
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 46 min 57 sec ago
Wine Is Now In Better Shape On NetBSD Thanks To GSoC 2019
In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative...
Intel Icelake Thunderbolt Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.4
The Intel Icelake Linux support has largely been squared away for months but one lingering important feature for many is the Thunderbolt support and that's now set to be introduced with the upcoming Linux 5.4 version...
The EOMA68 Upgradeable ARM Board Faces Another Setback: HDMI Connectors Don't Fit
The EOMA68 computer card design was novel when first talked about for integerchangeable Arm-based computer cards that could also be installed within laptops and other devices. But even after being worked on for years and raising more than $234k USD, it's still not ready yet to see the light of day...
GNOME's GUADEC 2019 Videos Available Online
This past week was GNOME's annual developer conference, GUADEC. Video recordings from all the presentations at this event in Thessaloniki, Greece are now online...
VirtIO-FS File-System Driver Being Added For Linux 5.4
In addition to the initial exFAT driver landing for Linux 5.4, also slated to land for this next kernel cycle is the VirtIO-FS file-system driver...
Wine 4.15 Brings Initial HTTP Service Implementation (HTTP.sys)
Wine 4.15 is out for testing this US holiday weekend. With Wine 4.15 it brings an initial implementation of Windows' HTTP.sys as the HTTP protocol stack that is a kernel-mode driver that lists for HTTP requests and passes it onto Microsoft's IIS...
AMD Is Hiring For Coreboot Development, Sponsoring Open-Source Firmware Conference
Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS / Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction...
The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel
The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window will kick off in September and with this next kernel cycle the initial open-source exFAT file-system driver is set to be mainlined for supporting this Microsoft file-system, but it will premiere within the kernel's "staging" area for code of lesser, yet-to-be-proven quality...
ACRN 1.2 Hypervisor Released With Kata Containers Support, Secure Boot Capability
The ACRN hypervisor that was open-sourced by Intel last year as a small footprint virtualization hypervisor focused on real-time computing and safety-critical applications for IoT and related embedded use-cases is up to version 1.2...
Clear Linux Offering Performance Advantages Even With Low-Power IoT/Edge Hardware
While we are often testing Intel's Clear Linux on high-end desktop and server hardware, it turns out even on the opposite end of the spectrum that their performance-optimized distribution can offer meaningful performance advantages on low-end SoCs for IoT-type devices. When testing Clear Linux with an Apollolake platform, it came out to being about 20% faster than the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Power Usage Is Running Measurably Higher On Linux Than Windows
Frequently brought up following our various Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" benchmarks like the Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Core i9 9900K gaming benchmarks is how the Ryzen 9 3900X is pulling considerably more power than the similarly equipped Intel Core i9 system and those numbers are higher than what is often cited by Windows reviewers as the difference. I've begun investigating that power difference and indeed quite quickly could see Linux power usage being higher than Windows 10...
Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy
Waypipe is off to the races as the newest network transparency effort in the Wayland space. Waypipe provides a network transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs/games over a network similar to X11's capabilities and forwarding X over an SSH connection...
CUPS 2.3 Printing System Finally Released With Licensing Change & Other Additions
Nearly three years to the day since the release of CUPS 2.2, the release of CUPS 2.3 that had been delayed more than one year is now available...
Fairphone 3 Pre-Orders Begin For Ethical Smartphone With Better Specs Than The Librem 5
The Fairphone 3 made its formal announcement this week with pre-orders beginning and plans to begin shipping in mid-October. The Fairphone 3 is the latest iteration for this phone design that is focused on social values / ethical manufacturing, the longevity of the phone, and modular replacement parts...
AMD Prepping Their HDCP 1.4 Content Protection Support For Raven Ridge & Newer
AMD developers have sent out their latest open-source Linux patches doing their kernel driver share for enabling High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support for version 1.4 and newer...
Arm Talks Up Their BFloat16 / BF16 Support For Upcoming Processors
While we've known Arm would be adding BFloat16 (BF16) support to their future processor designs, on Thursday they publicly provided more details on their plans for this new floating-point format to help AI / machine learning workloads with training and inference...
Intel Begins Setting Up Driver Mappings For Classic vs. Gallium3D OpenGL Linux Drivers
Intel has previously indicated they plan for their new "Iris" Gallium3D driver to become their default OpenGL driver for Linux by EOY 2019 as far as Broadwell graphics and newer are concerned. Working in that direction and acknowledging their "Gen 12" Tiger Lake graphics will only be supported under Gallium3D OpenGL, they have begun establishing the driver mappings to handle the change-over...
DXVK 1.3.3 Improves Clang/libc++ Compatibility, Other New Bits
While it feels like DXVK 1.3.2 was just released, it's approaching one month old already and has been succeeded today by DXVK 1.3.3...
NVIDIA 435.21 & 435.19.02 Linux Drivers Released
NVIDIA has promoted their 435.17 Linux driver as their newest short-lived driver release while also issuing a new Vulkan beta driver...
GTK 4.0 Isn't Expected To Be Released Until Autumn 2020
GTK 4.0 won't be out this year, nor is it expected next spring as part of the GNOME 3.36 cycle, but now the developers believe this next major tool-kit update will be ready to ship in just over one year's time with the autumn release of GNOME 3.38...