Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 39 min 39 sec ago
SD 8.0 Specification To Allow 4GB/s Transfer Rates By Leveraging PCIe 4.0
The SD 8.0 specification was announced today for SD Express memory cards to allow up to 4GB/s transfer rates by building off the PCIe 4.0 architecture...
Linux KVM Virtualization Had Mistakenly Been Applying L1TF Workaround To Unaffected CPUs
The all-important Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) code for open-source virtualization had mistakenly been applying its L1TF workaround for unaffected CPUs -- namely AMD EPYC CPUs -- for the past several months until the issue was uncovered this week...
Clang 11 Changes -O To Match GCC Behavior
Clang 11.0 has changed its "-O" optimization flag to match the defaults of GCC...
AOMedia AV1 2.0 Codec Library Released With Many Improvements
Version 2.0 of the libaom AOMedia AV1 video encoder / video codec SDK library is now available as the first major update in nearly two years...
Linux Kernel Seeing Workaround Revived For Buggy Micron NAND Block Erase Behavior
A new patch series has been revived from work originally published by Micron back in 2018 for dealing with the behavior on their planar 2D NAND devices where in rare cases when issuing block erase commands, the flash block might not actually be erased and this could lead to further problems down the road when touching said block...
Fedora 33 Looks To Up Its Code Hardening For 64-Bit Arm Systems
Fedora has been improving its 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support for quite some time and with this autumn's Fedora 33 release it should be in even better shape...
NVIDIA Engineer Revives Work On Linux Proactive Memory Compaction
One of the interesting patch series initially published back in 2019 by NVIDIA engineer Nitin Gupta was on proactive memory compaction for the Linux kernel while so far in 2020 it hasn't yet been merged but a fifth revision to the work was published today...
Xeon Gold 6250 vs. EPYC 7F32 - 8-Core Server CPU Performance On Ubuntu 20.04
Launched last month were the AMD EPYC 7Fx2 CPUs as new high frequency SKUs and with larger L3 cache sizes. Following our initial EPYC 7F52 benchmarking we moved on to testing the EPYC 7F32 and today are putting it head-to-head against the Xeon Gold 6250 and other EPYC/Xeon SKUs while running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
OpenBSD Seeing Initial Work Land On Enabling 64-bit POWER
It's arguably long overdue but OpenBSD is seeing initial work on POWERPC64 enablement landing in its source tree...
GCC 11 Adds CPU Detection For Newer Intel Families
Adding to the early changes accumulating for the GCC 11 development cycle is automatic CPU detection support for newer families of Intel CPUs...
XSAVES Supervisor States For Linux 5.8 To Support Future Intel CPU Features
Queued up this weekend as part of the x86/fpu changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle is low-level functionality necessary for supporting other current and future Intel CPU features...
GCC 11 Picks Up A New Option For Large Source Files
When seeing GCC 11 in its early development state pick up a new -flarge-source-files option I was curious what that was all about......
Linux 5.7-rc6 Released - Torvalds Is Not Entirely Happy Over Its Size
While the past few weeks have seen relatively smaller than usual weekly release candidates, Linux 5.7-rc6 is out this evening and it's bigger than normal...
Enlightenment 0.24 Released
Carsten Haitzler has released Enlightenment 0.24 as the latest significant update to this X11 window manager and Wayland compositor...
Rav1e Sees New Pre-Release With More Speed-Ups, Monochrome Support
Since the release of Rav1e v0.3.1 back in February the "weekly pre-releases" dropped off until this week with there finally being a new tagged milestone...
X-Plane's Vulkan Renderer Maturing, More Performance Optimizations Still Coming
The folks at Laminar Research published a new blog post this week detailing their latest development work on their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderers for the realistic X-Plane flight simulator...
Intel CET Support Still Getting Squared Away For Linux In 2020
Various open-source patches have gone back to at least 2017 for enabling Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for the Linux kernel and related components. This is the Intel feature for helping prevent ROP and COP/JOP style attacks via indirect branch tracking and a shadow stack. Recently there has been a fair amount of CET improvements to the various open-source components...
Linux Thunderbolt Support Can Work On Arm Systems
While there aren't yet any Arm SoCs we are aware of at least offering Thunderbolt connectivity, that will eventually change with at least USB4 being based on Thunderbolt. But in any case Thunderbolt software support can work on Arm today if using a Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card...
Zstd Compression Under Review For OpenZFS
The ZFS file-system has long offered transparent file-system compression via the likes of LZ4 and Gzip and while now Zstd compression is under review for OpenZFS and seeking testing from the community...
GCC 11 Proposal Would Default To C++17 Level Features
Since last year's GCC 9 release the C++17 support has been considered stable and with the changeover to it as the default C++ dialect having not happened for the recent GCC 10 release, developers are now looking at increasing the default C++ version to 17 for next year's GCC 11 release...