
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 39 min ago
FWUPD 1.6.1 Adds FreeBSD UEFI Capsule Handling, More Hardware Now Supported
A new feature point release is available for FWUPD for handling of system/component firmware and BIOS updating on Linux and other platforms...
Google + Canonical Bring Ubuntu Pro To Google Cloud
At the end of 2019 "Ubuntu Pro" was announced as Ubuntu for Amazon's EC2 cloud with ten years of package updates/security, kernel livepatching, Canonical Landscape integration, and more. Google and Canonical are announcing today that Ubuntu Pro is now coming to Google Cloud...
GCC 11 Compiler Performance Benchmarks With Various Optimization Levels, LTO
Given the recent forum discussion stemming from the -O3 optimization level still too unsafe for the Linux kernel (in part due to older, buggy compilers) and some users wondering about the current -O2 versus -O3 compiler optimization level impact, here is a fresh round of reference benchmarks using GCC 11.1 on Fedora Workstation 33 looking at various optimization levels and optimizations tested on dozens of different application benchmarks to see the overall impact on performance.
ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism Support Is Getting Underway For Linux
Platform Runtime Mechanism was incorporated into the ACPI 6.4 specification earlier this year and allows moving some system management interrupt (SMI) handlers out of the system management mode (SMM) "black box" and into the OS/VMM execution context. With Linux 5.14 initial work on ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism is set to land...
Another Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge Motherboard Now Works For Coreboot (ASUS P8Z77-V)
While Intel engineers have been working on Alder Lake support for Coreboot as with other recent CPU generations that open-source firmware/BIOS support remains focused on their reference boards with a particular focus on meeting necessary requirements for Google Chromebook devices. Sadly, there is not much or any in the way of consumer retail motherboard support at this point. For those looking for retail desktop motherboard support for Coreboot, aside from the open-source POWER9 systems out of Raptor Computing, on the x86_64 front it largely means using aging Intel and AMD platforms...
Linux 5.14 Mainline Should Work With The Raspberry Pi 400
Launched last November was the Raspberry Pi 400 as a Raspberry Pi Keyboard Computer with effectively a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC embedded within the keyboard and attached to a large aluminum block for cooling. It's a great little device and beginning with Linux 5.14 looks like it should be playing fine with the mainline kernel...
Intel Publishes Latest TDX Support Patches For Linux
Last year Intel detailed Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) as a new means of better protecting virtual machines with hardware-assisted isolation between VMs as well as from the VMM/hypervisor. Shortly after that Intel began posting TDX enablement patches and that work has continued while is still ongoing...
Intel Gallium3D Driver Merged Into Mesa 21.2 For Gen4 Through Haswell Graphics
The independently-developed "Crocus" driver providing a Mesa Gallium3D implementation for Intel Gen4 "i965" through Gen7 "Haswell" graphics has now been merged into Mesa 21.2 for ultimately aiming to improve the open-source OpenGL support for these aging Intel integrated graphics generations...
Linux 5.13-rc6 Released With The Kernel Cycle Smoothing Out
After several weeks worth of 5.13-rc releases where there were more changes than Linus Torvalds would like to see, Linux 5.13-rc6 is out now and it's on the smaller side while panning out nicely for this later stage of kernel development...
KWinFT Going Through Code Refactoring, Working On WLROOTS-Based Usage
Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work...
Linux 5.14 To Begin Enabling The Intel Graphics TTM Memory Management Bits for dGPUs
While a decade ago Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers resisted TTM at the time and instead devised the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) for kernel graphics memory management needs in its place, now with discrete graphics cards and dedicated video memory, Intel has been working on making use of TTM memory management for those purposes. With Linux 5.14 the initial bits are going to be there for using TTM by the Intel driver when running with discrete graphics having local memory...
Last Year's L-Shaped Desk Build Has Been Holding Up Well
As a quick follow-up to last year's L-shaped desk build for accommodating plenty of displays, laptops, and more, it's still working out very well...
Wasmtime 0.28 Released With C++ Embedding Support
In addition to the recent WebAssembly project releases of Wasmer 2.0-rc and WASM3 v0.5, the Bytecode Alliance that is made up of Intel and Mozilla and other organizations has announced Wasmtime 0.28...
Intel's ConnMan 1.40, IWD 1.15 Released For Linux Networking
A number of Intel's open-source projects have been seeing new released this week presumably for making Q2/H1-2021 goals, including two of the networking projects maintained by the company: the ConnMan connection manager and IWD wireless daemon...
XFS To Enjoy Big Scalability Boost With Linux 5.14
A big patch series out of Red Hat is now queued into the XFS file-system development Git branch that is part of the new material for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...
Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) Likely Coming To Linux 5.14 For Clang
Recently the mainline Linux kernel has seen a lot of improvements to its feature set when compiling it under LLVM's Clang rather than GCC as traditionally the only supported compiler. The most recent feature being brought to the Linux kernel when using Clang is finally allowing the use of compiler profile guided optimizations (PGO) for squeezing even greater performance out of the system by letting the compiler leverage the real-world profiles/metrics collected to make more informed code generation / optimization decisions...
helloSystem 0.5 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD Desktop
One of the most promising BSD-based desktop distributions in recent times has been helloSystem that wants to be the macOS of BSDs with a polished desktop experience. helloSystem has been making good progress towards their goals in recent months and this weekend now issued version 0.5...
Intel's ISPC Compiler Adds Alder Lake + Sapphire Rapids Support And Apple Arm Chips
On Friday afternoon Intel released a new version of their ISPC compiler, the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, that supports a variant of the C programming language with extensions around single-program, multiple-data programming for CPU and GPU execution. Not only does this release prepare support for upcoming Intel CPUs but also adds support now for Apple's Arm processors...
F2FS Picking Up "compress_cache" Feature With Linux 5.14
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) saw queued into its "dev" tree this week the new compress_cache mount option ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...
Plasma 5.23 Picking Up Latest Breeze Evolution Style, SDDM Lands Native Wayland Support
KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment...