Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 57 min ago
LVFS Serves Up 2+ Million Firmware Downloads In The Past Month
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) in conjunction with FWUPD for offering easy-to-deploy firmware updates on Linux continues its meteoric rise...
KWinFT Continues Working On WLROOTS Render, Library Split
KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin X11/Wayland compositor code continues making progress on driving fundamental display improvements and ironing out the Wayland support...
Multiple Games Are Now Working With RADV's Ray-Tracing Code
Not only is Intel progressing with its open-source ray-tracing driver support but the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been rounding out its RT code too and now has multiple games correctly rendering...
Intel's PSH ISHTP Driver Readied On Linux For Systems Wanting To Forego A Traditional EC
It looks like Intel's ISHTP_ECLITE driver will be ready for mainlining in Linux 5.16 as a driver for newer systems skipping out on a traditional embedded control (EC) and instead using this EC-like IP as part of their Programmable Service Engine subsystem...
X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security
Those reading Phoronix over the years likely know the X.Org Server has had an increasing number of vulnerabilities come to light in recent times and statements by security researchers like the security being even worse than it looks. Given the age of the X.Org/X11 codebase and many components being rather unmaintained these days, the security situation isn't that great combined with a lack of manpower. The security topic was under the spotlight today at the XDC2021 conference...
OpenZFS 2.1.1 Arrives As A Big Point Release
Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available today as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...
Intel Talks More About Their Open-Source Vulkan Ray-Tracing Bring-Up
Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support...
KDE Plasma 5.23 Beta Released As The 25th Anniversary Edition
It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop...
Running Linux 5.15-rc1 Causing A New Slowdown... Here's A Look
As usual when the Linux 5.15 merge window began wrapping up, I set out to dive into its performance to see what is in store for this next version of the kernel and whether there was any regressions or other performance changes worth noting. Linux 5.15 overall has been in good shape for the "-rc1" state except noticing that code compilation workloads were taking longer on multiple Linux 5.15-rc1-running systems than Linux 5.14 or prior. Seeing it across multiple systems and a very real-world regression, it was worth bisecting and looking closer so here are the details.
Linux 5.16 To Add Quirk For The Steam Deck, Other DRM-Misc-Next Changes
With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now...
Mesa's LLVMpipe + Lavapipe Land FP16 Support
The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers...
Google Is Successfully Using The Open-Source Qualcomm GL/VLK Drivers On Chromebooks
It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too...
Early Patches Bring BPF To The Linux Scheduler
The latest area where BPF is looking to expand within the Linux kernel is its CFS scheduler...
Microsoft Adds An EGL Implementation To Mesa For Windows
While Microsoft has long had WGL as an API analogous to EGL for residing between OpenGL and the Windows interfaces, Microsoft has now wired up an EGL implementation for Mesa that works on Windows...
Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple's M1 GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor...
Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q3 Released For Linux
AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well...
AMD Publishes Initial Firmware For Yellow Carp APUs
A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack...
Raspberry Pi V3DV Driver Still Working On Vulkan 1.1 Conformance, More Performance
Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...
Orange Publishes An In-Kernel eBPF-Powered Cache - Can Speed Up Memcached By ~18x
French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...
HP OMEN Laptops To Be Better Supported With Linux 5.16
HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle...
