
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 12 min 30 sec ago
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...
FGKASLR Appears Closer To Mainline For Improving Linux Security
Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization has been common on Linux for a decade and a half now while more recently has been Function-Granular (or sometimes referred to as Finer-Grained) KASLR for further upping the security benefits by making it much harder to predict kernel address positions for attacks...
A Hang In The Linux Kernel Can Happen If Trying To Read A Broken Floppy Then Ejecting It
Going into 2022 the Linux kernel's floppy driver continues to see new code improvements and fixes...
Fedora 36 May Support FS-VERITY Integrity/Authenticity Verification For RPMs
Fedora 36 may support using the Linux kernel's fs-verity code for allowing some interesting integrity and authenticity use-cases around RPM packages...
AMD Readies New Radeon Driver Code For Linux 5.17: STB, Seamless Boot For Van Gogh
Along with Intel this week sending out some of their initial graphics driver changes destined for the Linux 5.17 cycle early next year, AMD today also submitted their first batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes intended for this next kernel version...
Xen 4.16 Released With Improved Performance, Expanded Hardware Support
Xen 4.16 is shipping today as the latest major release to this open-source hypervisor that continues to be hosted by the Linux Foundation...
O3DE 21.11 Released As First Major Open 3D Engine Release
This summer there was the surprise announcement of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine being open-sourced and it being developed as the Open 3D Engine by the then newly-created Open 3D Foundation as part of the Linux Foundation...
openSUSE Leap 15.4 Alpha Builds Begin For Testing
Released this summer was openSUSE Leap 15.3 using the same binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise for its SLE 15 SP3 release. Looking forward to next year, openSUSE Leap 15.4 alpha builds have begun spinning for that next installment...
SiFive Details New Performance P650 RISC-V Core
Back in October SiFive teased a new performance-optimized RISC-V core and today they finally shared more public details on this Performance P650 core...
Intel Graphics Compiler Makes More Preparations For DG2/Alchemist & Ponte Vecchio
At the end of November was a big update to Intel's Graphics Compiler while out today is IGC 1.0.9441 as the first update since to this open-source, cross-platform graphics compiler...
Is It Worthwhile Running Intel Alder Lake With mitigations=off?
Over the past month of trying out Intel Alder Lake processors on Linux, one of the questions that has come up a few times but not readily disclosed is whether it's still worthwhile on this latest-generation process to boot with "mitigations=off" to disable CPU security mitigations to help squeeze out some otherwise lost performance. Here are some benchmarks to answer that questions.
RADV Driver Improvement Yields More Reasonably Sized Captures For Radeon GPU Profiling
When debugging graphics driver/API issues or performance profiling and relying on shader dumps, the size of such dumps can quickly add up due to all of the state collected, etc, but also inefficiencies when not within contiguous memory. Fortunately for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for pairing with the Radeon GPU Profiler there is a significant improvement that just landed for yielding smaller file sizes...