
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 45 min 59 sec ago
Proton 6.3-5 RC Allows More Windows Games To Run On Linux
Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers is a new release candidate of the upcoming Proton 6.3-5 that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...
Pending Patches Allow Direct3D 9 "Gallium Nine" To Run Over Mesa's Zink Vulkan
Mesa's Zink is well known for working to provide a generic OpenGL implementation over the Vulkan API that can be used across hardware/drivers. While still focused on OpenGL-over-Vulkan, with some pending patches it turns out Zink can support Gallium3D Nine for ultimately allowing Direct3D 9 atop this layer...
GravityMark OpenGL/Vulkan Performance For NVIDIA RTX 30 vs. AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series
A few days ago I wrote about GravityMark as a new cross-API GPU benchmark from a former Unigine developer. Being curious about the Linux GPU driver performance for this benchmark that is focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support, I ran some benchmarks on the latest NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards with this benchmark for OpenGL and Vulkan.
LibreOffice 7.2 Beta Arrives With Initial Command Pop-Up HUD, Better Performance
Following last month's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha, the first beta for this open-source office suite update is now available for testing...
New Linux Patch To Allow Booting From Arbitrary Non-Block Device File-Systems
The Linux kernel currently has code to allow booting an initial root file-system via NFS or CIFS for non-blockdevice file-systems while a new patch aims to allow for mounting of arbitrary non-block device file-systems as root...
Adreno 660 GPU Support Landing For Linux 5.14
The MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.14 cycle for improving this open-source Qualcomm Adreno kernel graphics/display driver...
Intel i915g Mesa Driver Now Goes Goes Through NIR, Fixes Some Past Test Failures
While this week's landing of the Crocus Gallium3D driver for Intel Gen4 through Gen7 graphics (i965 through Haswell) in Mesa is exciting for Linux users that are still running aging Intel systems, going back even further has been the i915g Gallium3D driver and there this week there happens to be a big improvement too...
Modula-2 Programming Language Front-End Still Looking Towards Mainline GCC In 2021
The Modula-2 programming language developed from the late 70's to 80's might finally see mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support in 2021...
OpenSSL 3.0 Release Candidate Arrives With Big Changes
The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter...
NVIDIA Resizable BAR Performance - A Big Boost For Some Linux Games
Back in March NVIDIA announced they would be supporting the GeForce RTX 30 series with Resizable BAR support via a video BIOS update for supported systems. Recently I've been looking at the performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 once flashing the graphics card under Linux with Resizable BAR support and the performance is quite compelling for Vulkan-based games where this functionality is working.
Fedora Stakeholders Back To Discussing Raising x86_64 Requirements Or Using Glibc HWCAPS
While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is dropping support for older x86_64 CPUs by raising the baseline requirement to "x86_64-v2" that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem era processors and newer, so far Fedora has not changed its default. There was a proposal shot down last year for raising the x86_64 microarchitecture feature level while now that discussion has been restarted or alternatively making use of Glibc's HWCAPS facility for allowing run-time detection and loading of optimized libraries...
Google Wants To See Rust Code In The Linux Kernel, Contracts The Main Developer
Google wants to see Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel so much so that they have contracted the lead developer working on "Rust for Linux" as the work aims to get mainlined...
W3C Promotes Web Audio API To Official Standard
The W3C has promoted the Web Audio API to now being an official standard as a JavaScript API for creating and manipulating audio content directly within web browsers...
It's Good But Maybe Bad: LVFS Skyrockets With More Than 100k Firmware Updates In One Day
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd has been serving on average around 40k~50k firmware updates per daay to Linux users relying on this cross-vendor, open-source firmware distribution service with FWUPD for applying firmware updates under Linux. But yesterday its usage just skyrocketed with more than 100,000 firmware updates in a single day... That's great for adoption but the motivation for the mass firmware updates may be something rough on the horizon...
AMDGPU For Linux 5.14 To Report Throttler Status, Many Fixes Sent Out
Last week marked the end of feature work for the AMDGPU driver (and other DRM drivers) for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle. Sent out today though were the first set of AMDGPU fixes targeting Linux 5.14 that does include a recently talked about throttler status feature...
Intel Speed Select Driver Issue Was Hurting Performance In Some HPC Benchmarks
Intel's Speed Select Technology introduced since Cascade Lake for providing more granular power/performance controls was done in the name of performance but it turns out an ISST Linux driver inefficiency could lead to a 10%+ performance hit for some HPC benchmarks...
Lenovo To Support Configuring ThinkPad BIOS From Within Linux
In conjunction with supported Lenovo systems, a new "Think-LMI" driver is on its way to the mainline Linux kernel for allowing some BIOS/firmware settings to be accessed and configured within Linux...
Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Hits Another "Massively Improved Performance" Milestone
The Zink component to Mesa that provides a generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API recently hit another "massively improved performance" milestone by Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz...
Blender 3.0 Likely Delayed 2 Months For Post-Lockdown Breather, Cycles X Might Land
The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release...
Wasmer 2.0 Released With Significantly Faster Runtime Performance, Quicker Deserialization
Going along with a number of other recent WebAssembly interpreter/run-time releases, Wasmer 2.0 has been released as this popular WebAssembly WASI and EmScripten run-time...