Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago
Open-Source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Driver Should Trip Less Often On Some GPUs With Linux 5.7
Last week there were a bunch of new improvements and features for the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers merged for Linux 5.7. There were not any feature changes on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver front while this week at least are some fixes/workarounds so it's less buggy for some hardware...
OverlayFS Can Be Paired With VirtIO-FS On Linux 5.7
The OverlayFS union mount file-system has a number of fixes and other changes with Linux 5.7...
The Qt Company Publishes A 2020 Roadmap Culminating With The Qt 6.0 Release
The Qt Company has made public their 2020 road-map for Qt software releases...
TURNIP Vulkan Driver Lands Initial Geometry Shader Support
The TURNIP open-source Vulkan driver continues advancing in-step with the other Mesa drivers...
AMD Rebases Their OpenMP For Radeon GPUs Against LLVM 11
At the end of last year with ROCm 3.0 AMD introduced the AOMP compiler for OpenMP support targeting Radeon GPUs. AOMP is another downstream of LLVM Clang and on Tuesday marked the latest update...
Google's Propeller Is Beginning To Be Upstreamed For Spinning Faster Program Binaries
We have begun seeing the start of upstreaming on Google's Propeller Framework for offering post-link-time binary optimizations in the LLVM compiler stack to offer measurably faster (re)generated binaries...
GNOME Launching A Community Engagement Challenge With $65k+ In Cash/Prizes
The GNOME Foundation in cooperation with Endless has launched their first Community Engagement Challenge where they are offering up many prizes and cash...
Some Older Intel Tablets Finally Seeing Working Touchscreen With Linux 5.7
While Intel's open-source Linux hardware support is extremely good even in time for launch day of not only for their server / data center products but also desktop and mobile platforms, occasionally there are exceptions. One of the biggest exceptions over the past decade has been the Bay Trail support sometimes taking years to see fixes or finishing up areas of the support. The latest example of this is some Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail tablets finally seeing working/reliable touchscreen support on Linux 5.7...
Vulkan 1.2.137 Specification Brings Many Clarifications + Fixes, Faster HTML Doc Loading
Less than one month ago came the big Vulkan 1.2.135 update with official ray-tracing capabilities and other extension promotions. Out today is Vulkan 1.2.137 with a whole lot of clarifications and fixes...
NVIDIA 440.82 Linux Driver Brings DOOM Eternal Performance Fix, Linux 5.6 Compatibility
NVIDIA today released the 440.82 Linux binary display driver as their newest stable update in the current 440 driver series...
Linux 5.6 I/O Scheduler Benchmarks: None, Kyber, BFQ, MQ-Deadline
While some Linux distributions are still using MQ-Deadline or Kyber by default for NVMe SSD storage, using no I/O scheduler still tends to perform the best overall for this speedy storage medium.
Firefox 75 Released With Flatpak Support, Wayland Improvements
Mozilla has released Firefox 75.0 as what is a big update for Linux users...
AMD ACO Begins Using Navi NGG For Tessellation + Vertex Shaders
The AMD "ACO" compiler backed by Valve for offering a faster shader compiler back-end than AMDGPU LLVM for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has begun making use of Navi's NGG "Next-Gen Geometry" hardware...
GNU MediaGoblin Announces They Are Still Alive
One of several GNU projects that have been silent in recent years is MediaGoblin, the effort to provide a free and decentralized web platform for sharing of digital media...
F2FS Introduces Zstd Compression Support With The Linux 5.7 Kernel
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been sent in for the very active Linux 5.7 kernel...
LLVM's Flang/F18 Fortran Compiler Might Be Back On Track For Merging Soon
Since the "f18" open-source Fortran compiler front-end was approved last year for merging as the newest LLVM sub-project and using the Flang name, there have been a number of false starts in getting the code merged. This year alone Flang had multiple delays and cancelled merge plans as the developers worked to get the code ready for upstream. Now though it looks like it could be ready to cross that long sought after milestone for having an in-tree Fortran front-end...
Canonical Contributing Upstream Improvements To Plymouth Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat's work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth...
Intel P-State Driver Shifting To "Schedutil" Governor Default With Linux 5.7
On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems...
AMD's Marek Olšák Lands Even More OpenGL Threading Improvements Into Mesa 20.1
One month ago to the day I was writing about OpenGL threading improvements for Mesa 20.1 and since then more "GLTHREAD" work has materialized and successfully landed for improving the Mesa OpenGL driver performance...
Linux 5.7 Changes So Far: New exFAT Driver, Tiger Lake Graphics By Default, Apple Fast Charge, Etc
We are now one week through the two week long Linux 5.7 kernel merge window where new/improved functionality is introduced. Here is a look at the changes so far for Linux 5.7...