
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 47 min 53 sec ago
LLVM Lands Very Basic Support For AMD Zen 3 CPUs
While AMD has landed Znver3 support in GNU Binutils, the company hasn't yet sent out patches for either the GCC or LLVM/Clang compilers in setting up the Zen 3 target with its new instructions or optimized scheduling model / cost table. But a basic implementation has been merged to LLVM for allowing "-march=znver3" based on the limited public details thus far...
It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware
The last major release of the X.Org Server was in May 2018 but don't expect the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.21 to actually be released anytime soon...
Red Hat's Tom Stellard Now Serving As LLVM Release Manager
After six years serving as the LLVM release manager and taking over the role from LLVM founder Chris Lattner, Google's Hans Wennborg has stepped down from his position and handed it over to Red Hat's Tom Stellard...
Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan At ~97% Piglit Testing Conformance
Not only is the Zink Gallium3D code for OpenGL accelerated by Vulkan up to around 69% the speed of Intel's OpenGL driver but it's at around a 97% passing test rate for Mesa's Piglit testing...
KVM For Linux 5.10 Brings New "TDP" MMU To Help VMs With Hundreds Of vCPUs, TBs of RAM
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is seeing plenty of improvements with the Linux 5.10 kernel...
Linux 5.10 Adds "nosymfollow" Mount Option Security Defense
FreeBSD has long supported a "nosymfollow" mount option to prevent following of symlinks on mounted file-systems while now the mainline Linux kernel is adding a similar security defense...
Intel Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U Linux Performance
For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU...
GNU Debugger 10.1 Released With BPF Debugging, Debuginfod Support
GDB 10.1 is now shipping as a big update to the GNU Debugger...
KDE Seeing More Bug Fixes Following Plasma 5.20
KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software...
Linux Gets Fix For AMD Zen 3 CPU Frequency Handling Stemming From 8 Year Old Workaround
Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer...
Wine-Staging 5.20 Released With ESYNC Support Re-Enabled
Building off the Friday release of Wine 5.20, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that is carrying more than 750 patches atop the upstream code-base that are currently undergoing testing...
Linux 5.10 Has Initial Support For NVIDIA Orin, DeviceTree For Purism's Librem 5
Complementing the ARM(64) architecture changes for Linux 5.10 are now the SoC and board updates that are quite interesting this round...
OpenJ9 0.23 Released As Latest Eclipse Java Virtual Machine
Version 0.23 of the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine was released this week in continuing to focus on being a high performance, open-source JVM...
EXT4 Changes Land In Linux 5.10 With Fast Commits, Big Boost For Parallel Writes
The EXT4 file-system updates have landed in Linux 5.10 with some notable additions for this mature file-system...
Wine 5.20 Released With Various Improvements For Running Windows Software On Linux
Wine 5.20 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development milestone for this solution to run Windows games and other software on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...
Intel Xe Graphics' Incredible Performance Uplift From OpenCL To oneAPI Level Zero To Vulkan
Since picking up the Dell XPS 13 9310 for delivering Tiger Lake Linux benchmarks, most of the focus so far has been about the overall processor performance while in this article is our first deep dive into the Gen12 Xe Graphics performance on Linux with Intel's fully open-source graphics and compute stack. Here is a look at how the Tiger Lake Xe Graphics performance is with the Core i7-1165G7 ranging from OpenGL and Vulkan graphics tests to OpenCL, oneAPI Level Zero, and Vulkan compute tests.
AMD SFH Driver To Land With Linux 5.11 For Better Ryzen Laptop Handling In 2021
It was sadly too late for squeezing into the current Linux 5.10 merge window but it looks like for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" driver will make its long awaited debut...
Integer Scaling To Come With Linux 5.11 For Intel Graphics Driver
Going back more than a year there have been Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver patches implementing integer mode scaling support while finally for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the support will have landed...
LLVM Clang 12 Adds Support For Vectorization Using Glibc's Vector Math Library
Upstream LLVM/Clang now supports making use of the vector math library found within the GNU C Library...
Laptop Touchpad Improvements, New Joystick Driver For Linux 5.10
The Linux 5.10 merge window is closing this weekend but there still is new code landing for this last complete kernel series of 2020...