Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 17 min ago
OpenZFS Could Soon See Much Better Deduplication Support
The OpenZFS file-system could soon be seeing better data deduplication support...
EXT4 Brings New Debugging Ioctls For Linux 5.4
Like the mostly mundane Btrfs and XFS changes with the Linux 5.4 merge window, the EXT4 file-system activity is mostly focused on fixes too but also new debugging ioctls...
Node.js Brought To BeOS-Inspired Haiku Open-Source OS
Haiku as the open-source operating system that still maintains BeOS compatibility continues tacking on modern features and support for software well past the days of BeOS...
Linux 5.4 DRM Pull Submitted With AMD Navi 12/14, Acturus & Renoir Plus Intel Tigerlake
While we've known about the many features for a while if you are a faithful Phoronix reader, today the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver changes were sent in for the Linux 5.4 kernel...
LLVM 9.0 Released With Ability To Build The Linux x86_64 Kernel, Experimental OpenCL C++
It's coming almost one month behind schedule, but LLVM 9.0 is out today along with the Clang 9.0 C/C++ compiler and associated sub-projects for this open-source compiler infrastructure...
KDE Plasma 5.17 Beta Rolls Out With Wayland Improvements, Overhauled Settings
The beta release is out today for KDE Plasma 5.17...
A Total War Saga: TROY Seeing A Native Linux Port Next Year
Creative Assembly revealed Total War Saga: TROY on Wednesday for release next year. Feral Interactive has announced they are porting this latest Total War game to macOS and Linux...
Running The AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 Boost Fix Under Linux With 140 Tests
Last week AMD's AGESA "ABBA" update began shipping with a fix to how the boost clock frequencies are handled in hopes of better achieving the rated boost frequencies for Ryzen 3000 series processors. I've been running some tests of an updated ASUS BIOS with this adjusted boost clock behavior to see how it performs under Linux with a Ryzen 9 3900X processor.
Valve's ACO Shader Compiler For The Mesa Radeon Vulkan Driver Just Landed
It was just two days ago that Valve's performance-focused "ACO" shader compiler was submitted for review to be included in Mesa for the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver. Just minutes ago that new shader compiler back-end was merged for Mesa 19.3...
Mesa's Disk Cache Code Now Better Caters To 4+ Core Systems
Most Linux gamers these days should be running at least quad-core systems so Mesa 19.3 has been updated to reflect that reality with the number of CPU threads used by their disk cache...
BLK-IOCOST Merged For Linux 5.4 To Better Account For Cost Of I/O Workloads
The Linux 5.4 block subsystem changes brings the new blk-iocost model...
Performance-Boosting DFSM Support Flipped On & Off For RADV Vulkan Driver
Back in July of last year the RADV Vulkan driver enabled primitive binning and DFSM for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Well, it thought it enabled DFSM support and paired with the binning did yield a minor performance benefit at the time for Raven Ridge APUs. But now it turns out the DFSM support wasn't properly wired up and is now addressed but is currently introducing a performance regression...
Btrfs & XFS File-Systems See More Fixes With Linux 5.4
The mature XFS and Btrfs file-systems continue seeing more fixes and cleaning with the now in-development Linux 5.4 kernel...
Microsoft's Latest Open-Source Contribution: A New Font For Terminals & Code Editors
This week Microsoft not only open-sourced their C++ standard library (STL) but they have also now shipped Cascadia Code...
Intel's Gallium3D OpenGL Driver Taps Another Optimization - ~32% For GFXBench
Intel's new OpenGL Linux driver, their Gallium3D-based "Iris" implementation that is aiming to be the default before year's end, continues making striking progress...
Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In "Init System Diversity"
Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian...
Samba 4.11 Released With Much Better Scalability While Disabling SMB1 By Default
Samba 4.11 is out as the latest big feature update to this SMB/CIFS/AD implementation for offering better Windows interoperability with Linux and other platforms. The changes in Samba 4.11 are aplenty that we are a bit surprised it wasn't called Samba 5.0...
Steam Play's Proton 4.11-5 Released With Fixes & Optimizations
Barely a week since the release of Proton 4.11-4, Valve's stellar Linux crew in cooperation with CodeWeavers have issued Proton 4.11-5 as the latest update to this Wine 4.11 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...
Microsoft exFAT File-System Mailed In For Linux 5.4 Along With Promoted EROFS & Greybus
Greg Kroah-Hartman began volleying his Linux 5.4 kernel pull requests today of the subsystems he oversees. The most significant of this morning's pull requests are the staging area changes that include the Microsoft exFAT file-system support...
FreeBSD 12 & DragonFlyBSD 5.6 Running Well On The AMD Ryzen 7 3700X + MSI X570 GODLIKE
For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04.