
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 8 min ago
Intel Continues Making Preparations For Ray-Tracing With Their Linux Graphics Driver
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities...
Linux Fixes Spectre V1 SWAPGS Mitigation After Being Partially Borked Since Last Year
This week's set of "x86/urgent" changes for the Linux 5.16-rc4 kernel due out later today has some Spectre V1 fixes after kernel commits last year ended up partially messing things up around its SWAPGS handling. These fixes in turn will also likely be back-ported to relevant stable kernel series...
x86 Straight-Line Speculation Mitigation Patches Updated For Linux
A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors...
XWayland Adds Support For Touchpad Gestures
XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling...
EPEL 9 Ready To Provide Extra Packages For RHEL 9, CentOS Stream 9
While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched...
Genode OS 21.11 Now Has Working Intel Gen9+ Graphics, Better PinePhone Support
Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features...
Intel Making Cluster Scheduling Configurable, Disabled For Alder Lake Hybrid CPUs
Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake...
Intel Linux Graphics Driver Prepares Task & Mesh Shaders, Vulkan Dynamic Rendering
Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities...
AMD AMF SDK 1.4.23 Brings Brings Main 10 HEVC Encode, Auto LTR Encoder Mode
AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware...
Open-Source Firmware Conference 2021 Videos Now Available
Taking place this week was the annual Open-Source Firmware Conference "OSFC" devoted to open-source firmware from Coreboot to open-source BMC solutions and other low-level booting/initialization efforts...
KDE Starts December With Numerous Fixes, Other Desktop Refinements
This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations...
Mesa's Classic Drivers Have Been Retired - Affecting ATI R100/R200 & More
The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline...
Wine 6.23 Released With More PE Work, Wine 7.0-rc1 Up Next
Wine 6.23 is now available for running Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs. Up next will be the Wine 7.0 release candidate that also marks the feature freeze for what will be the next annual Wine stable release...
Arch-Based EndeavourOS 21.4 Released With FSTRIM, Btrfs Zstd, PipeWire By Default
EndeavourOS as the two year old Linux distribution project built atop Arch Linux is out with a shiny new release. Beyond package updates, the new release has several default changes like now making use of the wonderful PipeWire. Looking to 2022, EndeavourOS is also exploring the possibility of a gaming-optimized build of their OS...
More BattlEye-Protected Games Now Working With Steam Play On Linux
Last month BattlEye-using games began running on Steam Play when using the latest Steam client beta paired with the experimental version of Proton. However, it still does require the intervention of the game studio to request the support be enabled for a particular game. Today in time for any weekend gaming is several more games using the BattlEye anti-cheat software working on Linux...
Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor 20 Released With CPU Pinning, Replacing Unsafe Rust Code
The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project that provides a VMM focused on cloud workloads and supports interfacing with Linux's KVM and Windows' MSHV is out with a big feature update. Cloud-Hypervisor is also the project that is known for its use of the Rust programming language and built in part off Rust-VMM...
AMD Threadripper 3970X Performance On Linux After Two Years
A few days ago it marked two years since the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X launched. While we are eager to see next-gen Threadripper, for now is a look at how the open-source Linux performance has evolved for these still-impressive HEDT processors by comparing the Linux performance at launch to where it is today with the very latest upstream Linux software.
CentOS Stream 9 Now Available To Live On The Bleeding-Edge Of RHEL9
While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9...
Blender 3.0 Shines As A Huge Update For This Leading Open-Source 3D Modeling Software
Blender 3.0 is officially releasing today as a huge update to this open-source 3D modeling software that in recent years has become backed by numerous large hardware/software companies and has rivaled proprietary software for its capabilities...
Open-Source Qualcomm "Turnip" Driver Achieves Vulkan 1.1 Conformance, Fixes For DXVK Use
TURNIP as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hit a new official milestone this week...