
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 53 min ago
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...
Mozilla's Incredible Speech-To-Text Engine Is At Risk Following Layoffs
For a while now a Mozilla software project that's been an "unsung hero" has been DeepSpeech as their speech-to-text engine. Sadly, following the recent major layoffs at Mozilla and restructuring along with a shift to focusing more on their profitable activities, DeepSpeech for now has an uncertain future...
Linux 5.10 To Bring Rework To Raspberry Pi 4 USB Firmware Initialization
One of the early changes queued in the USB area for the Linux 5.10 cycle later this summer is a "reset-raspberrypi" driver set for introduction as another upstream improvement for the current-generation Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer...
Unity Is The Latest Company To Join Blender's Development Fund
Unity Tech is the latest high profile company joining the Blender Development Fund for assisting this leading open-source 3D modeling software...
OpenZFS File-System Merges Support For Using Zstd Compression
Adding to the list of software projects embracing Zstd for its very efficient compression abilities, OpenZFS is now supporting the Facebook-developed Zstandard as its latest file-system compression support...
Linux 5.10 To Bring SLDT/STR Emulation To Help Some Windows Games On Wine
Last year Wine itself added emulation for some CPU instructions now blocked by UMIP, the User-Mode Instruction Prevention functionality found in the latest Intel and AMD processors. Now slated for Linux 5.10 is the emulation/spoofing of two of those instructions by the kernel as another attempt to help a small number of Windows programs relying on those instructions...
KDE Apps Now Remember Their Window Positions When Closed & Re-Launched
KDE applications finally have the ability to keeping their window positions preserved when closed and then re-launched...
EXT4 Changes Land For Linux 5.9 With Block Allocator Performance Work
With all the Linux 5.9 kernel changes you may have noticed no major EXT4 file-system pull request was submitted during the kernel merge window the prior two weeks. Fortunately, the EXT4 work has now been sent out and Linus Torvalds honored the late changes for this widely-used Linux file-system...
GStreamer 1.18 RC1 Released For This Leading Open-Source Multimedia Framework
GStreamer 1.18 is gearing up for release in the very near future while for right now a release candidate is available for testing this widely-used open-source multimedia framework...
Intel Xeon Ice Lake, Gen2 Optane + Linux's IO_uring Yielding Up To 2.58M IOPS Per Core
The Linux IO_uring interface for driving some major efficiency improvements in the Linux I/O stack is really screaming when paired with Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon server platforms and the Intel Gen2 "Alder Stream" Optane solid-state drives...
Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-08 Released With Explicit SIMD Extension
Along with this week marking the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.0, the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler has seen its newest tagged release...
Paragon Sends Out Updated NTFS Driver They Want To Mainline For The Linux Kernel
Coming as a surprise last week was word of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS read-write driver as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS Linux kernel driver. An updated patch series for that much improved NTFS Linux kernel driver is now available...
AMDVLK 2020.Q3.4 Released With Image Robustness Support, Fixes
AMD engineers responsible for their official Vulkan driver code-base have issued their first updated open-source snapshot in two weeks for AMDVLK fans...
Now That The Linux Kernel Can Be Zstd-Compressed, The Next Step Is The Firmware
With Linux 5.9 comes the ability to compress the Linux kernel image / initrd with Zstd for yielding faster boot speeds but at a compression ratio between Gzip and XZ/LZMA. Being proposed next with the widespread adoption of Facebook's Zstd is compressing the kernel microcode/firmware files...
Ubuntu Touch Working On Better PinePhone, PineTab Support
The UBports' Ubuntu Touch crew has been focusing a lot lately on improving their support for the popular, budget-friendly PineTab tablet and PinePhone smartphone. The next OTA release will bring more improvements for fans of these PINE Allwinner-powered devices...
GCC "-fparallel-jobs" Sent Out For Compiling Individual Files In Parallel - Up To ~1.9x Speedup
For the past two summers student developer Giuliano Belinassi has been working under Google Summer of Code in working to address GCC parallelization bottlenecks and ultimately a goal of allowing single source files to be split up for compilation in parallel by GCC. In particular, being able to split the compilation of large source files across multiple CPU cores. The latest patches on this "-fparallel-jobs=" was sent out today as we approach the end of GSoC 2020...