
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 38 min ago
RADV ACO Adds A Version Hack/Workaround For An Extra 2~5% Boost In SotTR
While many hoped that with the adoption of Vulkan it would lead to avoiding driver-specific checks/workarounds, that's still not been the case to workaround various driver bugs and other issues. The RADV ACO compiler back-end has resorted to altering its version string in order to obtain 2~5% higher performance in Feral's latest Linux game release...
TAIWINS Is A Compact Wayland Compositor
For those on the hunt for another lightweight Wayland compositor option, TAIWINS is the newest option...
OpenZFS 0.8.4 Released With Support Through Linux 5.6, Bug Fixes
OpenZFS / ZFS On Linux 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS...
Coreboot 4.12 Released - Drops Older Intel / AMD Platforms
Coreboot 4.12 is out today as the latest version of this open-source BIOS / system firmware implementation that saw more than 2,600 commits since the previous release...
Initial AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Linux Performance Is Very Good
Since AMD Renoir laptops began shipping some weeks ago, I've been on the hunt for an interesting laptop to pick up for Linux testing and to potentially even use as my next main production laptop. Given the successes of AMD Zen 2 on the desktop and server front, I've been very eager to try out a Renoir laptop and last week picked up a Lenovo IdeaPad with Ryzen 7 4700U and the experience so far has been very good and with captivating Linux performance.
Ubuntu's Server Installer Was Mistakenly Leaking Encrypted Storage Passphrase To Its Log
With the recently released Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Ubuntu Server installer exclusively uses the "Subiquity" installer that Canonical has been working on in recent years in moving away from the classic Debian Installer. Unfortunately a security issue crept into Subiquity that has now been resolved...
Intel's Load Hardening Mitigation Merged Into LLVM 11 For LVI Protection
Intel's Load Value Injection mitigation has finally been merged into mainline LLVM...
Qt 5.15 Aiming For Release A Week From Today
Qt 5.15 is aiming to release next week while today marks the availability of the toolkit's second release candidate...
WireGuard Ported To The OpenBSD Kernel - Looking For Upstream Inclusion
With the WireGuard secure VPN tunnel having been upstreamed in the Linux 5.6 kernel, developer attention recently turned to OpenBSD and porting the very promising VPN technology to its kernel...
Proxmox VE 6.2 Released With Zstd Backups, Live Migration With ZFS Storage Replication
Version 6.2 of the Proxmox VE open-source virtualization environment has been released for this web-based, easy-to-use solution...
FlightGear 2020.1 Released For This Open-Source Flight Simulator
FlightGear 2020.1 is out as the newest release to this long-running project providing an open-source flight simulator...
Wraith Master 1.0 Released For Controlling AMD RGB Fans On Linux
Wraith Master 1.0 has been released as the "feature complete" version of this Linux GUI application for providing RGB lighting controls for the AMD Wraith Prism heatsink under Linux...
SESES Speculative Execution Pass Lands In LLVM With "Extreme Performance Implications"
The Google-backed SESES pass for LLVM to help fend off speculative execution vulnerabilities has been merged for LLVM 11, but in opting to enable this patch you lose much of your system's performance...
FESCo Approves Fedora 33 Switching To Systemd-Resolved
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) today approved the plans for Fedora 33 to enable systemd-resolved by default...
AGP Graphics Card Support Proposed For Removal From Linux Radeon/NVIDIA Drivers
Longtime AMD open-source driver developer Christian König is proposing the removal of AGP graphics card support from their Radeon kernel driver as well as the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver and in turn removing the AGP related code from the TTM memory management code...
AMD Relaunches GPUOpen For Open-Source Game Development Resources
AMD announced this morning the relaunch of GPUOpen, the company's effort on providing open-source development resources primarily for game developers in making use of various Radeon GPU technologies and other open standards across Windows and Linux...
Thunderspy Is A New Vulnerability Affecting Thunderbolt Security
Thunderspy is a class of seven vulnerabilities found within Intel's Thunderbolt 3 hardware and the researchers having found nine realistic scenarios for exploiting these Thunderbolt issues across platforms...
IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches
Over the past year IBM engineers have been plumbing "future" processor support into the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components. The patches often referred to the work either as "future" or "powerxx" while today is christened as what was pretty much obvious all along: it's POWER10...
Firefox 76 + 77 Beta Web Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux
Given last week's release of Firefox 76 and promoting 77 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks of the recent Mozilla Firefox releases on Ubuntu Linux...
Zink GL-Over-Vulkan Now Supports Conditional Rendering - Stepping Towards OpenGL 3.0
The Zink Gallium3D driver project that is layering OpenGL over Vulkan is one step closer to exposing OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...