
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 19 min ago
Gallium3D's LLVMpipe Lands NIR Support Plus Radeon R600g NIR Support Is Forthcoming
More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations...
The Big Graphics Driver Update Lands In Linux 5.5 With Exciting Changes For Intel + AMD
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates were sent out last night for the Linux 5.5 kernel and quickly landed into the mainline tree...
Compiz Sees New Update Ahead Of The Holidays - But It's Mainly Bug Fixing
Over a decade ago all the Linux desktop rage was over the likes of Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, and the like... Ah the memories. But to much surprise, Compiz saw a new release today. Compiz 0.9.14.1 isn't the most exciting update, but the project is still alive...
PHP 7.4 Released With FFI, Typed Properties, Arrow Functions, Better Performance
PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series...
Intel Comet Lake Added To RAPL Driver With Linux 5.5, New "HMEM" Driver
The ACPI and power management updates were sent in back on Tuesday for the Linux 5.5 kernel and punctually landed in the mainline tree...
Mesa 19.3-RC5 Brings RADV Secure Compile Update, Other Fixes
While Mesa 19.3.0 was supposed to be out last week, it didn't happen nor is it happening this week due to blocker bugs. Given the US holiday week, it's looking like Mesa 19.3's blocker bugs might not be cleared in time for releasing next week either, but in any case the Mesa 19.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available for testing...
The Linux 5.2+ "Register Corruption" Bug / Golang Issue Was A One-Line Kernel Caching Issue
Coming together just over a day ago was the Google folks working on Golang figuring out many Go issues stemmed from a bug on the Linux 5.2 kernel and newer that was worked out to be some sort of a register corruption issue. That issue is now sorted out and fortunately it's a one-line kernel fix and boils down to being a caching issue...
Linux 5.5 Finally Doing Away With The SYSCTL System Call
The Linux 5.5 kernel is set to finally eliminate the code backing the sysctl system call, which has been deprecated for about a decade and should have no impact on modern systems of any architecture...
AMD's RadeonSI Driver Finally Enables OpenGL 4.6 But You Need To First Enable NIR
The OpenGL 4.6 extension is nearly two and a half years old while finally the open-source Mesa OpenGL drivers are catching up to this latest OpenGL revision that offers Vulkan/SPIR-V interoperability and other additions...
Google's Stadia Controller Support Added To SDL2
The SDL2 library has been seeing a number of additions in recent days to its game controller database by Valve's Sam Lantinga. The latest game controller to be added is for Google's now-shipping Stadia Controller...
Linux 5.5 Staging Changes Land With New WiFi Driver To Improved exFAT Support
Greg Kroah-Hartman mailed in the staging area changes today for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they have already been pulled into mainline...
Intel Nehalem vs. Ice Lake Benchmarks - Including Clock + Power + Thermal Metrics
As part of the exciting benchmark week and our ongoing tests of Intel Ice Lake on Linux, this next piece has been driven out of curiosity... While recently I posted new benchmark results of Intel Haswell to Ice Lake laptop performance, what about going further back like to the days of Nehalem? Here is that comparison of Core i7 Nehalem to Core i7 Ice Lake including power / performance-per-Watt data, thermal, and performance-per-MHz data too. Enjoy this fun comparison for how the Intel mobile performance on Ubuntu has evolved over the past decade.
Librem 5 "Birch" Linux Smartphones Begin Shipping To Consumers
While coming a few weeks later and two months after the original "shipping" of Librem 5 smartphones, the Librem 5 Birch batch has begun shipping to actual consumers who pre-ordered the privacy-minded Linux smartphone...
Flatpak 1.5.1 Prepares For Protected/Authenticated Downloads - Future App Purchasing
Flatpak 1.5.1 was released today as a new development release for this Linux application sandboxing technology. With Flatpak 1.5.1 it also begins laying the groundwork for a future payments system around Flathub as what's starting off for allowing donation-based software acquisition but could ultimately turn into a paid app store...
AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 Released With New Extensions + Navi 14 Support
AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement...
WireGuard Could Be Mainlined Before Christmas
It's been a wild past few weeks for WireGuard as the secure VPN tunnel destined for the mainline Linux kernel and also supported on all other major platforms. It turns out WireGuard could quite well end up in the Linux 5.5 kernel rather than having to wait until Linux 5.6...
300+ Benchmarks With AMD Threadripper 3960X vs. Intel Core i9 10980XE
Complementing our launch-day Intel Core i9 10980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X Linux benchmarks, here is much more data now that we've had the additional time for carrying out more tests... For your viewing pleasure this US holiday week are more than 330 benchmarks carried out on both the Core i9 10980XE and Threadripper 3960X in the same configuration while running Ubuntu Linux.
CentOS Working To Increase Transparency, Revamp Branding
Recently the CentOS Board met for the first time since the recent CentOS 8.0 and CentOS Stream releases. It was an interesting outcome...
Linux 5.4-ck1 Kernel Released With MuQSS Patched In
While the release of Linux 5.3-ck1 with MuQSS was quite tardy and only arrived a few weeks ago, Con Kolivas has returned to his punctuality in releasing Linux 5.4-ck1 with the updated MuQSS scheduler intended to improve the responsiveness of desktop/mobile class Linux systems...
Wayland's Weston 8.0 Bringing Direct-Display Extension, HDCP On DRM Back-End + More
Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January...