
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 25 min ago
OPNsense 20.1-RC1 Released For Popular BSD-Based Firewall / Routing OS
The release candidate of OPNsense 20.1 is available this weekend, the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based networking/firewall OS that forked from pfSense now a half-decade ago...
WineD3D Vulkan Back-End Is Back In The Works Following Wine 5.0
One of the features that didn't materialize in time for Wine 5.0 as the annual stable Wine release was the work-in-progress Vulkan back-end to WineD3D. Rather than going from Direct3D to OpenGL as WineD3D currently does, there has been efforts to introduce a Vulkan back-end similar to the likes of DXVK...
DXVK 1.5.2 Released With Many Game Fixes
Coming a few weeks past DXVK 1.5.1 is now version 1.5.2 and it brings with it quite a number of improvements...
Weston 8.0 Released With DRM HDCP Support, EGL Partial Updates, Headless OpenGL
Weston 8.0 was released today as the newest version of this reference Wayland compositor...
NVIDIA Contributes Much Less To The Linux Kernel Than Intel Or AMD
Yesterday I put together some statistics on the AMD vs. Intel contributions to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but a request coming in off that was how do NVIDIA's contributions compare. Here is a look at the NVIDIA contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade...
Radeon RX 5600 XT With New vBIOS Offering Better Linux Performance Following Fix
Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5600 XT and as shown in our Linux launch-day review it offers nice performance up against the GTX 1660 and RTX 2060 graphics cards on Linux with various OpenGL and Vulkan games. Complicating the launch was the last-minute change to the video BIOS to offer better performance, but unfortunately that led to an issue with the Linux driver as well as confusing the public due to the change at launch and some board vendors already shipping the new vBIOS release while others are not yet. Fortunately, a Linux solution is forthcoming and in our tests it is working out and offering better performance.
Linux 5.5 Ready To Shine With Navi Overclocking, Raspberry Pi 4 Support, Wake-On-Voice
Everything is aligning that the Linux 5.5 kernel is likely to be released this coming Sunday rather than being pushed off for another week of testing...
Intel's OpenSWR Rasterizer Starts Seeing Tessellation Support
As more last minute work for the upcoming Mesa 20.0 is initial OpenGL tessellation support for Intel's OpenSWR driver...
Nsight Graphics 2020.1 Released With Profiling For Vulkan+OpenGL Interop
NVIDIA on Thursday introduced Nsight Graphics 2020.1 that to its profiling support can now handle OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games/applications making use of both APIs. While not many game engines / apps are yet using the likes of OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv, Nsight is ready...
Arm Has Many Changes On Tap For Linux 5.6 From Spectre/Meltdown Bits To New RNG
While the Linux 5.5 kernel isn't even released yet, it's ideally coming out on Sunday should there not be a one week delay. But in any event Arm's Will Deacon has already sent in the pull request of the ARM architecture changes for Linux 5.6...
Two Decades Late: Mainline Linux Kernel Getting Keyboard / Mouse Driver For SGI Octane
The MIPS-based SGI Octane IRIX workstations were first introduced in the late 90's while recently there has been a resurgence in the work on getting these vintage PCs running off a mainline Linux kernel...
Mesa 20.0 Now Defaults To The New Intel Gallium3D Driver For Faster OpenGL
After missing their original target of transitioning to Intel Gallium3D by default for Mesa 19.3 as the preferred OpenGL Linux driver on Intel graphics hardware, this milestone has now been reached for Mesa 20.0!..
ZFS On Linux 0.8.3 Released With Many Fixes
ZFS On Linux 0.8.3 is out today as the first official update to ZoL since last September...
AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile Series "Renoir" Graphics No Longer Experimental With Linux 5.5
While the Linux 5.5 kernel is expected to be released as soon as this Sunday, a last minute change to the AMDGPU DRM driver makes the Renoir graphics no longer treated as experimental. With that, there is open-source support out-of-the-box rather than being hidden behind a kernel module flag...
Linux 5.6 To Bring FQ-PIE Packet Scheduler To Help Fight Bufferbloat
In addition to WireGuard being part of "net-next" as the networking subsystem material targeting the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle, there is another big last minute addition to the networking space: the Flow Queue PIE packet scheduler has been merged...
Valve's ACO Shader Compiler Back-End For Radeon Vulkan Is Now In Good Shape For GCN 1.0
As last minute material for Mesa 20.0 is making Valve's "ACO" AMD compiler back-end for the RADV Vulkan driver in better shape for GFX6/GCN1.0 graphics hardware...
AMD vs. Intel Contributions To The Linux Kernel Over The Past Decade
Driven by curiosity sake, here is a look at how the total number of AMD and Intel developers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s as well as the total number of commits each year from the respective hardware vendors...
LibreOffice 7.0 Is The Version Now In Development With Its Skia + Vulkan Support
LibreOffice 6.4 is set to be released in the coming days while succeeding that will now be LibreOffice 7.0...
Flatpak 1.6.1 Released Due To Security Issue - Special Case Of Getting Access Outside Home
Flatpak 1.6 was an exciting update for this Linux application sandboxing/distribution tech in that it started laying the foundation to support a paid app store but elsewhere in the code-base a security issue came about...
Gutting Out Intel MPX Support To Be Finished Up In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
Last year Linux kernel developers began removing support for Intel's Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and that looks like it will be finished up in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 cycle...