Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 45 min 19 sec ago
Proton 5.0-2 Released To Fix Crashes For Steam Play Linux Gamers
Proton 5.0-2 is out with fixes over last week's big Proton 5.0-1 release that brought many features to this Wine 5.0 downstream focused on powering Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games nicely on Linux...
Intel Blackhole Render Support Lands In Mesa 20.1
Intel Blackhole Render support was finally merged today for the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver default, the older i965 driver for pre-Broadwell hardware, and also the Mesa state tracker for Gallium3D drivers...
Ubuntu 20.04 + Linux 5.5: Fresh Benchmarks Of AMD EPYC Rome vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake
Here are some fresh numbers looking at the current performance of various AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors up against Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors when using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot and also upgrading to Linux 5.5 as the latest stable kernel. Beyond raw performance, power efficiency and performance-per-dollar for these different server CPUs are being compared as well for these sub-$5000 processors.
Flatpak 1.6.2 Released To Fix Performance Regression Of Slow Install Times
Flatpak 1.6.2 is out and users are encouraged to upgrade due to a recent Flatpak + OSTree regression that leads to slow install times...
New Patches: AMD Live Migration Support For VMs With Secure Encrypted Virtualization
Beyond the Linux kernel patches presented earlier this week for AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" support, another Linux patch series out overnight provides another improvement to Secure Encrypted Virtualization with AMD EPYC server processors...
Belated GTK 3.98 Puts GTK 4.0 One Step Closer
The release of the long sought after GTK 4.0 is one step closer to finally becoming reality with the slightly delayed GTK 3.98 now being available for testing...
Mesa Developers Discuss LTO'ing + PGO'ing Builds For Greater Performance
Making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) is currently being talked about by Mesa developers for their release builds in potentially squeezing out better performance...
An Open-Source Bootloader For Windows Lets You Run Off Btrfs, Other Possibilities
Quibble is a new open-source bootloader that supports booting Windows XP through Windows 10 and opens up new possibilities like booting a Windows installation off Btrfs...
DragonFlyBSD Improves Its TMPFS Implementation For Better Throughput Performance
It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap...
Cavium OCTEON Driver Support For Linux Is Coming Back From The Dead
It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed...
Hwangsaeul Is A Collabora-Backed Open-Source Video Surveillance SRT System
Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds...
Firefox 73 + Firefox 74 Beta Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux
Given this week's release of Firefox 73 stable that also puts Firefox 74 into beta state, here are fresh Firefox browser benchmarks of Firefox 72/73/74 on Ubuntu Linux with and without WebRender as well as how it compares to the current state of Google Chrome.
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS Released With The Newest Hardware Enablement Stack
After a one week delay, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS is available today as the newest long-term support point release...
Benchmarking Linux 5.5 vs. Linux 5.6-rc1 On A Few Systems So Far
Since the release of Linux 5.6-rc1 that is coming in as a very feature-packed kernel, here are benchmarks of Linux 5.5 stable up against Linux 5.6-rc1 on a few of the systems tested so far while more results are in-progress...
Whoops, Linux 5.5 Missed Some "Critical" Intel Graphics Driver Patches
While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users...
AMD Volleys Third Revision To Sensor Fusion Hub Linux Driver
One of the letdowns of the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel is that AMD's long-awaited Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" open-source driver wasn't ready in time for merging this cycle, but it continues moving forward with hopes of seeing it in Linux 5.7...
Linux Kernel Continues Prepping For RISC-V's Updated Supervisor Binary Interface
RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface "SBI" is the interface between the platform-specific firmware and the running operating system or hypervisor for interacting with the supervisor execution environment in the higher privileged mode. The Linux kernel has been working to support a newer version of the SBI that is more extensible moving forward...
Open-Source Nouveau Extended To Support The GeForce 16 Series With Hardware Acceleration
With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7...
Linux Kernel Seeing Work To Implement MEMFD "Secret Memory Areas"
There is experimental work pending that plumbs support into MEMFD for creating "secret" memory areas. This secret memory support would then be exposed to user-space for different use-cases...
Wayland 1.18 Released With Meson Support, Other Minor Changes
Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year...