
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 54 min ago
Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender...
Qt 6.2 Alpha Released With Many More Modules Ported From Qt5
The Qt Company has announced the debut of Qt 6.2 Alpha as it prepares for its September release with many more modules finally making the transition from Qt5 to Qt6...
Linux 5.14 To Support The OpenPOWER Microwatt Soft CPU Core
Announced two years ago was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an FPGA-based soft CPU core...
Left 4 Dead 2 Vulkan Performance With Radeon Graphics On Linux
Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.
Crocus Gallium3D Adds Experimental Intel Gen8 Graphics, Overlapping With Iris Driver
Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support...
Habana Labs Driver Drops Default Memory Scrubbing For Better Performance, Other Changes
Intel-owned Habana Labs has submitted their set of driver updates to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 merge window...
Intel Lands More Open-Source Vulkan Driver Changes For Ray-Tracing
Even though Vulkan ray-tracing support on Intel graphics hardware isn't coming until Xe HPG avaiability, Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have been preparing since last year. In preparation for the Xe HPG launch, Intel's open-source talent have for many months already been preparing the Vulkan ray-tracing functionality wither another batch of code being merged today...
Intel Announces New Leadership Roles, Business Unit Changes
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger continues working on restructuring the company and today announced some new leadership as well as business unit changes...
Intel's Latest CPU Microcode Update Isn't All That Scary
While in the past we have seen Intel CPU microcode updates lead to measurable performance differences on multiple occasions, this month's CPU microcode update doesn't end up being all that concerning for real-world performance...
PanVK Merged Into Mesa 21.2 For Open-Source Vulkan Driver With Arm Mali GPUs
Hitting mainline Mesa today for Mesa 21.2 next quarter is PanVK as the open-source Vulkan driver in development for newer Arm Mali GPUs...
NVIDIA Posts 470 Linux Driver Beta With Better Wayland Support, DLSS + Improved PRIME
NVIDIA announced yesterday they would be releasing DLSS Linux support tomorrow and indeed they have delivered on that first milestone of Deep Learning Super Sampling support for Linux gamers. NVIDIA has published their first 470 driver series beta in the form of the NVIDIA 470.42.01 build...
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Source Code Coming Next Month
AMD today released FidelityFX Super Resolution that was announced earlier this month at Computex. Today it's Windows-only with no Linux support being introduced. FidelityFX Super Resolution is open-source but the code drop will not be until next month...
SiFive Announces The Performance P550 As The Fastest RISC-V Processor Yet
SiFive today is announcing the Performance P550 as the fastest RISC-V processor yet while also announcing the Performance P270 too...
FreeBSD 13.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6.0 vs. Linux On AMD EPYC 7003 Series "Milan"
For those wondering how well the likes of FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors launched earlier this year, here are some initial benchmarks of those BSDs alongside a few Linux distributions. With recently having a Tyan 1U server in the lab with EPYC 7543 32-core processor, I've been running a number of BSD benchmarks on it given these recent BSD releases have been running well on this 1P server.
AMD Drops Pre-Polaris GPU Support From Their Mainline Radeon Software Driver
AMD has shifted all their graphics processors and APUs prior to Polaris / GCN 1.4 to being legacy and will not be supported by their new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases...
W3C Publishes Working Draft For Web Neural Network API
The latest JavaScript API to see a public working draft out of the W3C is for a Web Neural Network API...
Haiku R1 Beta 3 Aims For Release In About One Month
The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has been in development since 2001. It took until September 2018 for the Haiku R1 Beta and then last summer was succeeded by Haiku R1 Beta 2. Now a year later the third beta for this inaugural release is now approaching...
AMD SEV/SEV-ES Local Migration Support Patches For Linux
Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host...
NVIDIA Releasing DLSS Support For Vulkan API Games On Linux Tomorrow
NVIDIA announced earlier this month that they would be bringing DLSS to Linux / Steam Play and tomorrow they will be introducing that initial driver support...
Running The New Intel OpenGL "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver On Sandy Bridge
Merged this past week was Crocus as the new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver developed by the community and used for Gen4/i965 through Gen7/Haswell generations of Intel graphics. This week I ran some Crocus benchmarks on Intel Haswell comparing against the existing i965 classic Mesa DRI driver while in this article are some comparison driver benchmarks using Intel Sandy Bridge graphics for those still running those once popular processors.