Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 1 hour 28 min ago
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...
Freescale Ethernet Driver Unlocks A Big Performance Improvement
The Freescale "FEC" Ethernet driver used by select i.MX SoCs will be seeing better performance on the next kernel release...
Linux 5.7-rc4 Released As A Pleasantly Calm Kernel
Linus Torvalds just announced the Linux 5.7-rc4 kernel release is up for testing...
Linux Device Mapper Adding An "Emulated Block Size" Target
A new target for Linux's Device Mapper is EBS, the Emulated Block Size...
Linux 5.8 Will Finally Be Able To Control ThinkPad Laptops With Dual Fans
Long overdue but for Lenovo ThinkPad laptops sporting two fans, the Linux 5.8 kernel will see the ability to control both fans...
Valve Updates Steam Survey Data For April With A Slight Linux Increase
Valve has published their Steam Survey results for April, which is the first full month where the US and still much of the world has been in lockdown over the coronavirus, and thus interesting to see how it has impacted the gamer metrics...
Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha Released For This X11 Window Manager / Wayland Compositor
The first alpha release of the Enlightenment 0.24 window manager / Wayland compositor with new features and other improvements...
ReactOS Upgrades Its Build Environment - Shifting To A Much Newer GCC Compiler
The "open-source Windows" ReactOS project has upgraded its build environment leading to much newer versions of key compiler toolchain components...