
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 18 min ago
Intel's OpenGL/Vulkan Mesa Drivers Begin Properly Identifying Arc Graphics Hardware
When currently using Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with their new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, it's simply been reported as "Intel{R} Graphics" for the product/renderer string. With the latest Mesa 22.3-devel work and for back-porting to the current stable series, the graphics card models are beginning to be properly reported...
Steam On Linux Marketshare Crawls Up To 1.27% For August 2022
Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2022 that show a slight increase to Linux gaming as part of the overall marketshare on a percentage basis...
Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS Released With Hardware Enablement Stack Backported From 22.04
For those planning to stick to the Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Long-Term Support series still for some time before moving to the newer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is available today as the newest point release in that older series...
AMD Releases Orochi 1.0 For Dynamic Runtime Switching Between Radeon HIP & NVIDIA CUDA
Earlier this year AMD's GPUOpen team announced the Orochi project for dynamic HIP/CUDA run-time handling. Orochi makes it easier for application developers to ship AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA support within a single code-base / binary that is then selected at run-time based on the GPU in use...
Vulkan 1.3.226 Released With Mesh Shader Extension
Vulkan 1.3.226 is out this morning and to much excitement adds the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension as cross-vendor functionality for mesh shaders!..
GCC vs. LLVM Clang Compilers For The Apple M2 On Linux
With the Apple M2 running Asahi Linux you may be wondering whether it's better to use the GCC compiler as is the default on upstream Arch Linux or whether going for LLVM Clang will yield better performance given all the LLVM/Clang usage by AArch64 vendors, including Apple's own Xcode compiler toolchain making use of it. If you are wondering about GCC vs. Clang for building binaries on the Apple M2, here are some benchmarks.
LibreOffice's Little-Used OpenCL Support Enjoys Some Code Cleaning
Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite...
GCC Developers Discuss Possible -std=c++current & -std=c++future Options
Inspired by Microsoft's compiler toolchain having a "std:c++latest" option for automatically targeting the latest supported C++ spec, GCC compiler developers have been discussing the possibility of a similar feature with the ability to specify -std=c++current for the current C++ standard or -std=c++future for the future/draft specification...
Linux 6.1 Thunderbolt Networking To Support USB4 End-To-End Flow Control
One of the interesting capabilities with Thunderbolt and now USB4 that is seemingly not too widely used is for networking between systems. The Linux kernel for the past half-decade already has offered a Thunderbolt networking driver for networking between hosts with Thunderbolt cables. The latest improvement on this front is now supporting USB4's end-to-end flow control mode...
OBS Studio 28.0 Released With 10-Bit & HDR Video Encoding, Qt 6 Ported
For the open-source software popular for screen-casting and videogame live-streaming, OBS Studio 28.0 was released today as a big feature update...
Open-Source Arc Graphics, Apple M2, Mesa GPU Drivers & Linux 6.0 Excited Readers In August
During the month of August on Phoronix there were 260 original news stories and Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux / open-source readers the most this month...
Genode OS Framework 22.08 With Improvements For Mobile Phone OS Ambitions
Genode OS as the open-source operating system framework based on a micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components is out with its newest feature release. A big focus this cycle has been on making Genode OS more practical as a smartphone operating system...
MGLRU Linux Performance Looking Very Good For OpenWrt Router Use
For those running the embedded OpenWrt Linux operating system for routers and other networking devices or just running a memory-constrained MIPS Linux system, the forthcoming Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" kernel feature is looking very good on that front...
QEMU 7.1 Released With LoongArch Support, Zero-Copy-Send Migration
QEMU 7.1 is now available as the latest feature release for this processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
Apache Talks Up More Than 333 Million OpenOffice Downloads
While Apache OpenOffice development is rather stagnate, many of the original OpenOffice.org developers left for LibreOffice long ago, and LibreOffice has been delivering far more modern features and functionality, people continue to download OpenOffice. This week the Apache Software Foundation is celebrating more than 333 million downloads of their open-source office suite...
NVIDIA Proprietary Driver Causes Last Minute Headache For Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS
Earlier this month Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS was delayed by one week due to an OEM install bug leading to broken Snaps support. Now with Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS the Canonical developers are racing down to a last-minute rebuild of images over a NVIDIA proprietary driver issue...
Archinstall 2.5-rc1 For Easily Installing Arch Linux
A new release of Archinstall, an easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer, is on the way...
Google Chrome 105 Released With HTML Sanitizer API, Container Queries & More
Google engineers today promoted Chrome 105 to their stable channel across Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android platforms...
Intel Meteor Lake Thunderbolt Support Slated For Linux 6.1
The latest Linux hardware enablement work to report on for Intel's Meteor Lake client platform is Thunderbolt support being queued ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window...
Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
Richard Hughes as the lead developer of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd at Red Hat announced the release this morning of Fwupd 1.8.4 as a nice update to this open-source firmware updating utility. Fwupd 1.8.4 not only adds support for some new hardware and fixes but notably begins adding the infrastructure to allow facilitating BIOS changes to the system from within Linux...