Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 53 min ago
SECCOMP Filters Get A Very Nice Speed-Up With Linux 5.11
The Linux 5.11 kernel cycle continues to prove to be very exciting. The latest are SECCOMP filters for this secure computing mode yielding a nice speed-up...
GTK4 To Bring Better & Faster macOS Support
On top of the many other improvements for the soon-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit, there is now better support for Apple's macOS...
There's Finally An Experimental Driver For Native Wayland Support Within Wine
Alexandros Frantzis has announced the creation of a Wayland driver for Wine. This driver allows Windows GDI/OpenGL applications to run on Wayland compositors without any use of X11/XWayland...
NVIDIA 460.27.04 Linux Beta Driver Has Ray-Tracing, Many Other Changes
Timed with the expanded Vulkan ray-tracing resources available today, NVIDIA has released their first Linux driver beta in the R460 series as the eventual successor to the current 455.xx series...
Vulkan SDK, Tooling, Samples & Developer Guide Updated For Ray-Tracing
Vulkan 1.2.162 was released at the end of November with the ratified Vulkan ray-tracing extension for multi-vendor use. The Khronos Group today is announcing the updated Vulkan SDK, tooling, code samples, and developer guide today with ray-tracing coverage included...
Firefox 84 Rolling Out With WebRender By Default Appearing For Some Linux Setups
For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations...
"core/entry" Is Exciting For Linux 5.11 With Two Big Changes
While a "core/entry" pull request may not seem that exciting, this time around for the Linux 5.11 kernel there are two prominent additions...
AMDVLK 2020.Q4.6 Released With New Vulkan Extensions, Performance Tuning
AMD has released the newest open-source snapshot of their official AMD Vulkan "AMDVLK" driver for Linux systems...
Linux 5.11 Hardware Monitoring Brings New Additions From AMD Zen 3 To Corsair PSUs
HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel...
RADV Vulkan Driver Enables Fragment Shading Rate Support - Limited To GFX10.3 (RDNA 2)
The latest Vulkan extension now supported by Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is support for the new VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate...
Linux Continues Crackdown On User-Space Poking CPU MSRs
The Linux kernel this year has seen new safeguards and efforts aiming to have user-space reduce their arbitrary poking of CPU machine specific registers (MSRs) in the name of security and other handling concerns. That effort has continued on with the Linux 5.11 cycle...
Git 2.30-rc0 Released With More Work On "Main" Branch Renaming, Fixes
The initial test release of Git 2.30 is now available for evaluation of this distributed revision control system...
Linux 5.10 Didn't Even Last 24 Hours... Linux 5.10.1 Released Due To Bugs
It was just yesterday evening -- less than 24 hours ago -- that Linux 5.10 LTS was released but already the first point release has arrived due to bugs in the storage code...
Btrfs Has Many Nice Improvements, Better Performance With Linux 5.11
The first set of major file-system material submitted for the newly opened Linux 5.11 merge window are the Btrfs updates...
Intel Xe MAX Needs Two Linux Kernels For Now - Meaning You Need To Use A GPU-Accelerated VM
Back in October Intel announced Iris Xe MAX as discrete graphics for laptops. The overall Linux state for Xe MAX hasn't been too clear and we haven't had any hardware access to this Intel laptop discrete graphics hardware to report our own findings, but their developers have now cleared up the situation. The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of a virtual machine context as it needs "two different [Linux] kernels" for operation in conjunction with the integrated graphics...
SD Express Support Coming With The Linux 5.11 Kernel
Earlier this year work began on preparing SD Express card/host support for Linux and now with the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut in early 2021 is this preliminary support...
KDE Plasma Mobile Drops Halium Support In Favor Of Open Devices
Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support...
GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu After A Busy Time Deblobbing
Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel the GNU folks have released their "GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu" downstream that is the Linux kernel but without support for loading proprietary modules as well as preventing closed-source firmware binaries from being loaded on the system and related steps in the name of free software...
After Years Of Work With 40+ Revisions, Intel SGX Looks Like It Will Land In Linux 5.11
Assuming Linus Torvalds has no last minute objections, the long-in-development Intel SGX support will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel...
VKD3D-Proton 2.1 Released With Improved GPU-Bound Performance, More Games Working
Valve's VKD3D-Proton continues speeding along as their downstream of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. VKD3D-Proton 2.1 was just released and besides enhancing the GPU-bound performance there are more prominent DX12 games now working with this translation layer...