver for supporting hardware monitoring and controls for various NZXT all-in-one CPU liquid cooler products. A new Linux driver was posted today for supporting the latest generation of the NZXT AIO CPU coolers...
CachyOS Experimenting With x86-64-v4 Repository For AVX-512 Optimized Packages
While a number of Linux distributions are experimenting with x86-64-v2 baselines or offering x86-64-v3 optimized packages for assuming AVX/AVX2 support by default for their packages, the CachyOS Linux distribution has been experimenting with offering x86-64-v4 packages for those running on Intel or AMD systems with AVX-512 support...
The Current State & Future Of GTK's New Unified Renderers
GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers...
