Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 15 min 23 sec ago
Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference
Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day...
Mesa 20.1.8 Released While Waiting For Mesa 20.2
Mesa 20.2 (or 20.2-RC5) didn't debut last week as intended, but for the interim the Mesa 20.1.x release cycle brought 20.1.8 on Wednesday and now it's been extended to having at least a ninth point release to allow more time until not only Mesa 20.2.0 to ship but Mesa 20.2.1 alignment...
GNOME 40 Aims To Have A Better Extensions Experience
Following Wednesday's release of GNOME 3.38 was the surprising news of GNOME 40 being the next version as well as a new initiative to improve GNOME extensions...
Ray-Tracing Support For AMDGPU LLVM Back-End Lands For RDNA 2
AMD previously confirmed it would be supporting real-time ray-tracing with their next-generation GPUs while now one month out from the Radeon RX 6000 series debut are the first signs of the open-source driver work around GPU ray-tracing...
Arm Is Now Backing Panfrost Gallium3D As Open-Source Mali Graphics Driver
Most information presented during the annual X.Org Developers' Conference doesn't tend to be very surprising or ushering in breaking news, but during today's XDC2020 it was subtly dropped that Arm Holdings appears to now be backing the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver...
Gamescope Continues Advancing As Wayland/Vulkan Compositor Backed By Valve
Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS...
Optional L1d Flushing On Context Switching Looks Like It Will Try Again For Linux 5.10
The feature to provide opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on each context switch looks like it will be coming with the Linux 5.10 cycle for this functionality providing security benefits but at the cost of further performance degradation...
Succeeding GNOME 3.38 Will Be "GNOME 40" - Yes, GNOME Forty
Following today's GNOME 3.38 release a new versioning scheme was announced whereby the next release in six months time will be GNOME 40.0...
GNOME 3.38 Released With Many New Features, Better Performance
GNOME 3.38 has shipped as the newest half-year update to this desktop environment and will be featured in the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33, and other autumn Linux distribution updates...
After Reaching Vulkan 1.0 Conformance, V3DV Raspberry Pi Vulkan To Pursue Mainline Mesa
The V3DV driver for providing Vulkan support on the Raspberry Pi 4 is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance and once squaring that away along with other lingering bits they will be pursuing the upstreaming of this driver within Mesa...
X.Org Developers Conference 2020 Starts With Many Interesting Talks
XDC2020 as the annual gathering of X.Org developers was due to take place in Poland this year but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to be yet another conference happening exclusively online. Day 1 of XDC2020 has just begun...
LZHAM + Crunch Now Placed Under The Public Domain
Compression expert Rich Geldreich who previously worked for the likes of Valve and Unity prior to co-founding his own consulting firm has now made the Crunch and LZHAM technologies available under the public domain...
Rav1e 0.4 Alpha Released With Much Faster Performance For Rust AV1 Encoding
After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today...
Gentoo Offers Up New Easy Kernel Options
Gentoo Linux is looking to improve the kernel maintenance experience by offering up Ebuilds that make it easier to maintain the kernel through the package manager -- including prebuilt binary kernels...
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Linux Driver/Support Expectations
We still don't have our hands on the GeForce RTX 3080 yet and remains to be seen when we will get our hands on RTX 30 series hardware for Linux testing, but at least there's a pretty good rhythm for how the NVIDIA Linux support will play out...
AMD Radeon Navi 2 / VCN 3.0 Supports AV1 Video Decoding
It turns out the Radeon RX 6000 series will have AV1 hardware video decode capabilities...
Red Hat Has Been Working On New NVFS File-System
Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer...
Unvanquished Game, Assets Are Now Fully Open-Source Compliant
Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses...
OpenJDK 15 Reaches GA With Garbage Collector Promotions, Tossing Out Solaris + SPARC
OpenJDK 15 is out today as the latest general availability release for this open-source Java implementation...
IBM Contributing A2O Processor Core To OpenPOWER Community
IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community...