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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago

AMD's Zen 3 + RDNA2 Products Dominated November Along With The Apple M1

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 16:53
Another month of the tumultuous year that is 2020 is now in the books... At least in November were several exciting hardware announcements to help pass the time along with the exciting evolution of open-source software...

F2FS Proposal Adds Support For LZ4HC Compression

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 16:00
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) already supports LZO, LZ4, and Zstd compression while a proposal would also add support for LZ4HC...

Another Linux FBDEV Drover Poised For Removal In Favor Of Superior DRM Alternative

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 13:19
For years there have been calls to deprecate Linux's FBDEV and work around replacing FBDEV drivers with modern Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers. While hardware vendors are now trending in the direction of DRM drivers (and the FBDEV emulation support if needed) after the embedded space was somewhat of a holdout, FBDEV drivers and the subsystem still exist as we roll into 2021. But at least one more FBDEV driver is now looking likely for removal in favor of its modern and maintained DRM counterpart...

OpenZFS 2.0 Released With Unified FreeBSD/Linux Support, Many New Features

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 06:00
OpenZFS 2.0 has been officially released! OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support (macOS support is still being pursued as well) and this release also bringing many new features...

Fedora Looks To Provide Standalone XWayland Package Tracking X.Org Server Git

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 04:50
With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base...

Mesa 20.3 Is Near With Lavapipe Vulkan, Raspberry Pi V3DV, Better AMD RDNA2 Support

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 03:28
The weekly release candidates of Mesa 20.3 fell off the wagon last week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday but now is updated today for Mesa 20.3-RC3...

Intel IWD 1.10 With DHCP v6 Support

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 02:21
Version 1.10 of Intel's IWD "iNet Wireless Daemon" has been released as the increasingly useful alternative to the likes of WPA_Supplicant for Linux systems...

Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD Linux Performance

Tue, 12/01/2020 - 00:36
This month Western Digital introduced the WD_BLACK SN850 as the latest PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive hitting the market. The WD_BLACK SN850 is a surprisingly strong performer if looking to upgrade to PCIe 4.0 solid-state storage, competing with the fastest of the consumer drives currently available.

PAPPL 1.0 RC1 Released With A Goal To Replace CUPS Printer Drivers

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 22:28
CUPS printing system founder Michael Sweet who left Apple last year and that left CUPS in a stagnate position (as of writing, still no commits to their Git repository since April) while Sweet continues pushing ahead with his new and modern "PAPPL" effort...

Qt 6.0's 3D Renderer Is Much Improved But More Work Remains

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 22:13
With Qt 6.0 due to be released in December, Qt-minded consulting firm KDAB has published a blog post outlining the extensive 3D renderer improvements made for this big toolkit update. While Qt6's 3D rendering abilities are much improved, there still is further work ahead...

RADV Vulkan Driver Enables NGG For AMD VanGogh APUs

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 21:00
Up to now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has only enabled Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support by default for discrete graphics cards. But now that requirement is lifted for supporting NGG on forthcoming GFX10.3 (RDNA 2) APUs...

GhostBSD 20.11.28 Released With Improved Steam On Linux Performance

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 19:39
GhostBSD 20.11.28 is out as the latest version of this desktop-focused BSD operating system based on FreeBSD...

GNOME Circle Officially Announced For Letting More Apps/Libraries "Join GNOME"

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 19:19
GNOME Circle was talked about earlier this month at the Linux App Summit 2020 while now it's been officially announced...

Linux 5.10-rc6 Released - This LTS Kernel Now Appearing In Good Shape

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 09:12
While in recent weeks Linus Torvalds was becoming increasingly concerned over the size of the changes in Linux 5.10, 5.10-rc6 is out this evening and fortunately it has calmed down. At this point Linus is appearing relieved that Linux 5.10 will be in good shape for shipping on time and without any major concerns...

Firefox 83 vs. Chrome 87 On Intel Tiger Lake + AMD Renoir Under Linux

Mon, 11/30/2020 - 03:34
With this month's release of Chrome 87 having more performance improvements while Firefox 83 debuted with its "Warp" JavaScript improvements, it's a good time for some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks of these two main options. Plus with Firefox 84 to begin enabling WebRender by default in some Linux configurations, there is also a fresh run of Firefox with WebRender enabled.

Vulkan Improvements & Fixes Land In FFmpeg

Sun, 11/29/2020 - 23:13
Over the past year we have seen various Vulkan features landing in the FFmpeg repository and this past week brought more fixes and improvements around using the Vulkan API for accelerated filters and more...

Xilinx Continues Their Open-Source FPGA Upstreaming Push For The Linux Kernel

Sun, 11/29/2020 - 22:14
Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree...

SVT-AV1, Dav1d Speeding Along AV1 Into 2021

Sun, 11/29/2020 - 19:33
While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available...

Linux 5.11 Adds "Magic" To Support Guitar Hero Live PlayStation 3 / Wii U Dongles

Sun, 11/29/2020 - 16:32
The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live...

Mediatek DRM Driver Adding MT8167 Support In Linux 5.11

Sun, 11/29/2020 - 13:15
The Mediatek MT8167 SoC was announced four years ago already while for the Linux 5.11 kernel in early 2021 will finally be display support via the open-source Mediatek DRM driver...

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