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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 3 min 51 sec ago

An Open-Source Bootloader For Windows Lets You Run Off Btrfs, Other Possibilities

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 18:47
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 16:52
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 15:26
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 13:00
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 07:37
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 04:04
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

Thu, 02/13/2020 - 01:44
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

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 23:38
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

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 20:01
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

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 19:30
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

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 17:49
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"

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 15:00
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

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 13:00
Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year...

Making The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Run Even Faster - By Loading Up Intel's Clear Linux

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 06:00
One of the interesting takeaways from my pre-launch briefing with AMD on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X was AMD representatives actually recommending Clear Linux for use on this 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor and the platform to which they've found the best performance. Yet, Clear Linux is an Intel open-source project. In any case, here are benchmarks of how Clear Linux performs against other Linux distributions on the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X within the System76 Thelio Major. And, holy crap, with the Threadripper 3990X on Clear Linux I managed to build the x86_64 default Linux kernel in under 20 seconds!

Godot Merges Its Vulkan Renderer Ahead Of The v4.0 Game Engine

Wed, 02/12/2020 - 00:04
While the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline...

The Linux Kernel Now Seeing Patches For AMD SEV-ES "Encrypted State" Support

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 22:25
While since 2016~2017 AMD has been posting Linux kernel patches for Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization, coming out this morning is finally the first public patch series wiring up the Linux kernel for SEV-ES as further enhancing virtualization encryption...

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 20:29
The KDE community has released Plasma 5.18 as the newest version of their desktop and a release that is also a long-term support release, succeeding the aging Plasma 5.12 LTS...

Qt 5.15 Feature Development Is Over For This Last Step Of The Qt5 Series

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 20:21
Just as scheduled, earlier this month the feature freeze went into effect for Qt 5.15 as the last major step for Qt5 before seeing Qt 6.0 hopefully arrive towards the end of the year...

Mozilla Firefox 73 Now Available

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 19:42
Mozilla Firefox 73 is available this morning as the latest update to this open-source cross-platform web browser...

Red Hat's Stratis 2.0.1 Released For This Linux Storage Management Solution

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 16:47
Red Hat's Stratis storage project for offering enterprise storage capabilities on Linux to compete with the likes of ZFS and Btrfs while being built atop LVM and XFS saw the first update to its daemon of 2020...

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