Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 min 33 sec ago
Fedora 33 LTO Support Is Now In Good Shape For Faster, Smaller Packages
Fedora's plans to make use of link-time optimizations (LTO) by default with the GCC compiler when building Fedora 33 packages is looking like it will successfully pan out...
GraalVM 20.2 Released With Compile Time Improvements, Better Error Reporting
Oracle engineers have released a new version of GraalVM, their Java virtual machine that supports JIT compilation, ahead-of-time compilation with GraalVM Native Image, an LLVM runtime, JavaScript runtime, and other language support like Python and R...
Red Hat Bringing Multipath TCP To RHEL 8.3 As A Tech Preview
Red Hat confirmed today it is bringing Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 as a "tech preview" feature...
Intel Compute Runtime 20.32.17625 Prepares For oneAPI Level Zero 1.0
Intel's open-source team responsible for their Compute Runtime on Tuesday released version 20.32.17625 for this HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics compute stack providing OpenCL 2.x/3.0 and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities...
Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU24 Released With A Plethora Of Package Updates
Solaris 11.4 continues chugging along per the Oracle/Solaris maintenance terms but still with no signs of life beyond the 11.4 series with any radical changes. The twenty-fourth stable release update was issued on Tuesday for Oracle Solaris 11.4...
GRVK Allows AMD's Deprecated Mantle API To Run Atop Vulkan
There are just a handful of games like Battlefield 4, Thief, and others that can make use of AMD's long-deprecated Mantle graphics API as the predecessor to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Mantle never was brought to Linux given the emphasis quickly turned to Vulkan within The Khronos Group, but now with the open-source "GRVK" project it's being mapped on top of Vulkan...
Rust Core Team + Mozilla To Create A Rust Foundation
Given the uncertainty created by Mozilla laying off roughly a quarter of their staff last week that did include some Rust developers and in looking to further along the Rust ecosystem in its own right, the Rust core developers in cooperation with Mozilla are working to form the Rust Foundation...
Alibaba Reports Their XT910 RISC-V Core To Be Faster Than An Arm Cortex-A73
A few weeks back Alibaba announced the "XT910" as the fastest RISC-V processor featuring 16 cores and clock speeds up to 2.5GHz while being manufactured on a 12nm node. This by far beats most RISC-V hardware currently available and now at this week's Hot Chips conference the Chinese company is reporting that the XT910 is faster than an Arm Cortex-A73...
TensorFlow Lite Now Supports Tapping OpenCL For Much Faster GPU Inference
TensorFlow Lite for AI inference on mobile devices now has support for making use of OpenCL on Android devices. In doing so, the TFLite performance presents around a 2x speed-up over the existing OpenGL back-end...
Debian's Qt Maintainers Stepping Down Ahead Of Qt 6.0
Ahead of the big Qt 6.0 release expected before the end of the year, Debian's current Qt package maintainers have decided to step down...
NVIDIA 450.66 Linux Driver Released With Expanded EIZO, Matrox Support
NVIDIA today released 450.66 as their latest stable Linux graphics driver update...
Microsoft Doubles Their Commits To Mesa This Week
More than a dozen patches were merged by a Microsoft engineer into Mesa yesterday...
30-bit Deep Color For GNOME On Wayland Will Likely Take Some Time
As written about at the start of the month, well known GNOME contributor Daniel van Vugt of Canonical/Ubuntu has added tackling deep color support to his TODO list for being able to properly handle 30-bit color on the desktop...
LLVM's libclc Adds Mesa SPIR-V Target
Continuing on with all of the OpenCL Mesa work that's been going on by Red Hat developers in recent time, LLVM's libclc library now has support for targeting Mesa SPIR-V...
Reiser4/Reiser5 Updated For Linux 5.8
Edward Shishkin continues pushing ahead with not only maintaining the existing out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code but also developing Reiser5 seemingly without any major corporate support. Reiser4 and the experimental Reiser5 file-system code were updated on Monday for Linux 5.8 kernel compatibility...
OpenGL 4.5 Now Enabled For LLVMpipe With Mesa 20.3, To Be Back-Ported For 20.2
It landed sooner than anticipated but the LLVMpipe patches enabling OpenGL 4.5 support were merged to Mesa 20.3-devel today and are also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 20.2 series soon to be promoted to stable...
Benchmarks: Amazon EC2 C5ad Instances Launch For AMD EPYC Rome With Local NVMe Storage
Complementing Amazon's recently launched EPYC 7002 "Rome" CPUs in the EC2 cloud, the "c5a" series has now been extended with the "c5ad" line-up of AMD EPYC Rome processors that now have local NVMe-based solid-state storage directly attached. Initial tests of the Amazon EC2 C5ad instances are promising and indeed offering better value than the comparable Intel Xeon instances.
Libre/Open-Source POWER10 Hardware Systems Unlikely Until At Least 2022
While Raptor Computing Systems has been making fabulous 100% open-source/libre hardware systems based around POWER9 with the likes of their Talos II and Blackbird systems, don't hold your breath on quickly seeing fully-open POWER10 systems even with "OpenPOWER" being trumpeted in recent years and similar for being more open-source friendly than the likes of Intel and AMD...
SiFive Launches OpenFive As Custom Silicon Business Unit For RISC-V, ARM, Other ISAs
SiFive today announced OpenFive as their custom silicon business now spun into its own self-contained, autonomous unit...
VALLIUM Merged Into Mesa 20.3 As Vulkan Front-End To Gallium3D
Red Hat's David Airlie has been on quite a spree lately with open-source graphics driver improvements from OpenGL 4 for LLVMpipe to now merging "VALLIUM" for a Vulkan software implementation...