
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 24 min ago
Qt 5.14.1 Released With 200+ Bug Fixes, Including Security Fixes
Following last month's release of the big Qt 5.14 tool-kit, Qt 5.14.1 is out this morning as the first point release...
Wine Debugger Improvements Are On The Way, Start Of LLVM LLDB Support
With Wine 5.0 having released and the Git tree back open for feature work, we're quite looking forward to see what new material will land following this feature freeze that was in effect the past two months...
The Initial AMD Family 19h Support Sent In For Linux 5.6 EDAC Driver
SUSE's Borislav Petkov sent in the (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) updates for the Linux 5.6 kernel on this first day of the new merge window...
Habana Labs Aims To Upstream Gaudi AI Accelerator Code For Linux 5.7~5.8
Habana Labs, the AI start-up being bought out by Intel, is still striving towards upstreaming their Gaudi processor support code for AI training...
Linux 5.6 "HWMON" Changes Sent In With Big AMD Improvements
Following the Linux 5.5 kernel release one of the first pull requests sent in is for the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates. Dominating the HWMON interest this cycle is a long overdue SATA temperature monitoring driver and vastly improving the k10temp driver for AMD Zen desktop and server CPUs...
The CUPS Printing System Lead Developer Has Left Apple, Begins Developing "LPrint"
More than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source-code and its lead developer, that developer, Michael Sweet, recently parted ways with Apple...
Linux 5.5 Released With Many Hardware Support Improvements
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.5 as stable...
MPV Player 0.32 Released With RAR5 Support, Bash Completion
MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer...
Kubuntu Focus KDE Laptop Launches New $1,795 USD Base Model
Formally announced earlier this month was Kubuntu Focus as the most polished KDE laptop we've ever tested. Besides offering a great KDE desktop experience, the Kubuntu Focus offers high-end specs while now there is a slightly cheaper base model introduced...
Linux 5.6 Is Looking Like It Will Be Spectacular With A Long List Of Features
Linux 5.5 is likely to be released later today and with that are many new features. But as soon as 5.5 is released it marks the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window and this next kernel has us particularly exciting... It's certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting kernel cycles in recent times with many blockbuster features and improvements...
The Dracut Initramfs Generator Is Slow - Could Be Much Faster As Shown By Distri's Minitrd
Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster...
Fedora Workstation 33 Aiming To Have SWAP-On-ZRAM By Default
Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations...
KDE Developers Continue Polishing Ahead Of Plasma 5.18 LTS
KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack...
SQLite 3.31 Released With Support For Generated Columns
The widely-used SQLite embedded database library saw its first major release of 2020 this week...
Intel SST Core-Power Support Ready For Linux 5.6
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6...
Valve's ACO Helps The Radeon RX 5600 XT Compete With NVIDIA's RTX 2060
As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more...
Solus 4.1 Released With Application Changes, ESYNC Support For Linux Gaming
It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1..
Intel's Vulkan Driver Squeezes Another Optimization Into Mesa 20.0
Patches written two months ago for Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver have now been merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and branching...
Firefox Is Seeing Work On Wayland VA-API Video Acceleration
Some exciting news this week for Firefox users running on Wayland.....
RadeonSI Introduces A Live Shader Cache With Mesa 20.0
In addition to the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's on-disk shader cache and in-memory shader cache there is now a "live shader cache" to help with deduplication of compiled shader objects...