
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 9 min ago
Linux 5.5 Cycle Kicks Off Next Week With Exciting Changes On Tap
The Linux 5.4 kernel is to be released on Sunday and that will in turn kick-off the Linux 5.5 merge window. Here is a look at some of the changes on the table for what will in turn be the first major stable kernel release of 2020...
systemd 244-RC1 Released With Many Changes
It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas...
NVIDIA 440.36 Linux Driver Released With Official GTX 1650 SUPER Support
Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update...
PHP 5.3 To PHP 7.4 Performance Benchmarks On AMD EPYC
With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev...
Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance
Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...
webOS Open Source Edition 2.1 Released For Continuing The Palm/HP/LG Linux Distro
Released at the end of October to little fanfare was webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, the open-source Linux OS currently in development by LG for use on their Smart TVs and other digital products. With webOS Open Source Edition 2.0, they began setting their sights on automobiles and other potential use-cases. That was then extended by this week's release of webOS OSE 2.1...
TURNIP Mesa Vulkan Driver Lands Performance/Power-Helping UBWC Support
Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver...
Mesa 19.2.6 Released Due To POWER Fallout
Mesa 19.2.5 was just released earlier this week but now v19.2.6 has already been released due to the previous point release breaking IBM POWER builds...
Wine Patches Coming To Allow UMIP Emulation - Works Around Issues For Ryzen 3000
Coming up this weekend with the Linux 5.4 kernel is emulation/spoofing of the SGDT/SIDT/SMSW instructions around UMIP for allowing newer 64-bit Windows games to run on Wine and Steam Play (Proton). With newer CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series that support UMIP, these instructions are not allowed to run in user-space with Wine due to UMIP. So while the first stable kernel release is about to land with this support, some Wine-based emulation not contingent on the kernel patches is also in the works...
Linux 5.5 To Finally Expose NVMe Drive Temperatures Via HWMON
Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors...
A Look At The GCC Compiler Tuning Performance Impact For Intel Ice Lake
For those wondering if it's worthwhile for performance recompiling your key Linux binaries with the microarchitecture instruction set extensions and tuning for Ice Lake, here are some GCC compiler benchmarks looking at that impact for the Core i7 1065G7 on the Dell XPS 7390.
Blender 2.81 Released With NVIDIA RTX Optix Back-End, Intel Open Image Denoise Support
Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year...
Half-Life: Alyx Releasing In March 2020 With Linux Support
While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game...
Intel's Open-Source Gallium3D Driver Achieves OpenGL 4.6 Conformance
The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation...
PHP 7.4 Performance Benchmarks Show A Nice Improvement - But PHP 8.0-dev Is Running Even Faster
PHP 7.4 is due to be released next week as the annual major iteration to PHP7. Like we have seen through the PHP7 releases, while new features continue to be tacked on for this popular web-based programming language the performance has continued evolving. Here are the latest benchmarks of PHP 5.6 through PHP 7.4 while also looking at the PHP 8.0-dev performance that is in development on Git master.
Open-Source Intel TXT Support Published For Coreboot
Thanks to work done by 9elements Cyber Security for an unnamed client, there is now working open-source Intel TXT support for Coreboot with the patches under review for upstream inclusion...
NVIDIA DP MST Audio To Begin Working With The Linux 5.5 Kernel
While the official NVIDIA Linux driver has worked well with DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) setups for years now for driving large displays, audio hasn't worked under Linux for NVIDIA's driver in this combination. But with the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle that will be addressed...
Latest WireGuard Patch Out For Review With It Looking Like It Will Land For Linux 5.6
The long-awaited WireGuard secure VPN tunnel functionality looks like it will land with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle happening in early 2020. Linux 5.5 is kicking off next week but the necessary crypto subsystem changes have yet to take place as well as a final sign-off on the new WireGuard code...
AMD Promotes Navi 14 Linux Support Out Of "Experimental" + Fixes For Raven Ridge
With the initial Navi 14 support to be found in the Linux 5.4 kernel releasing this weekend the GPU ASIC (along with Navi 12) have been marked as experimental and thus not enabled by default unless passing a special module parameter to the kernel. But now at the last minute this support has been deemed non-experimental for Navi 14...
Intel Graphics Compiler Update Adds 16-Bit Atomics For Tiger Lake, Other New Features
Wednesday marked the v1.0.2878 update to Intel's "IGC" Graphics Compiler that is used by their graphics hardware compute stack...