
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 56 min ago
Is It Time To Overhaul The GNU Dynamic Linker?
At the GNU Tools Track during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat's Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020's...
Nintendo Switch Controller Driver To Be Upstreamed With Linux 5.10
There has been the out-of-tree DKMS hid-nintendo driver to support the Nintendo Switch controller on Linux while with the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year that driver will be merged...
VirtIO-FS DAX Support Close To Mainline For Offering Tremendous Performance Boost
Judging from the latest FUSE Git activity, it's looking like the VirtIO-FS DAX patches that have been around since last year could be merged for Linux 5.10. This can provide a significant speed-up for those making use of this FUSE file-system for sharing files/folders with guest VMs...
Registration Opens For 2020 Virtual LLVM Developers' Meeting
Like most conferences this year, the annual LLVM Developers' Meeting has become an online-only affair...
Wine-Staging 5.16 Begins Adding Patches For Microsoft Flight Simulator
Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.16 as the newest snapshot for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine-Staging 5.16 is now available as the latest release for this more bleeding-edge version of Wine...
Lenovo Starts Offering Up Fedora Linux Pre-Loaded Systems From Their Web Store
As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora...
Facebook Still Pursuing "NetGPU" - Working On AMD GPU Support In Addition To NVIDIA
It was the recent Facebook patches for implementing NetGPU that with one of the NVIDIA-focused patches led to the recent controversy around "GPL condoms" in the kernel and ultimately leading to new protections with Linux 5.9. That NetGPU code is still being worked on by Facebook with upstream hopes but now in addition to the NVIDIA driver support they are also working on AMD GPU support with the open-source driver...
Google Is Still Striving To Upstream Incremental FS In Linux
After originally publishing the Incremental FS patches back in May of 2019, Google's Android kernel team is still working to upstream this virtual file-system into the mainline Linux kernel and at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was working to drum up support for it...
Android AOSP Can Boot Off Mainline Linux 5.9 With Just One Patch
The Android open-source project "AOSP" with its latest code is very close to being able to boot off the mainline Linux kernel when assuming the device drivers are all upstream...
KDE Plasma 5.20 Will Alert You If Your Disk Is Failing
KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week...
Paragon Submits Third Version Of New NTFS Kernel Driver For Linux
Two weeks ago file-system driver vendor Paragon Software posted patches for their previously commercial NTFS Linux driver with hopes of getting the code mainlined. That initial patch drew some criticism for how it was handled but a week later a new version was published that split up the patches nicely and had other feedback. Prior to calling it a weekend, Paragon sent out a third version of the "NTFS3" Linux kernel driver patches...
NVIDIA's DALI 0.25 Deep Learning Library Adds AArch64 SBSA, Performance Improvements
DALI is the project at NVIDIA focused on GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading along with other tasks while being optimized for deep learning workflows. DALI 0.25 was released on Friday as the latest step forward for this open-source NVIDIA project...
LunarG Introduces New Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig)
The friends at LunarG who maintain the Vulkan SDK today announced their new Vulkan Configurator tool, accessible via the vkconfig command and installed as part of the SDK...
Wine 5.16 Released With Support For AVX Registers
Wine 5.16 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release leading up to next year's Wine 6.0...
Google Engineer Calls For Greater Collaboration On Speculative Execution Mitigations
When it comes to kernel address space isolation (ASI) and other yet-to-be-merged security features around fending off speculative execution attacks, there are multiple concurrent efforts by many of the public cloud providers and other hyperscalers. A Google engineer at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference has called for more collaboration in this area to ideally provide a unified solution...
AMD AOCC 2.2 Helping Squeeze Extra Performance Out Of AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" CPUs
At the end of June AMD quietly released a new version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. Noticing the new release this week, here are some benchmarks of AOCC 2.2 up against LLVM Clang 10 and GCC 10 with Ubuntu Linux while running from an AMD EPYC 7742 2P server for looking at the performance gains possible with the compiler optimizations.
Mesa 20.2 Should Be Released In About Two Weeks - LLVMpipe OpenGL 4.5 Enabled
After forgetting to release last week, Mesa 20.2-RC3 is out as the newest test build of this quarterly Mesa3D feature release for the collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...
OpenSUSE Jump Distribution Now Available For Alpha Testing
An alpha prototype of openSUSE "Jump" is now available for testing of this new build of openSUSE...
SuperTuxKart 1.2 Brings Better Gamepad Support, Other Features
For those looking at enjoying some open-source Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.2 is out as the Mario Kart inspired racing game that is cross-platform and features the Linux mascot Tux...
Google Using AutoFDO On Linux Meant Up To 12% Less Cycles Spent Within The Kernel
While a Microsoft engineer was at Linux Plumbers Conference this week talking up their LTO and PGO optimization work for the Linux kernel, Google engineers have now one upped that work by also shipping kernels with AutoFDO optimizations...