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Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 33 min ago

AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 19:02
While the Linux 5.7 merge window just ended on Sunday, with the DRM-Next cutoff for new material coming weeks prior to that, AMD developers working on their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver already have over 200 patches accumulated for the next cycle...

GNUstep Sees New 2020 Releases For This Apple Cocoa/OpenStep Re-Implementation

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 18:30
It's been a while since last having any news to report on GNUstep, the free software re-implementation of the Apple Cocoa / OpenStep frameworks. But GNUstep is alive and well and today several of its components saw new releases -- among the feature work is improving its multi-monitor handling...

Fwupd 1.4 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Firmware Updating

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 18:14
Fwupd 1.4 is available today as the latest major update to this open-source, Linux-focused firmware updating solution that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

EROFS-Utils 1.1 Released For This Read-Only Linux File-System

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 16:47
There hasn't been much to report on this year for EROFS as the Huawei-developed read-only Linux file-system with Android devices in mind. But out this week is now erofs-utils as an update to the user-space utilities around this file-system...

Fedora 33's "Enterprise Linux Next" Effort Approved - Testbed For Raising CPU Requirements, Etc

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 12:04
Fedora 33 later this year will see a new "Enterprise Linux Next" (ELN) buildroot and compose setup for testing new changes potentially destined for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most notable from the original ELN proposal is on potentially raising the x86_64 CPU requirements. ELN is now approved to take place...

Linux 5.8 To Add Auto-Detection For Using SoundWire On Newer Intel Platforms

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 06:46
While the Linux 5.7 feature merge window just closed yesterday, there is already one feature queued up for Linux 5.8 that caught our eye...

The Desktop CPU Security Mitigation Impact On Ubuntu 20.04

Tue, 04/14/2020 - 00:13
With Ubuntu 20.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the various CPU vulnerability mitigations compare on that latest Linux software stack when comparing the out-of-the-box mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, and friends, compared to booting with "mitigations=off" for disabling those mitigations. The desktop tests were done with Intel and AMD processors for reference.

Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate Emerges For This Excellent Vector Graphics Editor

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 21:52
The release candidate to the long-awaited Inkscape 1.0 emerged at the end of last week for this popular cross-platform SVG/vector graphics editor...

ASUS Releases Graphics Card That Could Actually Be Great For Open-Source NVIDIA Fans

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 20:24
ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux...

Intel DPTF Adaptive Policy Being Reverse Engineered For Better Linux Ultrabook Support

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 19:45
One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change...

ZFS/Zsys Code Seeing Important Performance Fix Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 19:13
One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way...

Linux 5.7-rc1 Marks More Than 915k Commits, 28.4 Million Lines In Source Tree

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 16:42
With yesterday's release of Linux 5.7-rc1 following the two week period of Linux 5.7 tacking on many interesting improvements and new features, here is a look at the current Git development states on the Linux kernel...

X.Org AutoRepeat Option Restored After 14 Year Hiatus

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 15:38
The X11 AutoRepeat option is for setting the auto repeat behavior of a keyboard to engage a configurable number of times a key will repeat per second after crossing a configurable delay threshold. While somewhat of an obscure feature, AutoRepeat is coming back after being on hiatus since 2006...

FreeBSD Is Off To A Solid Start For 2020

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 12:02
This weekend the FreeBSD project published their quarterly status report concerning Q1'2020 and the progress they made on many fronts...

Linux 5.7-rc1 Kernel Released

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 05:07
Following the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds has announced an Easter day kernel release in the form of the Linux 5.7-rc1 test candidate...

Linux 5.7 Will Let You Setup A Swap File Over A Network With SMB3/Samba

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 02:19
A last minute feature coming into the Linux 5.7 kernel on its last day of the merge window is experimental support for allowing a remote swap setup over a network using SMB3...

The New Features Of The Linux 5.7 Kernel: Tiger Lake Graphics Stable, New exFAT, Zstd F2FS, Performance

Mon, 04/13/2020 - 01:11
Linus Torvalds is expected to deliver an Easter day kernel release in the form of Linux 5.7-rc1. After a two week merge window, Linux 5.7 feature development formally ends today. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements and new features to find with Linux 5.7.

Continuing To Improve The Benchmark Result Viewer

Sun, 04/12/2020 - 20:00
The benchmark result viewer has some more improvements that should be of interest to many for digging into more performance details especially between processors and systems...

Linux 5.7 Makes It Very Easy To Build The Kernel With An LLVM-Based Toolchain

Sun, 04/12/2020 - 19:15
Since last year it's been possible to build a mainline x86_64 Linux kernel with a mainline LLVM Clang compiler while for the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel are more improvements on the LLVM front...

PG_Zero: Faster Page Allocation Proposed For Linux By Zeroing Out Pages Ahead Of Time

Sun, 04/12/2020 - 19:00
A set of patches sent out Sunday morning for "PG_zero" could provide much faster page allocation performance by the Linux kernel...

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