
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 58 min ago
Fedora IoT Looks For Promotion To Becoming Official Spin
Fedora's less talked about "Internet of Things" (IoT) edition is looking to be promoted to an official spin for Fedora 33...
Perf Changes For Linux 5.9 Include Intel Arch LBR, Hygon RAPL, Comet Lake Uncore
The Linux perf events changes for the performance monitoring subsystem were already sent in and pulled for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel...
GNU C Library 2.32 Released
GNU C Library 2.32 (glibc 2.32) is now available as this important library for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems...
PHP 8.0 Beta Released, Now Under Feature Freeze
The release of PHP 8.0 is now one step closer to reality with the first beta being issued today and this also marking the feature freeze for this version due out later in the year...
Linux 5.9 Introducing A Multi-Color LED Framework
Longtime Linux kernel developer Pavel Machek has taken over as sole maintainer of the LED subsystem. For this first pull request going into Linux 5.9 is a big addition... The multi-color LED framework code has finally been merged...
NVMe ZNS Makes It Into Linux 5.9 Along With MD RAID Fixes
NVMe 2.0's Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) functionality is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel...
Fedora 33 To Offer Stratis 2.1 For Per-Pool Encryption
While Fedora 33 is slated to default to the Btrfs file-system for desktop spins, for those on Fedora Server 33 or otherwise not using the defaults will have Stratis Storage 2.1 as another option...
Google Opens Patches For "METRICFS" That They Have Used Since 2012 For Telemetry Data
The METRICFS file-system has been in use internally at Google since 2012 for exporting system statistics to their telemetry systems with around 200 statistics being exported per machine. They are now posting the METRICFS patches as open-source for review and possible upstreaming...
Mesa 20.1.5 Released For The Latest Stable Open-Source Vulkan / OpenGL Drivers
Mesa 20.1.5 provides the latest stable open-source Vulkan/OpenGL graphics drivers for the Linux desktop as the newest bi-weekly milestone...
FSF Has Finally Elected A New President
The Free Software Foundation has elected a new president following Richard Stallman's resignation last September from the FSF...
RadeonSI Resorts To Disabling SDMA For GFX9/Vega Due To APU Issues
AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has resorted to disabling SDMA (System DMA) async DMA engine support for all GFX9/Vega hardware due to issues plaguing some APUs...
FS-Cache Rewritten But Even Its Developers Are Hesitant About Landing It For Linux 5.9
FS-Cache provides the Linux kernel with a general purpose cache for network file-systems like NFS and AFS but also other special use-cases like ISO9660 file-systems. FS-Cache has been rewritten for better performance and reliability, among other benefits, and while it has been sent in as a pull request for Linux 5.9 even its own developers provide some caution over landing it this cycle...
Intel's Clear Linux Still Outperforming Other Distributions For Mid-2020
Being well past the half-way point for the year, here is a look at how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is performing compared to its rolling state last December. Plus there are also benchmarks looking at how the current Clear Linux is performing against other rolling-release distributions.
Intel Workaround For Graphics Driver Regression: "The Platform Problem Going Crazy"
Sent out over the weekend was a patch series for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver entitled "Time, where did it go?" This set of 42 patches aims to provide incremental improvements to the driver to offset a performance regression in Linux 5.7 that Intel hasn't been able to track down. This this increased complication of the driver to offset the regression is now under the microscope...
LibreOffice 7.0 Released As The Open-Source, Vulkan-Accelerated Office Suite
LibreOffice 7.0 has been released! Making LibreOffice 7.0 so exciting is that the Cairo code was replaced with Google's Skia library and in the process gaining optional support for GPU accelerating the user-interface with Vulkan...
Google Engineers Propose "Machine Function Splitter" For Faster Performance
Google engineers have been working on the Machine Function Splitter as their means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this compiler-based approach. They are now seeking to upstream the Machine Function Splitter into LLVM...
Corsair Commander Pro Driver Sent In To Linux 5.9
The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem has a new driver that is likely to excite some enthusiasts wanting greater control over thermal monitoring and fan control for their systems...
Intel Tiger Lake OpenCL Support On Linux Now Considered Production Ready
With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago...
GNU Debugger Adding eBPF Debugging Support
The GNU Debugger (GDB) has merged initial support for debugging of eBPF code that is traditionally consumed by the Linux kernel as part of this in-kernel special purpose virtual machine...
RADV ACO Back-End Begins Tackling Navi 2 / GFX10.3 Support
With the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" open-source driver support as what appear to be the first "Navi 2" GPUs and the first of the "GFX10.3" generation on the graphics engine side there is the initial kernel support with Linux 5.9 and the initial Mesa support for 20.2. That Mesa support has been focused on RadeonSI as the official OpenGL driver as well as Mesa's RADV driver as the Radeon Vulkan driver in-tree but not officially supported by AMD. That RADV support is currently un-tested. Both drivers currently depend upon the "AMDGPU" back-end found in the forthcoming LLVM 11.0 with its initial GFX10.3 support. But now on the RADV driver side there is preliminary GFX10.3 bits landing for the popular "ACO" back-end...