
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 1 min ago
WireGuard Support Merged Into Upstream OpenBSD
Following WireGuard being merged into Linux 5.6, the attention turned in recent months by WireGuard developers onto seeing their kernel port upstreamed in OpenBSD. As of this weekend, the WireGuard upstreaming in OpenBSD is their latest accomplishment...
Perl 5.32 Released With Unicode 13.0 Support, Performance Enhancements
Perl is out this weekend with Perl 5.32 as the latest version of this interpreted programming language...
dav1d 0.7.1 AV1 Decoder Boosts 32-bit Arm Performance By ~28%
For those trying to carry out AV1 video decoding on a 32-bit Arm environment, the new dav1d 0.7.1 decoder should be a heck of a lot faster...
AMDGPU Patches Revived For Better Hot Device Unplug / External GPU Handling
More than one month ago we reported on AMDGPU patches proposed for better hot unplug handling, mainly for the use-case of external GPU solutions if disconnecting them while the system is still running to avoid a range of show-stopping problems. It's been a quiet few weeks but that work has now seen a new revision...
Vulkan 1.2.145 Released With VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state
There have been a few Vulkan spec updates without any new extensions introduced but this weekend's Vulkan 1.2.145 revision does bring new functionality...
LLVM Is Looking At Establishing An "Incubator" Process For Encouraging New Sub-Projects
In addition to changing the acceptable language within the LLVM project, another topic this week sure to be interesting is on the establishing of an "incubator" process similar to that of Apache Incubator projects...
FSGSBASE Testing Is Encouraged Ahead Of Linux 5.9
A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged...
Radeon ROCm 3.5.1 Open-Source Compute Stack Released
Two weeks after ROCm 3.5, the AMD Radeon team has now issued a patch update to this Radeon Open Compute stack...
A NVIDIA Engineer In His Spare Time Wrote A Vulkan Driver That Works On Older Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver...
FPC 3.2 Pascal Compiler Released In 2020 - Even Adds Windows 3.0 16-bit Support
The Pascal programming language is 50 years old this year. The Free Pascal Compiler for Pascal / Object Pascal is out with version 3.2 to celebrate, five years since FPC's previous 3.0 stable series. Somewhat amusing. this FPC 3.2 compiler update adds a Windows 16-bit target support for building Pascal code for Windows 3.0+...
KDE Plasma 5.19 Sees Many Regression Fixes, Other Work For Plasma 5.20
KDE developers continue making much progress on enhancing their desktop through this pandemic and the nice summer weather...
Wine-Staging 5.11 Is Down To Just Over 700 Patches
Wine-Staging has traditionally been around 800~850 patches over upstream while with Wine-Staging 5.11 this experimental/testing flavor of Wine has ticked down to just a 702 patch delta...
The First Batch Of DRM-Misc-Next Changes For Linux 5.9 Sent In
The first batch of "drm-misc-next" changes have been sent in for DRM-Next that is targeting the Linux 5.9 merge window later this summer...
Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.15 Released
Xfce's "xfdesktop" desktop manager rolled out version 4.15 this week as the newest update...
LLVM Developers Plotting Path Forward For Moving To A New Git Branch Name
LLVM is the latest open-source project working to shift their Git development terminology away from the "master" branch naming and to something more inclusive. Nearly everyone who voiced their opinion so far were in favor of this change, but there still are open matters such as what to call their new main development branch, the involved technical costs, and how quickly such a transition should happen...
Wine 5.11 Released With Updated Mono, Initial Work On NetIO Kernel Driver
Wine 5.11 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source project that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms...
DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Ubuntu 20.04 On Intel's Core i9 10900K Comet Lake
One of the areas where Intel has the leg up over AMD when it comes to open-source software support is on the BSD side where generally the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD often exhibit better out-of-the-box support at launch. Here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD are running on the Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with Z490 motherboard.
GNOME's Mutter Sees More Cleaning That Ultimately Could Help Foster Vulkan Support
A Cogl driver API clean-up within GNOME's Mutter code-base was merged this week after being open for two months. This cleanup could ultimately help if/when Mutter decides to add a Vulkan back-end...
Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Adds Experimental Support For Sienna Cichlid
Following AMD publishing the open-source Linux driver patches for "Sienna Cichlid" (Navi 2) that included the RadeonSI OpenGL driver changes, the RADV Vulkan driver has now tacked on support for this next-generation Navi GPU...
Latest Slab Cgroup Memory Controller Patches Saving ~1GB RAM Per Host On Facebook Servers
The past number of months Facebook engineering has been working on a new slab memory controller for Linux that can offer less memory fragmentation and lower memory use and slab utilization. The sixth version of these patches were published earlier this month...