Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 29 min ago
NVIDIA 450 Linux Beta Driver Quietly Rolls Out With New PRIME Option, Other Improvements
NVIDIA has yet to formally announce the 450 Linux driver series in beta or stable form, but the first pre-release builds in the 450 branch did manage to creep out this past week alongside the CUDA 11.0 release candidate...
Linux 5.8 Brings Modernization Work To Procfs
Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system...
Linux 5.7.1 Releases As A Benign First Point Release
One week after the release of the big Linux 5.7 kernel release with its many new features, the first point release is now available and overall it's quite light for being the first point release in a new series...
RISC-V For Linux 5.8 Finishes Bringing Up The Kendryte K210, Adds KGDB Support
The RISC-V architecture code in the Linux kernel continues seeing more improvements for running on real hardware and seeing other capabilities introduced...
Coreboot Ported To A Newer Intel Server Board From Supermicro
The German-based 9elements Cyber Security has ported Coreboot to another newer Intel server motherboard...
Performing Automated Server Installs With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
As part of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS exclusively using its newer "Subiquity" server installer is a new means of supporting automated installations of the operating system in a server environment...
New Arm SoCs Supported By Linux 5.8, Restructuring To Fit Android Kernel Improvements
Following last week's 64-bit ARM architecture updates for Linux 5.8, the Arm SoC/platform changes have now been submitted...
Gallium3D's Arm Bifrost Now Handling Most Of OpenGL ES 2.0, Runs GNOME Wayland
It was just back in late April that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver began rendering with Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics processors while now it has most of OpenGL ES 2.0 working, some of the desktop OpenGL 2.1 functionality, and is capable of running software like GNOME on Wayland...
PCI Changes For Linux 5.8 Bring Power Savings, AMD Workarounds/Whitelisting
Linux 5.8 has merged all of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates and there are a number of notable changes...
Fedora 33 Looking To Use Swap On zRAM By Default With systemd's zram-generator
Some Fedora spins have already made use of swap on zRAM for serving as a compressed RAM drive while with Fedora Workstation 33 they are looking to make use of zRAM by default...
SMB3 Updates For Linux 5.8 Offer Better Performance For Large I/O
The SMB3/CIFS updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel from the Samba camp can offer better performance...
KDE On Wayland Finally Supports Middle-Click Paste With Plasma 5.20
It's another busy week in the KDE land from their Wayland session finally supporting middle-click paste to Konsole now able to display image thumbnail previews when hovering over filenames with this KDE terminal emulator...
Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Linux Performance On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
Given the recent release of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are some fresh benchmarks showing how the latest Windows 10 software update paired with the latest AMD drivers performs against the latest 2020 Linux distribution releases. This testing was done on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X box given the interesting performance differences we have seen in the past to Linux's advantage with these HEDT processors. The Linux distributions tested against Windows 10 May 2020 Update were Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch-based Manjaro 20.0.2, Clear Linux 33250, and Fedora Workstation 32.
NVIDIA 440.66.15 Vulkan Linux Driver Offers Up More Fixes
NVIDIA has been quite aggressive recently with their new Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux with today marking another such release...
Linux 5.8 Feature Queue Has Multiple Performance Optimizations, Intel Rocket Lake, Other Hardware
If all goes well Linux 5.7 should reach stable this weekend and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.8 merge window. With our monitoring of the various "-next" branches for weeks already, here is a look at some of what is on the table for this next version of the Linux kernel...
Arm Announces Cortex-A78, Cortex-X Custom
Arm today announced the Cortex-A78 as their SoC for next-generation smartphones with up to 20% sustained performance improvements. Arm also announced today the Cortex-X Custom program...
A Quick Look At GCC 10.1 PGO Optimization Benchmarks
Following the GCC 10.1 compiler optimization benchmarks posted this weekend, a number of readers were wondering about the impact of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) on the new GCC 10 compiler. Here are some preliminary data points on that front...
Qt 5.15 Released With Graphics Improvements, Preparations Ahead Of Qt 6
It's coming a few days late but The Qt Company's Lars Knoll just announced the official release of Qt 5.15.0...
Reiser5 File-System Working On New Features Like Data Tiering, Burst Buffers
Reiser5 was announced back on New Year's Eve with support for local volumes and supporting parallel scaling out and other improvements over the long-in-development but never mainlined Reiser4. While Reiser5 was not met with enthusiasm, Edward Shishkin has continued working on this next-generation file-system and today announced the latest round of improvements...
Qualcomm Adreno 650 + 640 GPUs To Be Supported By Mainline Linux 5.8 Kernel
The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8...