
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 5 min ago
RADV Prepares To Switch Completely To Dynamic Rendering
One of the great things about Jason Ekstrand having joined Collabora at the start of the year is that the former Intel graphics engineer, who was on the team that created their original Vulkan driver, can now work on whatever open-source driver code he wishes. Among other upstream Mesa work, he's recently been contributing to the new "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan driver and also the RADV driver too...
Google Posts Updated Encrypted Hibernation Patches For Linux
Back in May there was a patch series by Google engineers working on encrypted hibernation support for Linux that would be protected by the platform hardware itself like with a TPM module as well as user authentication by a password or other means. Sent out today is a second revision to that Linux encrypted hibernation support...
AMD's New PMF CPU Linux Driver Now Preparing For "CnQF"
As I've written about the past several weeks, AMD engineers have been preparing a Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver for Linux. The AMD Platform Management Framework for future hardware appears similar to Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) and designed to enhance the thermal/power performance of future platforms...
Wine-Based CrossOver 22 Released For Enjoying Windows Apps & Games On Linux
CodeWeavers today announced the availability of their Wine-based CrossOver 22 software for enjoying Windows applications and games atop Linux, ChromeOS, and macOS...
Webmin 2.0 Released For Open-Source Web-Based Server Management/Administration
Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big "v2.0" release...
Imagination PowerVR Rogue DRM Linux Kernel Driver Out For Review
Earlier this year was the surprise announcement of Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa. That driver has since been mainlined in Mesa and the Imagination developers continue working on improving their Vulkan API coverage. Simultaneously they have been working on a proper, upstream-friendly open-source DRM/KMS kernel driver and that code now is far enough along that it's been sent out for initial review...
Sound Open Firmware 2.2.1 Released With Preparations For Intel Raptor Lake
Sound Open Fimware is already four years old as what started out as Intel pushing for more open firmware around audio DSPs. Since then we've seen Mediatek begin to support "SOF" as well as some AMD hardware supporting Sound Open Firmwar. Out today is SOF 2.2.1 as the latest from this open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella...
Firefox 104 Now Available With Minor Improvements
Mozilla is ready to ship Firefox 104.0 this morning as the latest incremental improvement to this open-source, cross-platform web browser...
Dell Now Preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS On New XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition
Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory...
Flatpak 1.14 Released With Improvements For Sandboxed Linux Apps
Flatpak 1.14 has been released as the newest feature release for this leading open-source solution for sandboxing and distribution of Linux applications...
GNOME 43's Mutter Lands Max BPC Property Support To Deal With Monitor Issues
Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth...
Asahi Linux May Have OpenGL 2.1 For Apple M1/M2 By Year's End
Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver and has been spending nearly two years now involved with the Asahi Linux crew working on reverse-engineered Apple M1/M2 graphics support has shared a new status update...
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Benchmarks Are Very Competitive To Radeon OpenGL Driver
With this weekend having seen more Zink refactoring code land and Zink being faster than RadeonSI at least for some operations, it was time to fire up some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. From the newest Mesa code this weekend after the latest Zink patches were merged, here is a look at how the Zink performance is compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's native OpenGL support. All of the testing was done using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.
Ubuntu Now Supports The Allwinner D1 Powered Nezha RISC-V Board
Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC...
GTK4's Broadway HTML5 Backend Coming Back To Ubuntu, Debian
For the past decade going back to the early GTK3 days there has been the "Broadway" back-end that allows for GTK interfaces to be rendered within HTML5 web browsers. Aside from demos and other toys, there hasn't been too much widespread use reported with this GTK HTML5 back-end and some distributions like Ubuntu and Debian haven't been shipping the Broadway support with the newer GTK4. However, that is changing now for Debian and with this autumn's release of Ubuntu 22.10...
Experimental Patches Allow Much Faster AArch64 & RISC-V Kexec Kernel Reboots
For those making use of Kexec reboots for booting to a new kernel without fully bringing down the system to reduce the server downtime from POST'ing and other hardware initialization tasks, Kexec reboots may soon be much faster on 64-bit Arm and RISC-V systems...
Kdenlive 22.08 Video Editor Brings UI Improvements, Experimental Parallel Processing
Following last week's release of KDE Gear 22.08, Kdenlive 22.08 is out as the newest version of this open-source, KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear video editing software...
Linux 6.0-rc2 Released
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.0-rc2 as the newest weekly test candidate for this next major kernel series...
R600 Gallium3D Driver Receives NIR Backend Fixes For Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Series
In addition to the R300g driver seeing new shader optimizations, also being merged this week to Mesa 22.3 were some fixes for the recently-introduced new NIR back-end for the Rade R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series...
Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Sees Uptick In Activity This Week
The open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" being developed for Mesa has seen a busy week of new development activity on this work-in-progress solution...