
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 53 min ago
Another Navi 14 Workstation GPU Patch Turns Up For "Pro-XLM"
Yesterday we reported on two Navi 14 device IDs being added for "workstation SKUs" while today a third has appeared...
Intel's Gallium3D Driver Gains Optimization For Helping With Java OpenGL Performance
In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming...
KDE's Kate Text Editor Plans Improvements To Better Compete With Atom
During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor...
Google Moves Ahead With Contributing The MLIR Machine Learning IR To LLVM
Back in April we wrote about MLIR as Google's new IR designed for machine learning. This intermediate representation was designed for use by any machine learning framework and now this common format is being contributed to LLVM...
CompuLab's Airtop 3 Is The Most Powerful Fan-Less Computer We've Tested Yet
The past month and a half we have been putting CompuLab's Airtop 3 computer through some demanding benchmarks and a variety of endurance workloads. With the Airtop 3 under test loaded with an 8-core / 16-thread Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, and 64GB of RAM with NVMe SSD storage there were some concerns over thermal throttling and if this fan-less industrial PC design could really deal with the generated heat. But after all of this testing, the Airtop 3 continues running strong and another shining example of CompuLab's engineering strength.
Microsoft Teams Is Coming To Linux
Microsoft Teams, the communication platform for chat / video messaging / collaborative file storage and other features, is in the process of being brought to Linux...
AMD Begins Posting "Dali" APU Linux Graphics Driver Patches
In addition to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers being busy in recent weeks bringing up the Renoir APU support, today we've seen the first baby steps towards bringing up "Dali" as another upcoming AMD APU...
Vulkan 1.1.122 Brings Extension Documenting Proprietary Imagination Tech Bits
Linux/open-source fans don't at least have to hear "Imagination Technologies" or PowerVR as often as in the past, but today's Vulkan 1.1.122 specification update does publicly document Imagination's VK_IMG_format_pvrtc extension that remains "Imagination Technologies Proprietary" licensed...
Vega-Based Renoir APU Has The Same VCN Video Encode/Decode Block As Navi
The next-generation AMD "Renoir" APU is turning into being an interesting successor over the existing Picasso APUs. While at first it was a letdown finding out that the APU is based on Vega and not their newer Navi architecture, follow-on open-source Linux patches have continued to show that it's more than a facsimile and in some areas like display and multimedia has blocks in common with Navi...
Intel To Try Flipping IOMMU On By Default For Linux Graphics
Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson today sent out a set of patches attempting to enable IOMMU coverage for graphics by default...
Navi 14 Will Work Its Way Into A Workstation Graphics Card
When it comes to Navi graphics processors in workstation cards, there's now confirmation of at least one coming with the "Navi 14" GPU...
Outreachy Applications Open For The Winter 2019 Round
Outreachy's summer round recently wrapped up while their winter round for participants in the southern hemisphere is now open...
GCC 10 Lands The eBPF Port For Targeting The Linux In-Kernel VM
Up to now the LLVM compiler stack has been used when wanting to target the Linux's eBPF in-kernel virtual machine while now the port for the GNU Compiler Collection has been deemed in good enough shape and merged...
Mumble 1.3 VoIP/Chat Program Released With ~3,000 Changes
For fans of the Mumble open-source VoIP communication program that is popular with gamers, Mumble 1.3 was released as their first major release in years...
Intel's Open-Source VP9 Video Encoder Just Scored A Massive ~3x Performance Boost
Intel's open-source team continues showing the power of optimizations... Or rather in this case, a three fold performance improvement due to previously limiting an AVX-512 routine that also works on AVX-2 CPUs. SVT-VP9 is now a lot faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD...
Linux 5.3-rc8 Released To Let The Kernel Bake An Extra Week
As expected, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 5.3-rc8 kernel rather than opting for the stable Linux 5.3...
Arch-based Manjaro Linux Will Pursue Full-Time Maintainers, Ramping Up Efforts
The past eight years Arch-based Manjaro Linux has largely been a hobby effort for this easy to use Linux distribution but moving forward there is a commercial entity being setup and ultimately they will be looking to employ full-time developers/maintainers...
DXVK 1.3.4 Released With More Workarounds, Performance Bits
Just over one week past the release of DXVK 1.3.3, the DXVK 1.3.4 is out with more fixes and workarounds...
PHP 7.4-RC1 Released With The Performance Looking Real Good - PHP 7.4 Benchmarks
PHP 7.4-RC1 was released this week as this next annual update to the PHP programming implementation nears. Here is a look at how the PHP 7.4-RC1 performance looks like compared to the major releases going back to PHP 5.6...
Linux 5.3 Is Near With Radeon RX 5700 Support, Speed Select & MBP Keyboard/Trackpad
The Linux 5.3 kernel is fit enough to be released today after another quiet week following 5.3-RC7. But due to the Linux Kernel Summit happening this week and Linus Torvalds traveling for that, he's expected to delay the stable kernel release until next weekend so as to not open the Linux 5.4 merge window until he returns from the event...