Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 16 min ago
NVIDIA 440.66.11 Linux Driver Fixes Annoying Bugs With PRIME Sync
NVIDIA has released their latest weekly-ish beta update to their Vulkan Linux driver...
Intel FSGSBASE Linux Support Revived For A Performance Boost On Intel/AMD Processors
Earlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out...
Radeon Software 20.10 vs. Upstream Linux AMD Radeon OpenGL / Vulkan Performance
With last week's release of Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 as AMD's first packaged graphics driver update for Linux of 2020, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance compares to what is shipped by Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS as well as when using the newer Mesa and Linux kernel releases for the very latest open-source performance, including switching over to RADV+ACO for Vulkan gaming.
Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed
When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops...
Ubuntu 20.10 Might Be The "Groovy Gorilla"
Either a ploy by Ubuntu developers / Canonical staffers or it's looking like Ubuntu 20.10 could be known as the Groovy Gorilla...
Intel ISPC 1.13 Compiler Brings Performance Boost To AVX-512 Systems
Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release...
SDL2 Sees Support For A Number Of Additional Controllers, Gamepads
A number of additional game controllers / gamepads / input devices have been added to the SDL2 code-base in recent days...
Marvell ThunderX3 Machine Model Pending For The GCC Compiler
Last month Marvell announced the ThunderX3 server processors with up to 96 ARM cores per SoC and with 4-way SMT means up to 384 threads per socket. This 7nm Arm server processor also supports eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other advancements to provide more competitiveness in the Arm server space. Marvell is now working on getting the ThunderX3 software support ironed out, including for the GCC compiler...
Mesa Trying Out Gitlab Milestones For Trying Better To Avoid Regressions
Due to unclear communication over patches queued for a given Mesa point release and ensuring all relevant patches are included, Mesa developers will begin making use of Gitlab's "milestones" functionality for tracking the work to be included in the next point release...
LibreOffice 7.0 Finally Retiring Its Adobe Flash Export Support
Many likely didn't realize the functionality was still in place, but LibreOffice 7.0 will finally phase out its export support for Adobe Flash (SWF)...
Fedora 32 Cleared For Release Next Week
After it was delayed last week, Fedora 32 will now be released next week...
KDE Releases Its April 2020 Applications Bundle
KDE today released its April 2020 Apps Update, what formerly would have been known as KDE Applications 20.04...
WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds
The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12...
Fedora 32 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Engaged In Some Healthy Competition Over Performance
After showing yesterday how the performance has changed from Fedora 31 to Fedora 32, you may be wondering about how Fedora 32 -- which is due to be released next week -- stacks up against the brand new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release. Here are the results from dozens of benchmarks and with some areas seeing some clear performance differences.
Qt Developers Discuss Theoretical Clang-Based Tool For Porting Qt5 Code To Qt6
While the future of Qt as an open-source project isn't too clear for now it's progressing as if all is well. One of the new items being discussed on the Qt 6 front is discussing a possible LLVM Clang based tool to help developers in automatically converting all of their Qt 5 syntax into a Qt 6 compatible manner...
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Now Available For Download
Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" is now available as the distribution's newest long-term support release...
Intel's Clear Linux To Divest From The Desktop, Focus On Server + Cloud Workloads
Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux has made some inroads in the desktop space over the past two years with providing a nice desktop installer last year, enhancing their documentation, and making available more desktop packages. Clear Linux has offered some of the fastest performance even for desktop workloads like web browser performance and has worked out equally well on AMD hardware. But moving forward they are going to be shifting back to their roots on focusing on server and cloud workloads...
The Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Begins Rendering On Arm Bifrost Hardware
With the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver having its Arm Midgard graphics support in order, the developers involved have begun working more on the newer Bifrost architecture...
Samsung Respins exFAT-Utils As exFATprogs In New Release
A few weeks ago the Samsung engineers responsible for the new Microsoft exFAT Linux kernel driver released exFAT-Utils as their user-space utilities for managing and creating exFAT file-systems under Linux. A new release is out and exFAT-Utils has been re-spun as exfatprogs...
Qt Creator 4.12 Released For Improving Qt/C++ Development
A few weeks ahead of Qt 5.15, The Qt Company has released Qt Creator 4.12 as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports other languages via the Language Server Protocol...
