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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 18 min ago

Many RISC-V Improvements Ready For Linux 5.5: M-Mode, SECCOMP, Other Features

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 17:22
The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5...

Newer Loongson 3A Variant Being Supported By Linux 5.5 Along With The SGI Octane

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 14:00
As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too...

X.Org's Modesetting Driver Gets Smarter - Queries Mesa For Which GL Driver To Use

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 13:02
The X.Org Server and its integrated "modesetting" DDX driver that is most commonly used on modern Linux systems in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers is finally getting more robust with xorg-server 1.21... It will no longer rely upon the server's PCI ID driver mapping for figuring out the DRI driver to load as needed for GLAMOR 2D acceleration over OpenGL...

Lutris 0.5.4 Released For This Linux Game Management Tool

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 09:49
Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming...

Radeon ROCm 2.10 Released With SUSE 15 SP1 Support, rocBLAS For Complex GEMM

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 08:53
While AMD annouced ROCm 3.0 earlier this month at SuperComputing 19 as the next major iteration to Radeon Open Compute, it looks like they aren't quite ready to ship it and instead released ROCm 2.10...

Linux 5.2+ Hit By AVX Register Corruption Bug - Affecting At Least Golang Programs

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 07:34
The Linux 5.2 kernel and newer appears to be suffering from an AVX register corruption bug stemming from signal delivery. This register corruption issue is manifesting itself at least for Golang programs leading to a variety of bug reports when running on Linux 5.2 through at least the newly-minted Linux 5.4...

Motorola m68k Support Improved Upon In GCC - Saved From Being Removed In GCC 11

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 06:27
While the Motorola 68000 32-bit processors are from the 80's and early 90's, there still is a loyal following of hobbyists who managed to save the "m68k" compiler back-end from being removed in GCC 11...

Linux 5.5 Adding Wake-On-Voice Support - Capable On Some Chromebook Hardware

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 04:11
As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware...

Linux 5.5 To Enable Intel's 5-Level Paging Support By Default

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 02:27
For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default...

Fedora 32 Might Disallow Empty Passwords For Local Users By Default

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 00:36
Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...

AMD's TEE Driver For Loading "Trusted Applications" On Their Secure Processor Under Linux

Wed, 11/27/2019 - 00:17
A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...

FreeBSD Foundation Buying Newer Laptops To Help Improve Hardware Support

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 23:35
The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...

Blender 2.81 Benchmarks On 19 NVIDIA Graphics Cards - RTX OptiX Rendering Performance Is Incredible

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 20:46
Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.

Linux 5.5's Scheduler Sees A Load Balancing Rework For Better Perf But Risks Regressions

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 19:45
Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...

Mesa 20.0 Lands A Load/Store Vectorizer As Latest "ACO" Backend Improvement

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 17:33
While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better...

Linux 5.5 To Finally Wire Up EFI RNG Code For x86 As Another Source Of Entropy

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 16:14
Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64...

Intel's SVT-AV1 0.7.5 Released With AVX2 + AVX-512 Optimizations

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 14:08
Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs...

Linux 5.5 Crypto Code Has The Changes To Usher In WireGuard

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 13:01
The cryptography subsystem changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel are notable...

Some Fedora Users Concerned GNOME Software Promotes Proprietary Software With Flathub

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 07:42
The Fedora Workstation working group has been weighing the matter of the GNOME Software "app store" recommending/promoting proprietary software. But this isn't something that is done out-of-the-box but rather when activating Flathub where Flatpaks can be installed for both open and closed-source software...

Devuan 2.1 Released - Still Delivering Debian 9 Without Systemd

Tue, 11/26/2019 - 04:38
Devuan 2.1 is available as the latest release of this spin of Debian GNU/Linux that works without a dependence on systemd. Devuan 2.1 remains focused on "init freedom" though this new release is still tracking the older Debian 9 "Stretch" branch...

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