
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 41 min 7 sec ago
Linux 5.19 To Upstream Driver For Raspberry Pi's Sense HAT Joystick
Queued up into the input subsystem's for-next branch ahead of Linux 5.19 is a new driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Joystick...
NVIDIA Working On VFIO Power Management Improvements For Linux
A NVIDIA engineer is working on addressing the currently "very limited" power management support available with the Linux kernel's upstream VFIO PCI driver...
Wolfire Games Releases Overgrowth Game As Open-Source
Open-source friendly game studio Wolfire Games has released their Overgrowth title, which was released back in 2017 and the sequel to the Lugaru game, as open-source software...
Linux 5.18-rc4 Released After Another Calm Week
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc4 and so far the kernel is looking good at this mid-stage of the development cycle...
RADV LBVH Ray-Tracing Code Lands In Mesa 22.2
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" LBVH support has landed for boosting the Vulkan ray-tracing potential for this open-source driver. The LBVH patch series is what I reported on earlier this month for at least one workload going from around 13 to 250 FPS boost...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Disables 3D Acceleration For Guest VMs With GNOME Boxes / Virt-Manager
In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default...
FFmpeg Lands JPEG-XL Support
The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has merged support for the JPEG-XL image format...
AMD Sends Out Updated Linux Patches For PerfMonV2 That's Expected With Zen 4
AMD's open-source Linux engineers on the CPU side of the house continue being quite busy with all sorts of new feature enablement work, which given their timing and other factors is almost all definitively for upcoming Zen 4. AMD this week sent out updated patches in getting "PerfMonV2" support in order that is updated performance monitoring abilities with upcoming processors...
PAPPL 1.2 Beta Printer Application Framework Released
In addition to CUPS back to seeing new feature development for this print server now being managed by OpenPrinting, CUPS founder Michael Sweet also continues being quite busy with working on PAPPL as his modern printer application framework effort...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Changes Default For NVIDIA Driver Back To Using X.Org Rather Than Wayland
While back in March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" changed the default behavior for NVIDIA's driver to use Wayland inline with Intel and Radeon graphics having used the GNOME Wayland session rather than X.Org for the past few releases, this change was reverted at the last-minute. With a launch-day SRU, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is defaulting to using the GNOME X.Org session rather than Wayland when running the proprietary NVIDIA driver...
Garmin Upstreams Linux Patch Around Boat Steering Wheels, Marine Navigation Displays
Being sent in as a fix for Linux 5.18-rc3 is supporting various marine navigation keycodes with at least Garmin's boat steering wheels and marine navigation displays running Linux...
More AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Changes Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.19
Another week, another batch of new AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature work ready for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the next kernel cycle. Feature code continues building up in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.19 cycle...
KDE Plasma Lands More Fixes, Theme Handling Improvements
Even amid all the April software releases, KDE developers remain very busy working on their open-source desktop stack...
Wine 7.7 Continues PE Conversion Work, Allows Theming Control Panel Applets
Wine 7.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux...
Mesa's New OpenCL Stack "Rusticl" Nearing Formal Support For OpenCL 3.0
Mesa's Rusticl is a yet-to-be-merged OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers written in the Rust programming language. The latest code now can pass the Khronos OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Test Suite!..
Mesa 22.1-rc1 AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance vs. NVIDIA
With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.
Intel Publishes Open-Source PSE Firmware
Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!..
Intel Releases SVT-AV1 1.0 For Speedy AV1 Video Encoding
Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0...
Mesa On Windows Continues Improving: Dzn Dynamic Rendering, WGL Kopper Lands
While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows...
Fedora 37 Looks Like It Will Proceed With Plan To Remove Legacy X.Org Drivers
Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year...