Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 16 min ago
Qt 6.1 Beta 2 Released, Qt-Project.org Called For Revival
This week marked the arrival of Qt 6.1 Beta 2 for providing the latest bug fixes for this cross-platform toolkit ahead of the planned release next month...
FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 Released With The WireGuard Driver Removed
A third and final release candidate of FreeBSD 13.0 was warranted ahead of its formal 13.0-RELEASE later this month...
Ubuntu 21.04 Moves Ahead With Enabling LTO Optimizations For Greater Performance
Ubuntu 21.04 is moving ahead with plans to enable compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for package builds in the name of greater performance...
AMD Sends In Aldebaran, FreeSync HDMI, Other Graphics Changes For Linux 5.13
AMD on Friday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.13 merge window...
Debian 11.0 Is Now Under A Hard Freeze
This past week Debian 11 "Bullseye" embarked on its hard freeze in gearing up for release later this year...
KDE Saw More Wayland Fixes This Week, Other Changes
As we get ready for spring, KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support for the Plasma 5.22 cycle...
Linux Looks To Finally Remove Its Legacy IDE Driver Support
It's 2021 and proposed patches by upstream developers would finally remove Linux's legacy IDE driver code...
Initial Support For The Rust Language Lands In Linux-Next
For a long while now Linux kernel developers have discusses the prospects of optionally allowing the Rust language to be used for new device drivers within the Linux kernel areas and other areas within the kernel for this language that prides itself on safety and performance. As the first baby step towards that dream, initial Rust support appeared this week in the Linux-Next tree...
Canonical Continues To Talk Up Google's Flutter UI Toolkit
Recently Ubuntu maker Canonical committed to using Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit as its "default choice" for their mobile and desktop applications moving forward. There is now an Ubuntu Blog post further detailing their interests in Flutter...
GNOME 40 Release Candidate Arrives Ahead Of Next Week's Official Debut
The release candidate of GNOME 40 is available today while the official GNOME 40.0 debut is still on track for next week...
AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 Released With Radeon RX 6700 XT Support
Following yesterday's release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and the updated Radeon Software for Linux 20.50 driver, AMD has now released AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 as their updated open-source Vulkan driver with Navi 22 / RX 6700 XT support...
Intel Tweaking Ice Lake Xeon Linux Power Management Code For Higher C6 Latency
While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver...
RISC-V XIP Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 To "eXecute In Place"
It looks like the Linux 5.13 kernel will be supporting an interesting RISC-V feature this spring...
FreeBSD: Sway Compositor Can Run While KDE Plasma On Wayland Is Still A Work-In-Progress
It's been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren't working well outside of Linux...
NZXT Kraken Liquid Cooler Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
While NZXT does not provide any official Linux software support for their products like their all-in-one liquid coolers, the open-source community for years has worked to fill that void thanks to reverse-engineering. The latest work when it comes to the NZXT Kraken AIO liquid coolers is a proposed HWMON driver for the mainline kernel...
Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan Still Has ~200 Patches To Land, More Performance Work
Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan...
Radeon Software For Linux 20.50 Released With RX 6700 XT Support
With the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards having gone up for sale today (albeit in incredibly short supply), AMD published an updated Radeon Software for Linux driver comprising its AMDGPU-PRO and AMDGPU-Open driver stacks with support for this new Navi RDNA2 graphics card...
Manjaro 21.0-RC1 Brings Linux 5.10 LTS, GNOME 3.38 / KDE Plasma 5.21
For those looking at Arch Linux powered distributions that provide a quick and easy desktop experience, Manjaro 21.0-rc1 is out today as the newest test release for this popular option...
NVIDIA 460.67 Linux Driver Brings A Few Fixes, 5.11 Kernel Compatibility
While we are very eager to see the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver for at least having Wayland / DMA-BUF support improvements and OpenGL 3.0 support, for now the NVIDIA 460 series is the latest public stable series and today was updated to v460.67...
Zen 3 GCC Tuning Continues With More Correct Latencies Rather Than "Random Numbers"
On Monday, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch day, we finally got to see some serious tuning begin for the Zen 3 "Znver3" CPU target in the GCC compiler after that initial code landed at the end of last year. Yesterday a second Zen 3 tuning patch was published and then today a third tuning patch has made it out...