Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 11 min ago
Cairo Graphics Sees Major Improvements To Its SVG Backend
The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end...
NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux Gaming Performance For End Of May 2021 Drivers
With May quickly drawing to a close, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmark figures for the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their respective latest Linux graphics drivers while looking at the performance across a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan games/workloads...
After UMN Debacle, Patatt Aims To Provide Cryptographic Attestation For Patches
Linux kernel developer Konstantin Ryabitsev has been working on Patatt as a cryptographic-based patch attestation system. While started a while ago, there is renewed interest in such patch attestation following the University of Minnesota "hypocrite commit" debacle...
GCC Rust Front-End Continues Advancing With Plans To Eventually Upstream
While the official/reference Rust compiler implementation is LLVM-based, there continues to be the independent effort working on a GCC Rust front-end as an alternative full implementation of the Rust programming language...
Linux 5.14 To Feature Enhanced Support For MikroTik 10G/25G NIC
The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer will feature improved support for a new MikroTik 10G/25G NIC...
RenderDoc 1.14 Released With Support For Vulkan's Shader Printf
RenderDoc 1.14 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform / cross-API graphics debugger...
KDE Plasma 5.22 Faster For NVIDIA + Wayland, More Crash Fixes
KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow...
AMDGPU To Expose More Information About GPU Throttling Status
The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver for Linux is poised to report more graphics throttling status information to user-space...
Raspberry Pi OS Updated With Faster OpenSSH, Software Upgrades
Released today was a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS (nee Raspbian) with various improvements over its prior update from March...
OpenZFS 2.1-rc6 Released - Will Now Scale Worker Threads With CPU Core Count
Yet another release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing and this time around there are some interesting changes to note...
AMD Ryzen 5 5500U - Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 Linux Benchmarks
While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.
Chrome 91 Benchmarks On Linux Showing Off Even Better Performance
Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks...
Dell Hardware Privacy Support Slated For Linux 5.14
Last year we wrote about Dell working on a hardware privacy driver for Linux as with 2021 laptops they are beginning to add hardware-based privacy buttons for disabling microphone and camera support. That Dell Hardware Privacy platform support is now set to be introduced to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.14...
Linux 5.14 To Bring Reworked User-Space API For Intel Discrete Graphics
The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer is going to bring a reworked user-space API for Intel's DG1 graphics card and their future discrete graphics offerings. This change to the Intel kernel graphics driver's user-space API, which is currently flagged as "broken" until it has been proven sufficiently capable for user-space needs and stable, is principally needed for handling of device local memory (dedicated vRAM)...
Archinstall 2.2 Released For Improving This Easy-To-Use Arch Linux Installer
Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall as a quick/easy installer for the Linux distribution. Released today is now Archinstall 2.2 as the latest advancement for this convenient Arch Linux installer...
AMD Preparing More Linux Code For The Frontier Supercomputer
Frontier as the first US exascale supercomputer being commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. while being powered by AMD CPUs/GPUs is in the process of seeing more Linux kernel changes for bringing up the new platform...
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 On The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X
Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop to which Ubuntu came out roughly 8% faster than the Microsoft OS on average. But what about the difference for HEDT systems? Given the more radical performance difference we have seen in the past with Windows vs. Linux for Threadripper systems, here are some recently conducted benchmarks on that front with the 64-core Threadripper 3990X.
Intel's OpenGL Mesa Drivers Now In Good Shape For External Objects
Over the past year developers from Igalia, Collabora, and others have been involved in bringing up support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects extension within the Intel open-source drivers. That work is now squared away as one of the pieces for offering better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...
Sailfish OS 4.1 Finally Embracing 64-bit, Android 10 App Support API Level
While other mobile operating systems have for years been on a 64-bit software stack and in the process of phasing out 32-bit app support, Jolla is celebrating Sailfish 4.1 as finally marking their first fully 64-bit Sailfish OS software stack -- for use currently just with the Sony Xperia 10 II smartphone...
Quake II RTX Performance For AMD Radeon 6000 Series vs. NVIDIA On Linux
Last month with the Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 driver there was finally Vulkan ray-tracing support added to that proprietary Vulkan driver component, the first time that Vulkan ray-tracing has been available on Linux for any AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics card across the multiple driver options. Last month I posted some initial Vulkan ray-tracing AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while questions were raised how well the driver performs with NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port. Here are some initial benchmarks for those wondering...
