
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 43 min ago
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.
Another Intel 4K + GNOME Optimization Yields 5% Faster Render Times, 10% Lower Power Use
Daniel van Vugt of Canonical who has been responsible for many GNOME performance optimizations in recent years has another tantalizing improvement under review...
Linux 5.9 To Expose Adaptive-Sync / VRR Range Via DebugFS
For aiding in testing and other purposes, the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) range for FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync setups will now be exposed via DebugFS with Linux 5.9...
EGMDE Is Still Being Hacked On As A Lightweight Mir Desktop
It's not yet ready to take on the likes of Xfce and LXQt, but EGMDE is surprisingly still being worked on by Mir developers of Ubuntu/Canonical as a lightweight desktop...
Mageia 8 Alpha 1 Released With Better ARM Support, Linux 5.7 Kernel
Mageia 8 Alpha 1 is out this morning as the newest version of this Linux distribution that originates from the once legendary Mandrake Linux...
LKRG 0.8 Released For Increasing Linux Kernel Runtime Security
Version 0.8 of the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) has been released for further enhancing the runtime security provided by this out-of-tree kernel code plus other general improvements...
Fedora Developers Restart Talk Over Using Nano As The Default Text Editor
Fedora developers are once again discussing a proposal on switching to Nano as the default text editor on Fedora systems...
PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 Released - Running Faster And With New Features
PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 was just released as the first development snapshot for this major PHP programming language update due to ship around the end of November...
Mesa 20.2 RADV Driver Flips On ACO By Default For Quicker Game Load Times, Better Performance
As we have been expecting, as of a few minutes ago in Mesa 20.2-devel Git, the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has enabled the Valve-backed ACO shader compiler by default rather than AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...
Testing Intel FSGSBASE Patches For Helping Elevate Linux Performance
After covering the Linux patches for FSGSBASE for years, it's looking like Linux 5.9 will finally land the support for this CPU capability present since Ivy Bridge on the Intel side and more recently on AMD CPUs with Bulldozer and Zen. Here are benchmarks looking at some of the performance benefits the Linux FSGSBASE patches can provide for an Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh server.
Linux To Begin Tightening Up Ability To Write To CPU MSRs From User-Space
The Linux 5.9 kernel is slated to begin introducing new restrictions on allowing writes to CPU model specific registers (MSRs) from user-space...
Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-06 Released With New Features
While Intel has been providing daily snapshots of the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) open-source compiler, today marks the latest monthly feature compiler release to their cross-architecture language for direct programming that is based on C++ while leveraging SYCL, LLVM/Clang, and other open-source technologies for exploiting the potential of hardware from CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs...
Two Areas KDE Can Use Help Right Now In Porting For Plasma 6.0
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has issued a call for help in porting work for Plasma 6.0...
Intel Squaring Away "Hours of Battery Life" Feature For New Notebooks On Linux
Intel's open-source Linux developers have got the Tiger Lake and Gen12 graphics support largely squared away at this point, but a few remaining features remain. One of the features new to Tigerlake/Gen12+ on the graphics side is HOBL, or "Hours of Battery Life", while the Linux support there is still being tidied up...