Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 37 min 47 sec ago
Linux 5.17 RISC-V Allows Rebooting Without Needing Special Driver, HiFive Unmatched Improvements
The RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been successfully submitted...
Intel Media Driver 22 Debuts With Alchemist / ATS-M Support, ADL-N
Intel's Media Driver 22.1.1 has been released as their firsr 22.x series open-source GPU video encode/decode software release. This quarterly update introduces new hardware support and a number of feature updates...
Apache Hop Hops To Top-Level Project Status
After starting off in development more than two decades ago as Kettle, Apache Hop in its current form has now made it to being an Apache Software Foundation top-level project...
VMware's SVGA Gallium3D Driver Lands OpenGL 4.3 Support In Mesa 22.0
VMware has been preparing support for OpenGL 4.3 to be exposed within their VMware virtualization software so that guest VMs can enjoy newer OpenGL support that is accelerated by the host...
Wine 7.0 Released With Improved Theming, New WoW64 & Much More
Wine 7.0 is now officially available for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...
Microsoft's Director of OS Security Gets Coreboot Playing Nicely With Windows 11
It turns out with enough maneuvering that Microsoft Windows 11 can run well with the open-source Coreboot even with keeping UEFI SecureBoot enabled and meeting Windows 11's TPM requirements and other security measures...
Firefox Gets AV1 VA-API Acceleration Sorted Out
Thanks to Red Hat developer Martin Stránský, he has managed to get the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) working for AV1 content within the Firefox web browser...
Microsoft To Acquire Activision Blizzard
Microsoft announced plans this morning to acquire Activision Blizzard in a nearly $69 billion (USD) deal...
LVFS Activity Going Wild Ahead Of New Security Disclosure Requiring Firmware Update
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that integrates with Fwupd for delivering firmware updates primarily to Linux users is surging with around three times the normal traffic volume. Unfortunately, this boost in traffic appears to be due to vendor(s) releasing new system firmware updates ahead of disclosing a presumptive security issue...
AMD Radeon Open-Source OpenGL Driver Expands Its Sparse Texture Capabilities
At the end of last year AMD introduced OpenGL sparse texture support into its RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This functionality for Vega GPUs and newer flipped on ARB_sparse_texture support while now with the very latest Mesa 22.0-devel code ARB_sparse_texture2 is now flipped on too...
Qt Launches Digital Advertising Platform To Integrate Ads Into App UIs
The Qt Company this morning announced Qt Digital Advertising 1.0 as its new ad platform that allows for developers to easily integrate advertising campaigns into Qt-based, cross-platform applications...
NVIDIA CUDA 11.6 Brings Convenient "-arch=native", Defaults To New "GSP" Driver Mode
NVIDIA has released CUDA 11.6 as the latest version of their widely used but proprietary GPU compute stack. With CUDA 11.6 there are some good improvements and new features in store...
Some Older AMD Systems Can Boot Faster On Linux 5.17+
A change merged overnight with the libata subsystem updates for Linux 5.17 means that some older AMD hardware will be able to boot quicker by avoiding an otherwise mandated sleep period...
Folio Improvements For Linux 5.17, Large Folio Patches Posted
Back in November memory folios were merged into Linux 5.16 as a fundamental change to the memory management code. Now for Linux 5.17 there are improvements for folios merged and then out likely for Linux 5.18 is introducing the notion of large folios...
GNOME 42 Alpha Released With A Lot Of GTK4 Porting, Other Improvements
The alpha release of GNOME 42 is now available for testing...
GCC 12 Moves On To Stage 4 Development With Many New Compiler Features
GCC 12 as this year's annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release has moved on to "stage four" development with likely releasing GCC 12.1 in April...
Platform Firmware Runtime Update & Telemetry Feature Submitted For Linux 5.17
Last September I was the first to call attention to Intel working on a new feature to allow updating some system firmware components without needing to reboot such as for mission critical servers that try to avoid downtime at all costs. That Intel "Seamless Update" feature also known as Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry (PFRUT) has now been sent in for mainlining with Linux 5.17...
FFmpeg 5.0 Aims To Be An LTS Release
FFmpeg 5.0 has now been formally christened as for what is aiming to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source multimedia library...
Intel's Former Vulkan Driver Lead Dev Lands Great Role For Improving Linux Graphics
Jason Ekstrand who was the lead developer of Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver left Intel in December and has now revealed details about his new role...
Lenovo USB-C 7-in-1 Hub On Linux
For those considering the Lenovo USB-C 7-in-1 Hub for connecting to your Lenovo laptop for enjoying USB-C power charging, HDMI output, and additional USB ports, it does work out on Linux. While there have been some users running into seemingly firmware-related issues, at least with my testing over the past month this $50~60 (USD) USB-C hub has been working out well under Linux.