Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 1 hour 30 min ago
Firefox 76 Released With WebRender Improvements, Better Security
Firefox 76.0 is out today as the newest feature release to Mozilla's web browser...
Linux's Local Cache For Network Filesystems Seeing Huge Speed-Up, Lower Memory Use
David Howells of Red Hat has been working to "massively overhaul" the code surrounding the kernel's local caching for network filesystems...
NVIDIA Carmel Support Finally Mainlined In LLVM/Clang
NVIDIA Carmel CPU cores that succeeded Denver 2 and found for a while already within Tegra Xavier hardware now has mainline LLVM/Clang compiler support...
Intel Preparing Platform Monitoring Technology - Hardware Telemetry With Tiger Lake
Intel developers are working on a new Linux feature and technology called "Intel Platform Monitoring Technology" as amounting to a hardware telemetry framework that can also be used by other hardware vendors. This appears to be a new feature Intel will be supporting on the hardware side starting with Tiger Lake...
The Wayland Book Is Now Freely Available
For those wanting to learn more about the inner-workings of Wayland and its architecture, The Wayland Book is now freely available for all to learn from for moving past the X11 world on the Linux desktop...
OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.04 Released To Phase Out Python 2, GCC7 As Base Compiler
OpenIndiana, the open-source operating system built off Illumos and the former open-source Solaris code, is out with version 2020.04 as its newest feature release...
Unigine Engine Turns 15 Years Old For Delivering First-Rate Linux Graphics
Yesterday marked fifteen years since the very first release of the Unigine Engine, the longtime Linux-friendly game engine that over the past decade has seemingly increased focus towards industrial simulations and AR but remaining well known among PC enthusiasts for the company's very demanding tech demos...
CompuLab Launching The Tensor-PC As A New IIOT Solution
The Linux-friendly folks at CompuLab are preparing to ship the Tensor-PC as their newest creation following their big successes with the likes of the Airtop 3 fan-less PC and incredibly small yet featureful Fitlet...
AMD Working With GNU Developers To Provide More Robust Runtime Detection For Better Performance
Back in March we reported how AMD developers were looking at GNU C Library platform optimizations for Zen and in part could be leveraging some of the capabilities currently employed by Intel for Haswell and newer. It's looking like some solid progress is being made in that direction...
Intel's High-Performance VP9 Encoder Sees Its Second Release
When it comes to Intel's high performance Scalable Video Technology (SVT) video encoders, SVT-AV1 is the most well known for its great speed and usage by Netflix and others. But Intel SVT also consists of VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encoders too and today brought the debut of SVT-VP9 0.2...
GNOME 3.36.2 Released With Restoring TLS 1.0/1.1, Crash Fixes, Other Stable Updates
GNOME 3.36.2 is now available as the latest stable GNOME desktop environment update...
Inkscape 1.0 Released For This Wildly Successful Vector Graphics Program
Inkscape 1.0 is finally here! This open-source vector graphics editor that has been around for nearly two years has finally reached 1.0 status...
Krita 4.3 Enters Beta For This Leading Open-Source Digital Painting Application
The first beta of Krita 4.3 is now available for this advanced open-source digital painting software package. Krita 4.3 has been baking for about one year so there is a lot in store...
GNOME Adds Bit To Launcher Files For Indicating Apps That Should Run On Discrete GPUs
The GNOME Shell has long provided the ability for easily launching applications on alternative GPUs namely for multi-GPU/Optimus-type setups especially with the increasing number of laptops having both integrated and discrete graphics. GNOME is now introducing an addition to .desktop files so applications can specify if they should run on the dedicated GPU if available...
OpenRazer 2.8 Brings Broader Razer Device Support On Linux
OpenRazer, one of the leading open-source/Linux solutions for configuring Razer peripherals on Linux, is out with a big update...
Vulkan 1.2.140 Released With New Extensions For Private Data, Custom Border Color
Vulkan 1.2.140 is out as the latest version of the Vulkan API for high performance graphics and compute. Besides the usual assortment of documentation clarifications/fixes, this round does bring two new extensions...
Firefox 77 Nightly Adds Initial AV1 Image File Support (AVIF)
Exciting times in Mozilla land as in addition to the recent Wayland improvements along with Flatpak availability and WebGPU support coming together, the newest Firefox Nightly builds now have AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support...
GNU C Library Adds Detection Support For Zhaoxin CPUs
For the x86_64 Zhaoxin CPUs made in China and based on VIA Centaur IP there is now proper support for them within the GNU C Library...
AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance On Mesa 20.1 Looking Good With RADV+ACO
Since its mainlining in Mesa 20.0, the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been helping to reduce game load times and often increasing overall Linux gaming performance both for native titles as well as those on Steam Play with Proton+DXVK/VKD3D. With Mesa 20.1 releasing in the coming weeks, here are some recent benchmarks showing the RADV+ACO performance on Mesa 20.1-devel compared to RADV using its default AMDGPU LLVM back-end.
FSCRYPT Inline Encryption Still Being Prepared For The Linux Kernel
For a number of months now Google engineers have been working on FSCRYPT inline encryption capabilities for EXT4 and F2FS. The work is designed to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs by having the encryption/decryption happen within the block layer as part of the bio and in turn leveraging the inline encryption hardware on modern Arm SoCs. The work still isn't merged but looks like it could be getting closer...