
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 58 min 39 sec ago
Intel ANV & Radeon RADV Vulkan Drivers Tacking On More Extensions With Mesa 19.3
There still is another month until the feature freeze for Mesa 19.3 to end out 2019 and it will be a big one...
GNOME Shell & Mutter 3.34.1 Deliver On Their Prominent Fixes
There weren't out in time for yesterday's formal GNOME 3.34.1 point release, but GNOME Shell and Mutter have out their prominent point releases today that are exciting on the correction front...
RadeonSI NIR Mesa 19.3 Testing Didn't Turn Up Any Bugs, Similar Performance To TGSI
Besides RADV ACO compiler testing and AMDGPU bulk moves restored another common test request recently on the Radeon Linux graphics side has been looking at the NIR support...
Amlogic Video Decode Driver Nearly Ready With H.264 Support
The in-kernel staging Amlogic Meson video decode driver could soon handle H.264 support as soon as Linux 5.5...
RadeonSI Adds Zeroing vRAM Workaround To Help Rocket League Players
For those annoyed by random textures appearing when launching the popular Rocket League game with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, a workaround has landed in Mesa 19.3-devel Git while also marked for back-porting to currently supported stable series...
Linux 5.5 To Advertise RDPRU Support For AMD Zen 2 CPUs Via /proc/cpuinfo
RDPRU is one of the new instruction set extensions of AMD "Zen 2" CPUs that is for reading a processor register that is typically limited to privilege level zero. RDPRU allows for reading select registers at any privilege level. With Linux 5.5, the RDPRU presence will be advertised by the CPU features...
Firefox 69 + Chrome 77 On Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu / Clear Linux Benchmarks
With running some fresh cross-OS benchmarks now that Ubuntu 19.10 is imminent followed by Ubuntu 19.10, a new Windows 10 update coming in the days ahead, and also the release of macOS 10.15, a lot of fun benchmarks are ahead. In today's article is a quick look at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 vs. Clear Linux web browser performance for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Navi 14 AMDGPU Firmware Lands In The Linux-Firmware.Git Tree
Just one day after announcing the Radeon RX 5500 series as the first Navi 14 GPUs, AMD has submitted the firmware binaries to the linux-firmware.git tree that are required for usage with the open-source Linux graphics driver...
KDE's KWin To Still Pursue X11 Composite Unredirect, More Wayland Improvements
KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans...
GNOME 3.34.1 Released With Latest Fixes
GNOME 3.34.1 is out as the first point release to last month's big GNOME 3.34 desktop debut...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku Making Progress On ARM, Various Kernel Improvements
Just last week marked the one year anniversary since shipping the Haiku R1 beta release for this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system. The developers remain though as busy as ever with advancing this interesting open-source project...
Firefox 71 Landing Wayland DMA-BUF Textures Support
Firefox 71 is bringing another important Wayland improvement!..
Fedora 31 Won't Add An Official POWER Desktop Spin
While Fedora recently began spinning workstation/live images for POWER (PPC64LE) at least as a work-in-progress, it won't be made a formal feature of the upcoming Fedora 31...
NVIDIA Begins Funding Blender Development
NVIDIA is the latest high profile company now contributing significant funds for advancing the open-source Blender 3D modeling software...
Imad Sousou Steps Down As Head Of Intel's Open-Source Efforts
After an incredible 25 year journey at Intel and having founded the Open-Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou announced today he is stepping away from Intel...
Intel Readies Another Big Graphics Driver Push With Linux 5.5 - Lots For Tigerlake/Gen12
While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle...
PostgreSQL 12 Performance With AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Benchmarks
One of the areas of performance I had been meaning to look more at following the recent AMD EPYC 7002 series launch was for database servers. With the original EPYC 7000 series performance, the performance came up short in competing with Intel Xeon CPUs, but for the EPYC Rome processors it ends up being a very different story. Given the launch last week of PostgreSQL 12, I've been trying out this new database server release on both EPYC and Xeon processors.
Intel Lowers Costs On New Xeon W-2200 Series & Cuts Core 9000 F-Series CPU Pricing
In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs laqunching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too...
AMD Announces Navi 14 Based Radeon RX 5500 Series
AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Nav 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...
NVIDIA Still Working On A Generic Allocator - Has Working Open-Source Implementation
For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...