
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 30 min 10 sec ago
MIR JIT Aiming For First Release Later This Year By Red Hat Developer
Vladimir Makarov of Red Hat spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference during the GNU Tools Track on lightweight JIT compilers and the effectiveness (or not) of GCC's JIT implementation as well as LLVM's JIT in the context of just-in-time support for Ruby. But following those shortcomings with GCC/LLVM JIT, he's been working on MIR as a lightweight JIT compiler...
TUXEDO Introduces New Linux Laptop With Ryzen 7 4800H / Ryzen 5 4600H
Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors. Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts...
OpenZFS Support Merged Into Mainline FreeBSD
Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base...
Linux 5.10 Slated To Use New Intel SERIALIZE In Fending Off Speculative Execution Bugs
Queued now in the "x86/cpu" development branch ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year is the change to make use of Intel's new "SERIALIZE" instruction within the kernel's "sync_core" code that is used for stopping the speculative execution and prefetching of modified code...
Firefox 80 Available With VA-API On X11, WebGL Parallel Shader Compile Support
Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front...
DigitalOcean & Others Still Working On Core Scheduling To Make Hyper Threading Safer
With vulnerabilities like L1TF and Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) prominently showing the insecurities of Intel Hyper Threading, DigitalOcean and other organizations continue spearheading a core scheduling implementation for Linux that could allow HT to remain enabled but with reducing the security risk...
Experimental Zink Patches Get OpenGL 4.6 Running Atop Vulkan
When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!..
Intel To Release OSPray Studio Scene Graph Application Soon As Part Of oneAPI
As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts...
FUTEX2 Still Being Worked On For Benefiting Linux Gaming & Much More
Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued...
GCC 11 Compiler Might Finally Enable DWARF 5 Debugging By Default
For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default...
Older Radeon GPUs With RADV Vulkan Driver Now Have Trap Handler For Helping Catch Issues
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders...
hipSYCL Seeing New Runtime For This SYCL Implementation For CPUs + ROCm/CUDA GPUs
The hipSYCL effort has been about supporting the Khronos SYCL single-source language built on C++ across any CPU with OpenMP as well as AMD Radeon GPUs via ROCm and NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA. The hipSYCL effort has a new "Lite" experimental runtime under development...
GNOME Mutter Code Further Tuned For Lowering Latency On NVIDIA Driver
One of many performance optimization projects being pursued by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt in the GNOME space has been working to lower the latency when using NVIDIA's proprietary driver to address high latency spikes in certain situations as well as stuttering on the desktop. The Ubuntu developer has had patches under testing for months while this past week a latest revision was made available...
BPF Preload / User Mode Debugging Additions On The Way For Linux 5.10
The "first real user" of the BPF user mode driver facility is on the way for Linux 5.10...
Some Ugly Code Can Get NVIDIA's Linux Driver Working With Accelerated XWayland
Red Hat's Adam Jackson has been working on "GLX Delay" as a means of offering accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The proposed code is going through Mesa even though it's for the proprietary NVIDIA driver benefit and also requires a change to the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd)...
Linux 5.9-rc2 Released With EXT4 Updates, More POWER10 Bits
It's been one week already since feature work ended on Linux 5.9 and that means it's time for the 5.9-rc2 kernel. Like clockwork, Linux Torvalds has shipped Linux 5.9-rc2 with the initial batch of bug/regression fixes as well as some late changes for the cycle...
Cachy Is The Latest Effort To Provide A Better Linux CPU Scheduler
Cachy is a Linux CPU scheduler that has been generating some attention over the past month that aims for optimal CPU cache usage and based on a Highest Response Ration Next (HRRN) policy...
ATGC Could Come In Linux 5.10 For F2FS, Much Faster Decompression Speeds Too
We previously reported on F2FS "ATGC" functionality for increasing the garbage collection efficiency for the Flash-Friendly File-System. Those patches are now queued up in F2FS' "dev" branch meaning we could see the functionality in place for Linux 5.10...
The Virtual DebConf20 Kicks Off With A Number Of Interesting Debian Talks This Week
The virtual DebConf 20 is happening now through 29 August. Due to COVID-19, the annual Debian Conference is happening exclusively as a virtual event for those wanting to watch a number of interesting Debian/Linux/FLOSS-related talks...
Micron's HSE Open-Source Storage Engine 1.8 Released
Back in April the folks at Micron announced the "HSE" open-source storage engine optimized for SSDs and persistent memory. Version 1.8 of HSE was released on Friday as the first major update since going public earlier this year...