Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 49 min ago
GNOME Shell's Icon Grid Could See Almost Double The Performance
On top of an optimization to lower render times and reduce power usage and fixing window culling as another performance optimization, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt also came across another serious optimization for GNOME Shell's icon grid performance...
Linux 5.8-rc3 Released - Fairly Big But Not Particularly Scary
Linus Torvalds just pushed out Linux 5.8-rc3 as the newest weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.8 that should debut as stable around early August...
Bcachefs Linux File-System Seeing Performance Improvements, Other Progress
While Ubuntu continues in their path of OpenZFS integration, Fedora is revisiting the possibility of using Btrfs on the desktop, Red Hat is continuing to invest in Stratis, and Reiser5 is being developed, Bcachefs as the file-system born out of the Linux block cache code is continuing to evolve...
Godot 4.0 Is Looking Even More Impressive With SDFGI
While we are most excited about Godot 4.0 for its Vulkan renderer for this leading open-source game engine, there continues to be a lot of other improvements building up for this major release...
Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre4 Brings DG1 Graphics Card Support
Intel's open-source media team has released a new development snapshot of their media driver that provides GPU-accelerated video encode/decode capabilities on Linux...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku Working On Supporting Modern CPU Features Like AVX
The open-source Haiku operating system that continues maintaining compatibility with BeOS and inspiration from its design has continued in its quest of better supporting modern hardware...
In 2020 The Linux Kernel Is Still Seeing Driver Work For The Macintosh II
The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems...
5+ Years Late: LLVM's AMD Excavator Target Was Missing Two Features
It took until 2020 for an Intel developer to land a patch providing support for two instructions supported by AMD "Excavator" CPUs but not exposed by the "bdver4" target...
RISC-V UEFI Linux Support Under Review
Following Linux's UEFI code getting cleaned up earlier this year in preparation for RISC-V support being added and then some early RISC-V UEFI patches, a more comprehensive set of patches for enabling UEFI support on RISC-V under Linux have been sent out...
An Early Benchmark Of The NVIDIA CUDA GPU Performance On WSL2
Our recent benchmarks have shown WSL/WSL2 performance on the latest Windows 10 builds to generally be quite good compared to running bare metal Linux. But past the May 2020 Update and on the latest Insider Preview builds is the initial support for GPU acceleration in conjunction with updated Windows graphics drivers. The initial emphasis is on GPU compute with DirectML and for NVIDIA hardware CUDA support as well. Here are a couple CUDA benchmarks that ran gracefully under WSL2 albeit the performance leaves a lot to be desired...
LuxCore 2.4 Beta Brings Big Changes For This Open-Source Physically Based Renderer
This leading open-source physically based renderer is about to get even better with the upcoming LuxCore 2.4 release...
Intel Begins Volleying Open-Source Patches Around Intel AMX
Intel updated their instruction set extensions programming reference guide that along with other additions now details the Intel AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions) coming with Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs next year...
Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" Released - Based On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" is shipping this weekend as the newest major release to this user-friendly desktop Linux distribution derived from the Ubuntu LTS package set...
GCC 11 Now Defaults To C++17 Dialect By Default
Following the proposal at the end of last year over GCC 11 aiming to default to C++17 for its C++ front-end, that change is now in place for GNU Compiler Collection 11...
Freedreno Lands On-Disk Shader Cache Support In Mesa 20.2
Freedreno Gallium3D is the latest Mesa driver implementing an on-disk shader cache...
KDE Ending Out June With Many Bug Fixes, Finally Supporting Btrfs Copy-On-Write
KDE developers remain as busy as ever, especially when it comes to fixing bugs...
AMD Queues Its First Batch Of AMDGPU Changes For Linux 5.9: Sienna Cichlid + More
On Friday the initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.9 merge window happening in August...
RHEL Deprecating The Virt-Manager UI In Favor Of The Cockpit Web Console
The upstream virt-manager project including the virt-manager user-interface is still being maintained, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has decided to deprecate the virt-manager UI moving forward...
There's A Proposal To Switch Fedora 33 On The Desktop To Using Btrfs
More than a decade ago Fedora was routinely trying to pursue the Btrfs file-system by default but those hopes were abandoned long ago. Heck, Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer even supports Btrfs. While all Red Hat / Fedora interests in Btrfs seemed abandoned years ago especially with Red Hat developing their Stratis storage technology, there is a new (and serious) proposal about moving to Btrfs for Fedora 33 desktop variants...
AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Performance On Windows 10 vs. Six Linux Distributions
As part of our Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U Linux benchmarking there have been multiple requests for showing how various Linux distributions run and perform with these exciting Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPUs. Here are some benchmarks not only looking at six Linux distributions but also the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 as was preloaded on the Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch 2-in-1.