Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 40 min 16 sec ago
Intel Submits More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 5.10
Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday...
Libre-SOC Still Persevering To Be A Hybrid CPU/GPU That's 100% Open-Source
The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding...
X.Org Is Getting Their Cloud / Continuous Integration Costs Under Control
You may recall from earlier this year that the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud costs were growing out of control primarily due to their continuous integration setup. They were seeking sponsorships to help out with these costs but ultimately they've attracted new sponsors while also better configuring/optimizing their CI configuration in order to get those costs back at more manageable levels...
Linux 5.10 To Support AMD SME Hardware-Enforced Cache Coherency
Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)...
New /dev/random Implementation Hits 35th Revision
Going on for more than four years now has been creating a new /dev/random implementation and this Friday marks the 35th revision to this big set of patches that aim for better performance and security...
Etnaviv Gallium3D Adds On-Disk Shader Cache Support
Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache...
Taiwins 0.2 Released As Modular Wayland Compositor That Supports Lua Scripting
Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release...
V3DV Developers Lay Out Plans For Upstreaming The Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Driver In Mesa
Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa...
Linux 5.9 To Allow Controlling Page Lock Unfairness In Addressing Performance Regression
Following the Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarks on AMD EPYC and it showing the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel regressing in some workloads, bisecting that issue, and that bringing up the issue of the performance regression over page lock fairness a solution for Linux 5.9 has now landed.
Cache Creator Tool Proposed For AMDVLK Vulkan Driver
Google engineer Steven Perron has laid out their proposal for an XGL cache creator tool for AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK...
KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support
If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop...
NVIDIA 455.23.04 Linux Beta Released With GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Support
NVIDIA has once again managed to provide launch-day Linux driver support for their next-generation graphics processors. Today the NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta driver is shipping for Linux support with the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards...
RADV's "ACO" Shader Backend Still Pursuing RadeonSI, Early Work On RDNA 2
Valve developer Timur Kristóf who has been spending the past year working on the AMD Compiler "ACO" back-end for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" as well as beginning to port this shader compiler back-end to RadeonSI Gallium3D. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has made incredible progress over the past year -- enough so that it's been the default for Mesa's RADV driver. During XDC2020 Day 2, Timur provided an update on ACO...
Intel Releases HAXM 7.6.5 Execution Manager
Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs...
Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference
Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day...
Mesa 20.1.8 Released While Waiting For Mesa 20.2
Mesa 20.2 (or 20.2-RC5) didn't debut last week as intended, but for the interim the Mesa 20.1.x release cycle brought 20.1.8 on Wednesday and now it's been extended to having at least a ninth point release to allow more time until not only Mesa 20.2.0 to ship but Mesa 20.2.1 alignment...
GNOME 40 Aims To Have A Better Extensions Experience
Following Wednesday's release of GNOME 3.38 was the surprising news of GNOME 40 being the next version as well as a new initiative to improve GNOME extensions...
Ray-Tracing Support For AMDGPU LLVM Back-End Lands For RDNA 2
AMD previously confirmed it would be supporting real-time ray-tracing with their next-generation GPUs while now one month out from the Radeon RX 6000 series debut are the first signs of the open-source driver work around GPU ray-tracing...
Arm Is Now Backing Panfrost Gallium3D As Open-Source Mali Graphics Driver
Most information presented during the annual X.Org Developers' Conference doesn't tend to be very surprising or ushering in breaking news, but during today's XDC2020 it was subtly dropped that Arm Holdings appears to now be backing the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver...
Gamescope Continues Advancing As Wayland/Vulkan Compositor Backed By Valve
Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS...