Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 12 min ago
AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / ASUS ROG Strix G15 Is A Nicer Experience On Ubuntu 21.10
Earlier this week I posted benchmarks showing how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved nicely for Ubuntu 21.10 compared to Ubuntu 21.04. Of course, readers immediately wondered whether this also applied on the AMD laptop side... So here are some tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop under Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and then also looking at running Linux 5.15 + Mesa 21.3-devel Git for an even more bleeding edge experience.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11 Released - Increased Font Size In Help, Other Mundane Changes
The Apache Software Foundation today announced the release of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11 as their 14th release while stewarding this open-source office suite...
Intel C For Metal Compiler Updated With Support For XeHP & DG1
Intel's CM Compiler is out with its first big update since earlier in the year for advancing their "C For Metal" GPU programming language effort...
Intel Removes ASTC Hardware From Gen12.5+ Graphics
Somewhat of a surprising change with Intel Gen12.5 graphics is that they have removed the hardware supporting Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). Intel's Linux graphics driver has now been updated to address Gen12.5+ foregoing hardware support for ASTC texture compression...
GNU Toolchain Begins Landing RISC-V Bitmanip/Zbs Instructions Support
The GNU toolchain (initially with the GNU Assembler) has begun landing support for RISC-V's Zbs instructions that are part of the Bitmanip extension to the processor ISA...
Google Trumpets The Success Of Their Chrome "RenderingNG" Performance Initiative
For the better part of the past decade Google has been pursuing performance improvements to their Chrome/Chromium web browser as the "RenderingNG" initiative to provide faster web page performance, lower memory consumption, and better battery life. This current work is finally wrapping up in 2021 to great success...
NVIDIA 470.62.05 Beta Brings Vulkan Video Updates
NVIDIA today published their newest Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux with some new extension support plus Vulkan Video enhancements...
FWUPD 1.7 Released With Supporting More Hardware For Firmware Updates On Linux
FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware...
Chrome 96 To Feature Improved WebRTC Code, Better Wayland Screensharing
Next month's release of Chrome 96 is a bit more exciting now thanks to the work of Jan Grulich at Red Hat...
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 Now Available As Beta
Red Hat today made available the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 (RHEL 8.5) beta, incorporating a half-year of improvements to this flagship enterprise Linux distribution...
Canonical Announces Ubuntu Frame As A Full-Screen Shell Built On Mir
Canonical today announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame, its full-screen shell built atop the Wayland-embracing Mir server for embedded displays, IoT, and related use-cases...
Radeon Software 21.30 PRO vs. Mesa 21.3-devel + Linux 5.15 Gaming Performance
For those wondering how AMD's latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series is competing now between the Linux driver options of AMD's official Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 "PRO" driver stack and the latest upstream, fully open-source driver components from Mesa and the mainline Linux kernel, here is a fresh comparison.
Raspberry Pi "V3D" Driver Landing Support For Multiple Sync Objects
A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...
Sony Has Begun Accelerating Their Contributions To Open-Source / Linux
At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions...
Ampere Computing Steps Up With Monthly Open-Source Firmware Releases
We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware...
ET: Legacy 2.78 Released With Better OpenAL Sound, Android Support Materializing
One of our favorite open-source game projects, ET: Legacy for letting the legendary game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on as a community project, is out with a new release...
Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: "Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop" Sans GPU Acceleration
The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report...
Linux 5.16 Preps More Display Code For Alder Lake P & DG2/Alchemist
In Linux 5.14 Intel introduced initial Alder Lake P enablement driver support including around the new "XeLPD" display block. With Linux 5.15 there was the initial enablement around DG2/Alchemist graphics. Now for Linux 5.16 is a significant amount of new driver code for actually getting the display support into shape for both DG2 and ADL-P...
Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support
Coming with the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle will be support for RISC-V virtualization with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)...
CentOS Kmods SIG Working On exFAT, WireGuard Additions
Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS...
