
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 49 min ago
Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
An interesting anecdote shared in today's Linux 5.7-rc7 announcement is word that Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds switched his main rig over to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper...
Linux 5.7-rc7 Kernel Released With It Looking To Be In Good Shape
While last week's Linux 5.7-rc6 kernel was quite big, Linux 5.7-rc7 is out today and it's on the smaller side of things in reassuring Linus Torvalds that the stable release of this kernel can happen soon...
Linux Work Culminating On A "READFILE" Syscall For Reading Small Files Efficiently
Stemming from recent kernel discussions over a hypothetical new system call for reading small files more efficiently, Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on the readfile() system call and it's looking like it is taking shape well enough to premiere soon in a new mainline kernel release...
AMD Sensor Fusion Hub Support Is Not Coming With Linux 5.8
For those AMD Ryzen laptop users eager to see the Sensor Fusion Hub driver for supporting the different hardware sensors on these AMD Zen laptops, that driver still isn't going to be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle even after the patches were first published months ago...
Intel Engineer Proposes Software-Based KVM Protected Memory Extension
While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization...
Ardour 6.0 Digital Audio Workstation Released
Ardour 6.0 is now available as the latest major release of this high-end yet open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) package that runs across all major platforms...
NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2020.3 Supports Profiling KHR Ray-Tracing
NVIDIA on Friday released Nsight Graphics 2020.3 as the newest version of their proprietary tool for profiling and debugging Direct3D / Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenVR software...
TUXEDO Computers Launches Their First AMD Linux Laptop
TUXEDO Computers has launched their first AMD-powered Linux laptop! The excitement quickly faded though when seeing it's not a Renoir design...
Many MediaTek Wireless Driver Improvements On Deck For Linux 5.8
There is a lot of wireless (and wired) networking activity each kernel cycle but for the upcoming Linux 5.8 merge window it looks like there will be particularly a lot for MediaTek drivers...
PostgreSQL 13.0 Beta 1 Released With Parallel Vacuum, Security Improvements + Benchmarks
The first beta of the forthcoming PostgreSQL 13.0 is now available for evaluation. PostgreSQL 13 is coming with many new features with this article serving as a quick look plus some very preliminary benchmarks...
Intel ComboPHY Support Coming With Linux 5.8 For Their Gateway SoC
Published back in February were the Linux kernel enablement patches for a new "ComboPHY" driver for supporting the company's forthcoming Gateway SoC. That code is now set to be included in the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.8...
Async Buffered Reads Support Yielding Promising Results
Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe who oversees the kernel's block layer and is employed by Facebook while working on IO_uring and other storage innovations has recently been working on async buffered reads support...
Dav1d 0.7 Speedups Are Looking Great On Various Intel + AMD CPUs
This week marked the release of the dav1d 0.7 AV1 video decoder with more performance optimizations thanks to more hand-tuned Assembly and other tweaking of this leading CPU-based AV1 video decoder. Here are benchmarks compared to the prior dav1d 0.5 and 0.6 releases...
KDE Begins Its Transition To GitLab, Plasma 5.20 Seeing Early Activity
With KDE Plasma 5.19 due for its stable release in early June, development efforts are beginning to focus on Plasma 5.20 for release later this year...
GCC 10.1 Compiler Optimization Benchmarks
With the recently minted GCC 10 compiler there was a request to see some fresh benchmarks at different compiler optimization levels and flags like LTO...
Wine-Staging 5.9 Picks Up A Patch In The Effort To Deal With Denuvo Anti-Cheat
Just hours after the release of Wine 5.9, the latest staging release is now available that is re-based to the latest upstream while continuing to toss in over eight hundred extra patches...
It's About Time: MIPS Release 5 + Warrior P5600 Support Coming With Linux 5.8
While MIPS Release 6 is the latest version of the MIPS ISA, the MIPS Release 5 support is finally set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle...
Oracle Updates Many Packages With Solaris 11.4 SRU21
While still on the Solaris 11.4 series and no signs of major advancements beyond it, SRU21 was released this week by Oracle with quite a number of package updates...
Intel DPTF Battery Support Published For Linux
Intel is extending their Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) Linux support with battery participant device support...
Wine 5.9 Released With Latest WineD3D Vulkan Capabilities, DLL Improvements
Wine 5.9 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release for this software allowing Windows games and applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux...