Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 12 min ago
Qt 6 To Ship With Package Manager For Extra Libraries
Adding to the list of changes coming with the Qt 6 toolkit, The Qt Company has now outlined their initial implementation of a package manager to provide additional Qt6 modules...
Sony Engineer Talks Up Using Flutter + Wayland For Their Embedded Interfaces
A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems...
Mesa 20.3 Supports Intel Alder Lake Gen12 Graphics
Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the "Alder Lake S" graphics support. That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support...
The Linux Kernel Looks To Eventually Drop Support For WiMAX
With the WiMAX 802.16 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain...
Collabora's Work On Extending The Linux Kernel To Better Support Windows Gaming
Windows gaming on Linux got some love this week at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit Europe virtual event. In particular, a recap of the work that's been done so far on extending the Linux kernel to better support Wine / Steam Play based support for Windows games running on Linux...
AMDGPU Linux Driver To Finally Enable BACO For Hawaii - Allowing S4/Hibernation
The Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" series are about seven years old almost to the day and the AMD Linux open-source driver crew is seemingly celebrating by finally adding the few lines of code needed to enable BACO power management...
FreeBSD 12.2 Released - Supports Linux In Jailed Environments, Better Hardware Support
FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE is now available as the latest feature and bug fix update to the FreeBSD 12 platform ahead of the expected FreeBSD 13.0 release around the end of Q1-2021...
Bcachefs Linux File-System Sent Out For Review With Exciting Feature Progress
Bcachefs has been developed for a half-decade now as the Linux file-system born out of the block cache "bcache" kernel code. Kent Overstreet continues spearheading the work and while it's been quiet in recent months today he sent out a new round of Bcachefs patches for review on the Linux kernel mailing list...
Canonical's Snap Packaging Switching To LZO Compression For Faster Startup Times
The Snap packaging / software deployment effort led by Canonical for Ubuntu and other distributions currently relies on XZ compression of the SquashFS-based archives while moving forward they are planning to make use of LZO compression. Snap'ing with LZO will result in faster startup-times at the cost of larger packages...
Rust Lands Experimental Cranelift-Based Code Generator - Much Faster Debug Build Times
Landing yesterday within the Rust code-base is the initial version of a Cranelift code generator back-end. By leveraging the Cranelift code generator that is developed as part of the Bytecode Alliance for WebAssembly, Rustc with Cranelift can experince much faster debug builds...
A Look At The Performance Improvements With System76 Pop!_OS 20.10
At the end of last week System76 released Pop!_OS 20.10 as their customized distribution built atop Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. For those curious here are some benchmarks of System76's Pop!_OS 20.10 versus 20.04 using the Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.
Fedora 33 Released With Workstation Using Btrfs By Default
Fedora 33 has just been released as the last major update to this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution for 2020...
AMD To Acquire Xilinx In $35 Billion Stock Deal
Following the rumors earlier this month that AMD was in talks to acquire Xilinx, a deal has been announced this morning...
Linux 5.11 To Bring Early Bits Around DisplayPort 2.0, Orphans The Frame-Buffer Layer
While Linux 5.10-rc1 was just released two days ago, the first pull request to DRM-Next of various changes was submitted today in beginning to stage material for inclusion with next year's Linux 5.11 kernel release...
The 2020 State Of Wayland Support For Chrome/Chromium - Aiming For H2'2021 Default
At this week's virtual Embedded Linux Conference was a talk on Monday by Igalia engineer Maksim Sisov as to the state of native Wayland support for the open-source Chromium web browser and in turn Google Chrome...
LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha Is Up For Testing
While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released back in August, LibreOffice 7.1 is now in alpha as the first step towards this next open-source office suite release...
Fedora 34 Looking To Add An AArch64 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin
Given the AArch64 laptops coming to market and continuing popularity around ARM64 SBCs for Linux desktop use-cases, Fedora's KDE special interest group is proposing Fedora KDE Plasma edition also be spun for the 64-bit ARM architecture...
Systemd 247-RC1 Released With Systemd-OOMD, Systemd-Homed Now Defaults To Btrfs
The first release candidate of systemd 247 is now available for testing and it's a huge feature release...
LLVM Adds A SPIR-V CPU Runner For Handling GPU Kernels On The CPU
LLVM has merged an experimental MLIR-based SPIR-V CPU runner that the developers are working towards being able to handle CPU-based execution of GPU kernels...
Linux 5.10 Is The Next LTS Kernel
While there had been much speculation that Linux 5.9 would be the kernel's next long-term support release based on past timing, Linux 5.10 is going to be the LTS release...