
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 5 min ago
seL4 Microkernel Being Ported To RISC-V
The seL4 micro-kernel that is focused on delivering robust security and performance is being ported to the RISC-V architecture...
Linux 5.5-ck1 Released With Latest MuQSS Scheduler
Following last week's release of Linux 5.5, Con Kolivas is out today with his latest "CK" patch-set and MuQSS scheduler for this new kernel version...
Early Out Of Tree Patches Let Wine Run Natively On Wayland
Not yet mainlined but there is a Git repository offering up a Wine Wayland driver implementation for letting Windows applications/games run atop a Wayland compositor without any dependence on X11/XWayland...
The Modern Flang "f18" Compiler Is The Most Exciting Fortran Compiler Of Recent Times
While merging of the Flang "f18" Fortran compiler into the LLVM source tree was delayed in January, this is still looking like the most exciting Fortran open-source compiler in development...
The Current State of AMD Zen Coreboot Support: Basically Limited To Chromebooks
Firmware developer Michał Żygowski of embedded consulting firm 3mdeb has provided a convenient overview over the current state of AMD Coreboot support for booting with this open-source alternative to conventional proprietary BIOS...
Intel's Linux Graphics Stack Is Close To Landing A Code-Generator Generator
Intel's Linux graphics stack has seen a lot of major changes in recent years besides the addition of their "ANV" Vulkan driver. The Intel Linux OpenGL driver saw their new Gallium3D driver, NIR has come about as the new intermediate representation used across their drivers, and other fundamental changes and improvements. The latest underlying work is introducing a pattern-based code generator for their graphics compiler...
The $199 Motile M141 With AMD Ryzen 3 3200U Offers Surprisingly Decent Performance
Last week we published benchmarks of the Motile M141, Walmart's private-label tech branch, and the M141 being a Ryzen 3 3200U powered laptop that has been retailing for just $199 USD. In those initial benchmarks was an extensive look at the Windows vs. Linux performance while this article today is looking at the performance of this AMD Ryzen 3 laptop against a number of old and new Intel laptops, all tested using a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Codeplay Brings SYCL, Intel DPC++ To NVIDIA GPUs
Codeplay announced last year they were working on an open-source layer for running Intel's oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ on NVIDIA GPUs and as part of that supporting Khronos' SYCL on NVIDIA hardware. Today they revealed more details on this achievement and new software layer...
NVIDIA 440.59 Linux Driver Brings DP MST Audio, PRIME Sync For Linux 5.4+
NVIDIA has kicked off February by releasing the 440.59 Linux driver as their newest stable driver...
AMD's Zen 2 Scheduler Model Gets Partially Fixed Up In LLVM
Landing in the LLVM compiler infrastructure code-base in January was finally an AMD Zen 2 scheduler model optimized for the latest-generation AMD processors when compiling code with Clang using the -march=znver2 targeting. However, now some important fixes to this scheduler model have landed...
GRUB 2.06 Planning For Release This Year - Possibly With Intel TXT + AMD SKINIT Support
Oracle's Daniel Kiper provided an update on the GRUB boot-loader efforts and their hopes on sticking to a yearly release cadence...
Hikari Is A FreeBSD-Focused X11 Window Manager + Wayland Compositor
Hikari is a stacking window manager with tiling support that has also work-in-progress code for serving as a Wayland compositor. However, unlike most X11 window managers and Wayland compositors being focused on Linux systems, Hikari is BSD-focused...
AMD Linux Graphics Driver To Better Handle Power Savings During Compute Workloads
Over the past week have been two patch series in working to enable BACO (Bus Active, Chip Off) support and in turn power management capabilities when using AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver) for compute workloads...
Haiku R1 Beta 2 Is Hopefully Not Too Far Away
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system that has been in development since 2001 saw its long-awaited beta release in late 2018 while it looks like a second beta release could be on approach for this open-source operating system...
NetBSD 9.0 Coming Soon With 64-bit ARM, Updated ZFS, Hardware-Accelerated Virtualization
The second release candidate of NetBSD 9.0 is now available for testing of what should be the last test candidate before the stable NetBSD 9 unveiling in the very near future...
KDevelop 5.5 Released With Better C++, PHP, Python Language Support
Version 5.5 of KDevelop, the KDE-focused integrated development environment, is now available with various language integration improvements...
Wine 5.1 Kicks Off The New Development Series Towards Wine 6.0
Following the release of Wine 5.0 about two weeks ago as the annual stable feature release of Wine, Wine 5.1 is out today in kicking off the next bi-weekly development series in the path towards Wine 6.0 due out next January...
Qt-Powered Lumina Desktop 1.6 Released For BSD/Linux Systems
Out this weekend is Lumina 1.6 as the latest release of this Qt-powered desktop environment originally developed by iXsystems as part of PC-BSD / TrueOS...
FS-VERITY Seeing Performance Enhancements With Linux 5.6
FS-VERITY came in Linux 5.4 as a means of transparent integrity and authenticity support for read-only files. This Google creation is seeing better performance with Linux 5.6...
New Vulkan Extension Could Enhance Frame Timing Controls For Games
Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard who has been working on various infrastructure improvements to the Linux desktop in recent years under contract for Valve has been eyeing the creation of a new Vulkan extension for dealing with frame timing behavior for Vulkan apps/games...