
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 23 min ago
Mesa 19.2.2 Brings Fixes For Solaris/Illmos, Continued Fixes For Intel ANV + Radeon RADV
Mesa 19.2.2 was released on Thursday as the second point release to this quarter's Mesa 19.2 stable series...
Fedora 31 Will Be Released Next Week Tuesday
While Fedora 31 didn't make its original release target of this week due to being delayed by installer issues and DNF bugs, those blocker bugs have now been addressed and this next installment of Red Hat's Fedora Linux is coming out next week!..
Zink Is Almost In Mesa For Offering OpenGL 2.1 / GLES 2.0 Over Vulkan
Zink is the year-old effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund on developing a Mesa driver that maps OpenGL over Vulkan. It's now nearly within Mesa pending the merge request to actually add it...
An Introduction To Intel's Tremont Microarchitecture
Intel's Stephen Robinson is presenting today at the Linley Fall Processor Conference on the company's Tremont microarchitecture. Here is a look at Tremont from our pre-briefing earlier this week.
Intel Icelake "Gen11" Graphics Are A Huge Upgrade Over Gen9 With Good Linux Support
Earlier this week I delivered our initial look at the Core i7-1065G7 Icelake Linux performance compared to Whiskey Lake and Kabylake-R. The CPU performance improvements and performance-per-Watt for this 10nm+ CPU is a big upgrade over those earlier notebooks while now here is our first look at how the Icelake "Gen11" graphics compare to those aging Gen9 graphics.
Qt 5.14 Beta 2 Released As Another Chance To Test The Big Toolkit Update
The second beta of the forthcoming Qt 5.14 is now available for testing ahead of this Qt5 tool-kit update before more attention turns to focusing on Qt 6.0 for release around this time next year...
Red Hat Provides New VirtIO Windows Driver Installer
Red Hat engineers are busy working on oVirt 4.4 as the next feature release for this virtualization management platform that forms the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. For this next release they are planning to ship a new Windows installer for their drivers to ease the deployment...
F2FS File-System Seeing LZO/LZ4 Compression Support
Similar to the transparent file-system compression that has been available on the likes of Btrfs and ZFS for years, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is also in the process of receiving native compression support...
Intel 8K Display Support Should Be Working With Linux 5.4
On top of the many Linux 5.4 features we have been talking about so far, it turns out with this kernel update due out in November that 8K display support for Intel (Gen11 Icelake and newer) should be in order...
Google's SwiftShader Is Becoming Conformant & Performant For Vulkan On CPUs
SwiftShader had traditionally been about OpenGL and Direct3D over CPUs as a fallback while in recent years Google has been focused on making it viable for Vulkan. Recently SwiftShader reached Vulkan 1.1 conformance, but besides being conformant to the standard it's also showing it has some CPU performance potential...
Imagination Getting Behind Open-Source SYCL Libraries For TensorFlow
The SYCL train continues rolling: besides this single-source high-level C++ target for OpenCL playing a big role at Intel with their forthcoming oneAPI and as part of that also working on SYCL LLVM support for upstream, new SYCL learning courses, and other industry adoption around this Khronos standard, Imagination Technologies is getting behind it in at least one way...
Google Plumbing The Linux Support For Privacy Screens On Intel Laptops
A number of recent laptops have begun appearing that offer support for built-in privacy screens with the press of a button. These privacy screens reduce much of the visible light when viewed at angles to try to block out the screen contents from anyone that may be sitting besides the user. Linux has finally begun seeing this support prepared...
Purism Provides Update On Librem 5 Shipping, Known Issues
Following the closure of Librem 5 initial "Aspen" batch shipping window and it coming out that the devices were just sent to employees/insiders, Purism has now provided more information on the shipping windows ahead and known issues...
UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 Released
The UBports community has released the eleventh over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch that they continue advancing as the open-source Linux smartphone/tablet stack based currently on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...
AMD Joins The Blender Foundation With An Emphasis On Vulkan
Just earlier this month NVIDIA announced their funding of the Blender Foundation at the flagship "patron" level and now AMD has followed them in backing this foundation for assisting the development of this leading 3D creation software...
Firefox 70 Linux Performance, Firefox 70 vs. Chrome 78 Benchmarks
With the new releases of Mozilla Firefox 70 and Google Chrome 78 here are fresh benchmarks of these web browsers with testing under Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, on the Firefox side looking at the performance with WebRender and compared to prior releases.
Will Cooke Steps Down As Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Director
With Ubuntu 19.10 having successfully shipped last week and the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle just getting off the ground, longtime Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke announced he is leaving Canonical...
RADV Lands More Fixes + Performance Improvements Into Mesa 19.3
It's always great waking up and to find RADV improvements in Mesa Git for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that is particularly popular with Linux gamers...
Chrome 78 Arrives With Dark Mode Enhancements, Native File System API, SMS Receiver API
In addition to Mozilla Firefox 70 having been released on Tuesday, Google released Chrome 78 as the newest version of their web-browser...
Valve's SteamOS Compositor Has Begun Seeing Some Activity Recently
SteamOS Brewmaster hasn't seen any updates in a while (SteamOS 2.195 came out this summer with minor updates) though recently Valve's SteamOS Compositor GitHub repository did see some activity igniting hopes we could see a new release still this year... Well, it would be really great seeing a release re-based to Debian 10 "Buster" but any activity would be welcome even just pulling in all of their Linux graphics driver infrastructure updates they've funded in recent times...