Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 40 min ago
Mesa 20.2 Gets A Release Schedule With Hopes Of Shipping By End Of August
It should hardly come as a surprise if you regularly follow the Mesa quarterly release cadence for these open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers, but a release schedule has now been committed for next quarter's Mesa 20.2...
Intel P-State Getting Energy Efficiency Knob, EPB Knob Change
Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux systems has been seeing a number of refinements lately including some major changes like shifting towards the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization governor by default. Further tuning with new/changed knobs is also on the way for giving users more control over their CPU power / performance preferences...
Microsoft Posts Initial DRM Driver For Hyper-V Synthetic Video Device
Microsoft has posted their initial patch implementing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the synthetic video device exposed by their Hyper-V virtualization stack...
FGKASLR Revised For Better Linux Security Via Enhanced Address Space Randomization
One of many high profile features that didn't make it in time for Linux 5.8 is FGKASLR, Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...
It's Looking Unlikely KDE Will See Per-Screen Scaling On X11 This Year
At the start of 2020 well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly status reports on their desktop environment posted a 2020 KDE roadmap of sorts. Now being half-way through the year, here is a look at how that roadmap is looking with what items have been completed, what is still being tackled, and what is looking less likely to be accomplished...
NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver Finally Adds External Memory Host Support
NVIDIA today released a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux systems at version 440.66.17...
Ampere Announces Altra Max 128-Core Server Processor
Back in March Ampere Computing detailed their next-gen Altra ARM-based server CPU with up to 80 cores per socket. Today the company is revealing more roadmap details including the forthcoming Altra Max that offers 128 cores per socket.
Dell To Begin Shipping Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Their Latest XPS Developer Edition
Dell is announcing this morning that their latest XPS Developer Edition laptops are beginning to ship with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the latest version of the popular desktop Linux distribution...
Open-Source Qualcomm "TURNIP" Vulkan Driver Adds Tessellation Shader Support
Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno support took another big step forward this week with the mainlining of tessellation shader support...
RADV Vulkan Driver Adds New Workaround For Path of Exile Game
A new tunable for the RADV driver is to disable bounds checking for dynamic buffer descriptors. The initial beneficiary of this driver workaround is for satisfying the Path of Exile role playing game running under Wine / Proton (Steam Play)...
Apple's Compiler Team Starts Upstreaming Changes For macOS 11
It wasn't even twenty four hours ago that Apple disclosed their plans for transitioning to in-house chips for future laptops and desktops and with that macOS 11. Already we are seeing the first of the LLVM compiler patches being upstreamed in preparing for the wild new Apple future...
Intel DG1 Graphics Card Support Lands In Mesa 20.2 For OpenGL / Vulkan
Intel has landed their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver support for their "DG1" discrete graphics card!..
FSF Calls Software Patents A Disease Amid COVID-19 Crisis, USPTO A Super-Spreader
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has renewed their attacks against the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and software patents in general, this time in relation to the COVID-19 / coronavirus crisis...
Apple Confirms Their Future Desktops + Laptops Will Use In-House CPUs
Apple finally confirmed the log-running rumor that their future laptops and desktop computers will be using in-house silicon with their custom designed Arm-based chips...
55th TOP500 Supercomputer List Topped By Arm-Based Fujitsu A64FX
The newest TOP500 supercomputer list was published today. The newest TOP500 list includes more positions for AMD EPYC supercomputers but to some surprise the Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX-powered supercomputer has topped the list...
Open-Source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" 3D Driver Performance
Going back to the end of 2018 was initial open-source "Nouveau" driver work on RTX 2000 / Turing GPUs as of Linux 5.0. But due to the lack of signed firmware images at the time, there was no actual hardware acceleration but just display/modesetting. The accelerated Turing support has come together recent so now here are benchmarks showing the open-source GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2080 performance of this open-source driver compared to the proprietary official driver.
LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 2 Released For This Open-Source, Vulkan-Supported Office Suite
LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing...
GNOME Shell Continues Eyeing Improvements As It Approaches 10 Years Old
While GNOME 3.0 didn't debut until early 2011, GNOME 3.0 and GNOME Shell have now been in development for a decade. While GNOME Shell has come a long way over the past ten years, the UI/UX folks are still eyeing further enhancements to this widely used Linux desktop...
GNOME's Window Rendering Culling Was Broken Leading To Wasted Performance
It turns out for the GNOME 3.34 and 3.36 series, Mutter's window rendering culling code was broken and that led to extra rendering of windows not even visible... A fix is in the works and can lead to the performance doubling or more...
OmniOS Updates Bring Microcode Mitigation For CrossTalk/SRBDS
New OmniOS Community Edition releases for this open-source Solaris/Illumos-based operating system are now available that principally bring updated Intel CPU microcode for mitigating the CrossTalk / SRBDS vulnerability...