Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 6 min ago
PowerPC 40x Support Slated For Removal From The Linux Kernel
Following the original, first-generation PowerPC CPU support being removed in the Linux 5.10 kernel, the original PowerPC 400 series is also looking like it will now be removed as well from the kernel...
Raspberry Pi Vulkan Driver Seeing Faster Blit Support Come Mesa 21.0
Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan driver is on quite a streak lately. In addition to inclusion in Mesa 20.3, Vulkan 1.0 conformance, and Wayland support, more performance work is being pursued with those initial milestones reached...
Vulkan Comes To Apple Silicon GPUs / M1 By Means Of MoltenVK 1.1.1
While Apple continues to drive their own Metal graphics/compute API, Vulkan support built atop Metal continues to mature thanks to the open-source MoltenVK project. With the MoltenVK's latest update is now support for Apple Silicon with the M1's new GPU...
AMD Opens Up The Code To Its Radeon Memory Visualizer
Back in May was AMD's celebration of the GPUOpen re-launch and that included the introduction of the Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) as their newest tool at the time. But rather strange for being a "GPUOpen" development tool is that it was Windows-only and not actually open-source. Today that has now changed with Radeon Memory Visualizer going open-source...
Cyberpunk 2077 Can Run On Linux With Steam Play's Proton 5.13-4
The highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 game will run on Linux on launch day by means of Steam Play!..
Mesa 21.0 Begins Landing Optimizations For AMD Smart Access Memory
While AMD Smart Access Memory has already been supported under Linux for some time with its resizable BAR functionality, only now with all the excitement around the feature being promoted with the Ryzen 5000 series and Radeon RX 6000 series hardware is the Mesa driver code beginning to see some optimizations for it...
AMD Zen 3 Performance With The Initial "znver3" GCC Compiler Support
Last week AMD published their Zen 3 support for GCC code compiler. That initial support, which has already been merged into GCC 11, is the initial support flipping on newly supported instructions but not yet offering any tuned scheduler model or other optimizations compared to the existing Zen 2 path. In any case, here is a look at the performance changes with building the open-source benchmarks under test with "znver3" compared to the prior Zen 2 and Zen 1 targets along with generic x86_64 and then also looking at the performance if catering the compiler targets for Intel's Skylake and Haswell processors.
The AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Continue To Impress On Linux
It's been just over one month since AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 series as the first processors part of the Zen 3 family. The Linux performance continues to be terrific with the Ryzen 5600X / 5800X / 5900X / 5950X parts in our continued benchmarking...
AMD Publishes RDNA 2 ISA Documentation
AMD has carried out a timely release of their RDNA 2 ISA documentation for those interested in working on any compiler support around these very latest graphics processors or working on other shader optimization approaches, etc...
SDL 2.0.14 Being Prepared With OS/2 Support, PS5 DualSense + Xbox Series X Controllers
A new SDL2 library release is being prepared for this widely-used, cross-platform abstraction layer popular with games for supporting a wide range of input devices / peripherals and other vast subsystem coverage in a portable manner...
Radeon SDMA Support Is Deemed Too Buggy That It's Dropped From Open-Source Driver
There have been many workarounds and changes to the SDMA (System DMA) copy support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver since the support was introduced years ago, but it's now been outright removed due to too many generations of AMD Radeon hardware having issues with it enabled...
QEMU 5.2 Released For Improving The Linux Open-Source Virtualization Stack
QEMU 5.2 was released on Tuesday as the latest feature release for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
Intel Releases oneDNN 2.0 To Bring The Open-Source Neural Network Library To Its GPUs
Intel's Deep Neural Network Library currently known as oneDNN as part of the oneAPI suite (and formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL) has reached version 2.0 as an open-source project...
Intel Opens Up "IMF LA" As A GPU Compute Speed Boost To Better Compete With Windows
The open-source Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is currently used by their oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL implementations but likely to see Intel driver Mesa usage in 2021 has a new feature dubbed "IMF LA" that aims to help with the performance and close the gap with Windows...
Google's Fuchsia Open-Source OS To Begin Accepting Community Contributions
Four years after Google began developing the "Fuchsia" operating system complete with its own kernel, Google is now becoming more open with Fuchsia development and also accepting community code contributions...
SiFive's RISC-V HiFive Unmatched Upgraded To Ship With 16GB Of RAM
Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing...
CentOS 8 Ending Next Year To Focus Shift On CentOS Stream
Well here is a surprise for those that have long used CentOS as the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux... CentOS 8 will end in 2021 and moving forward CentOS 7 will remain supported until the end of its lifecycle but CentOS Stream will be the focus as the future upstream of RHEL...
Radeon RX 6900 XT Launches As Flagship Card With Open-Source Drivers But Very Limited Availability
After the Radeon RX 6800 series launched just under a month ago, the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is launching today. This is currently the most powerful RDNA 2 graphics card and should work under Linux with the open-source driver stack but the card is likely to be scarcer than even the RX 6800 series...
Qt 6.0 Officially Released
The Qt Company has officially released Qt 6.0 as the latest major release to this open-source, cross-platform toolkit...
The 10 Most Interesting Features Of Linux 5.10
With the Linux 5.10 kernel expected to be released this weekend, here is a look at some of the most interesting changes and new additions. Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, Linux 5.10 is significant in that it's also serving as a Long Term Support (LTS) release...
