Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarks & Open-Source News
Updated: 1 hour 39 min ago
55th TOP500 Supercomputer List Topped By Arm-Based Fujitsu A64FX
The newest TOP500 supercomputer list was published today. The newest TOP500 list includes more positions for AMD EPYC supercomputers but to some surprise the Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX-powered supercomputer has topped the list...
Open-Source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" 3D Driver Performance
Going back to the end of 2018 was initial open-source "Nouveau" driver work on RTX 2000 / Turing GPUs as of Linux 5.0. But due to the lack of signed firmware images at the time, there was no actual hardware acceleration but just display/modesetting. The accelerated Turing support has come together recent so now here are benchmarks showing the open-source GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2080 performance of this open-source driver compared to the proprietary official driver.
LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 2 Released For This Open-Source, Vulkan-Supported Office Suite
LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing...
GNOME Shell Continues Eyeing Improvements As It Approaches 10 Years Old
While GNOME 3.0 didn't debut until early 2011, GNOME 3.0 and GNOME Shell have now been in development for a decade. While GNOME Shell has come a long way over the past ten years, the UI/UX folks are still eyeing further enhancements to this widely used Linux desktop...
GNOME's Window Rendering Culling Was Broken Leading To Wasted Performance
It turns out for the GNOME 3.34 and 3.36 series, Mutter's window rendering culling code was broken and that led to extra rendering of windows not even visible... A fix is in the works and can lead to the performance doubling or more...
OmniOS Updates Bring Microcode Mitigation For CrossTalk/SRBDS
New OmniOS Community Edition releases for this open-source Solaris/Illumos-based operating system are now available that principally bring updated Intel CPU microcode for mitigating the CrossTalk / SRBDS vulnerability...
NVIDIA A100 PCIe Accelerator Now Shipping For Servers
After announcing the NVIDIA Ampere architecture at last month's virtual keynote, beginning today the NVIDIA A100 PCI Express accelerator is now shipping in GPU compute servers...
Linux 5.8-rc2 Released For This Big Summer 2020 Kernel
Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel marked Father's Day 2020 with the release of Linux 5.8-rc2, right on schedule following last week's big 5.8-rc1 kernel with this cycle being one of the largest ever for this open-source kernel...
WireGuard Support Merged Into Upstream OpenBSD
Following WireGuard being merged into Linux 5.6, the attention turned in recent months by WireGuard developers onto seeing their kernel port upstreamed in OpenBSD. As of this weekend, the WireGuard upstreaming in OpenBSD is their latest accomplishment...
Perl 5.32 Released With Unicode 13.0 Support, Performance Enhancements
Perl is out this weekend with Perl 5.32 as the latest version of this interpreted programming language...
dav1d 0.7.1 AV1 Decoder Boosts 32-bit Arm Performance By ~28%
For those trying to carry out AV1 video decoding on a 32-bit Arm environment, the new dav1d 0.7.1 decoder should be a heck of a lot faster...
AMDGPU Patches Revived For Better Hot Device Unplug / External GPU Handling
More than one month ago we reported on AMDGPU patches proposed for better hot unplug handling, mainly for the use-case of external GPU solutions if disconnecting them while the system is still running to avoid a range of show-stopping problems. It's been a quiet few weeks but that work has now seen a new revision...
Vulkan 1.2.145 Released With VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state
There have been a few Vulkan spec updates without any new extensions introduced but this weekend's Vulkan 1.2.145 revision does bring new functionality...
LLVM Is Looking At Establishing An "Incubator" Process For Encouraging New Sub-Projects
In addition to changing the acceptable language within the LLVM project, another topic this week sure to be interesting is on the establishing of an "incubator" process similar to that of Apache Incubator projects...
FSGSBASE Testing Is Encouraged Ahead Of Linux 5.9
A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged...
Radeon ROCm 3.5.1 Open-Source Compute Stack Released
Two weeks after ROCm 3.5, the AMD Radeon team has now issued a patch update to this Radeon Open Compute stack...
A NVIDIA Engineer In His Spare Time Wrote A Vulkan Driver That Works On Older Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver...
FPC 3.2 Pascal Compiler Released In 2020 - Even Adds Windows 3.0 16-bit Support
The Pascal programming language is 50 years old this year. The Free Pascal Compiler for Pascal / Object Pascal is out with version 3.2 to celebrate, five years since FPC's previous 3.0 stable series. Somewhat amusing. this FPC 3.2 compiler update adds a Windows 16-bit target support for building Pascal code for Windows 3.0+...
KDE Plasma 5.19 Sees Many Regression Fixes, Other Work For Plasma 5.20
KDE developers continue making much progress on enhancing their desktop through this pandemic and the nice summer weather...
Wine-Staging 5.11 Is Down To Just Over 700 Patches
Wine-Staging has traditionally been around 800~850 patches over upstream while with Wine-Staging 5.11 this experimental/testing flavor of Wine has ticked down to just a 702 patch delta...