
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 37 min 8 sec ago
Open Source Firmware Conference 2019 Videos Posted
Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...
Before Ending 2019, Vintage SiS X.Org Driver Sees A New Release
xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...
AMDGPU Fixes For Linux 5.5 Include AMDKFD For PowerPC, Fix For Old ATI R100/R200 GPUs
Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...
Linux Mint 19.3 Enters Beta With HiDPI Support Finally Nearing Completion, New Default Apps
The beta release of Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" is now available for testing in the default Cinnamon desktop flavor as well as MATE and Xfce spins...
GNOME Shell + Mutter Had A Busy November With Some Big Performance Optimizations
The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings...
Mir 1.6 Released With New Wayland, DispmanX Platform Support
Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility...
Amazon Talks Up Big Performance Gains For Their 7nm Graviton2 CPUs
We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Gravin2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance...
DXVK 1.4.6 Released With More Game Fixes For Direct3D 10/11 Over Vulkan
DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 Released For Open-Source, Cross-Platform Benchmarking
Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is available today as the newest quarterly feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite for automated, cross-platform and open-source benchmarking...
AMD Launches Ryzen V1000/R1000 Embedded Processors For Small Form Factor PCs
AMD today announced the Ryzen V1000 and Ryzen R1000 series embedded processors intended for mini PCs and other small form factor PCs...
Firefox 71 Available With New Kiosk Mode, New Certificate Viewer
Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0...
Arm's Mali T720 Now Stable With Panfrost Gallium3D On Mesa 20.0
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that is the open-source OpenGL community-led driver for supporting Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost architectures now has stable support for the T720 GPU...
OmniOS Updated With Latest Intel Microcode, Better LX Zones Support For Newer Distros
OmniOS, the Illumos/OpenSolaris-derived platform focused on delivering an enterprise-quality open-source OS, is out with a new update today...
Linux 5.5 Livepatching Tracks The System State For Better Patch Handling/Compatibility
The kernel livepatching infrastructure that allows applying kernel patches (primarily security fixes) to a running kernel without the need to reboot in order to avoid downtime is seeing a big improvement with Linux 5.5...
XFS For Linux 5.5 Brings Quite A Few Changes
The XFS file-system is seeing a large number of changes for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel...
Imagination Announces IMG A-Series To Deliver 2.5x Faster Performance Over Current PowerVR
Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors...
Mesa Adds Option For Changing Intel's OpenGL Driver Default
While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...
NEOX V Announced By Think Silicon As First RISC-V 3D GPU
While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...
FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Refreshingly Well With AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X - Benchmarks Against Windows + Linux
For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.
NetBSD 9.0 RC1 Released With 64-Bit Arm Support, Updated ZFS + Other Improvements
NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...