
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 48 min 47 sec ago
Intel Tiger Lake + Jasper Lake Power Management Support Prepped For Linux 5.6
We've been covering Intel's Tiger Lake hardware enablement for Linux since the early patches were posted this summer and that quickly followed with
FSF-Approved Hyperbola GNU/Linux Switching Out The Linux Kernel For Hard Fork Of OpenBSD
In a rather unusual twist, the Hyperbola GNU/Linux distribution that is approved by the Free Software Foundation for being free software and making use of the Linux-libre kernel has now decided they are going to fork OpenBSD and become a BSD...
Intel Sends Out A Big Christmas Update Of Graphics Driver Changes Aiming For Linux 5.6
Intel's open-source graphics driver team responsible for their kernel graphics driver (the i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver) have sent out their first (big) batch of new material to DRM-Next for collection ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window opening in just over one month's time...
NVIDIA Releases 340.108 Linux Driver Providing Updated Legacy Support For GeForce 8 / 9
For those still running a GeForce 8 or 9 series graphics card, you really ought to consider upgrading this holiday season. Even the cheapest of recent generation NVIDIA GPUs should deliver better performance and far better efficiency over those older GPUs, but in any case, NVIDIA released the 340.108 Linux driver as part of their legacy maintenance support...
Linux 5.0 Through Linux 5.4 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC 7642 "Rome" Server
A month ago I posted benchmarks looking at the performance of Linux 4.16 through Linux 5.4 kernels using an Intel Core i9 workstation. Stemming from that was a request for an AMD EPYC kernel comparison, so I carried out said tests. Due to the Rome support being newer, this round of testing is looking at the EPYC 7642 performance on Linux 5.0 to Linux 5.4...
Cavium Octeon's Ethernet Driver Being Booted From Linux 5.6
The Ethernet driver for supporting Cavium's Octeon SoCs is slated for removal in the Linux 5.6 cycle...
Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds
The latest in our series of interesting year-end benchmarks -- made more interesting by also looking at the Linux performance over the 2010s -- is looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux over the past roughly seven years by re-testing all the releases. Ubuntu 19.10 stable and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development builds were tested along with the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 13.04, the initial release where the Intel Sandy Bridge support was in good shape for the Core i7 2700K platform being used for this round of benchmarking. It's quite a wild ride looking at the Ubuntu performance over this long span with dozens of different workloads.
AMDVLK 2019.Q4.5 Vulkan Driver Adds A Couple More Extensions
AMD's official Vulkan driver team has pushed a new code drop of their open-source Linux "AMDVLK" derivative for those wanting to give it a whirl for some holiday gaming...
After 3,600 Original Articles This Year On Linux/Open-Source, Let's Have A Holiday Special
So far this calendar year on Phoronix has been more than 3,400 original news articles on Linux/open-source and more than 260 featured multi-page articles / Linux hardware reviews. From 2010 to date that count becomes more than 27,950 original news articles and more than 2,800 featured articles. But due to the continued use of ad-blockers by much of our audience, it becomes an increasingly tight ship to continue operating and producing new content each and every day. So for the Christmas / Hanukkah / end-of-year holidays, here is a way you can show your support while enjoying a great deal...
F2FS Data Compression Using LZO/LZ4 + Selective File Extension Handling To Land In 2020
F2FS is the latest Linux file-system gaining transparent data compression support for saving on-disk space. With F2FS there are two compression algorithms supported so far plus the support of making the data compression opt-in per file or applying the compression to select file extensions(s)...
More Logitech Device Additions + Refinements Coming With Linux 5.6
While there still is at least a full month to go before seeing the Linux 5.5 stable release and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window, already a fair amount of HID subsystem work is queuing in its "-next" tree ahead of the first full kernel cycle of 2020...
Linux 5.5-rc3 Released With A Lot Of Fixes Ahead Of The Holidays
Linux 5.5-rc3 is out following a week of seeing many bug/regression fixes landing as we approach the half-way point of the Linux 5.5 kernel...
The Performance Advancements Of The Radeon Open-Source OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers Over 2019
For the latest of our year-end tests is a look at how the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and RADV Vulkan driver performance has evolved since the end of 2018 for Linux gaming.
AMD Radeon TrueAudio-Next Finally Going Cross-Platform With Linux Support
TrueAudio-Next is AMD's solution for advanced GPU-accelerated audio effects and other capabilities by leveraging OpenCL compute rather than any dedicated DSP audio hardware. While developed as open-source the past three years, there hasn't been official Linux support but that seems to finally be changing...
LLVM Clang Achieves ~96% The Performance Of GCC On Intel Ice Lake
The LLVM Clang compiler continues becoming increasing competitive against the long-standing GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on Linux x86_64 systems... With tests done on Intel Ice Lake using the Core i7-1065G7, the Clang 9.0 stable performance is delivering over 95% the performance of GCC 9 stable based on over 40 C/C++ benchmarks...
USB4 Support Being Introduced With Linux 5.6 Kernel
While the Linux 5.5 kernel with its many new features isn't even launching as stable until around the end of January, the number of reasons to get excited over the next kernel (5.6) continues to grow. Linux 5.6 will be headlining with WireGuard support and other features while the newest big-ticket item is USB4 support...
Intel SVT-AV1 0.8 AV1 Video Encoding Benchmarks
On Friday Intel released SVT-AV1 0.8 with more AVX2/AVX-512 optimizations for this one of the fastest CPU-based AV1 open-source video encoders (and growing decoding support too). Here are some benchmarks of SVT-AV1 0.8 compared to the previous v0.7 release on various Intel and AMD systems...
KDE Plasma & Friends See Many Fixes + Improvements Ahead Of Christmas
KDE developers haven't let up ahead of the holidays in their relentless work for improving the KDE desktop and contained applications...
SuperTuxKart 1.1 Prepping Improved Internet Multiplayer, More Polishing
For those looking for some family-friendly Linux gaming this holiday season, a release candidate of the Mario Kart inspired SuperTuxKart 1.1 is now available for your enjoyment... err testing...
LLVM Begins Landing Preliminary Patches Around Intel's JCC Erratum, GAS Support Landed
Disclosed back in November was the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum affecting Skylake and newer CPUs that could lead to "unpredictable behavior" when jump instructions cross cache lines. Intel issued a CPU microcode update to address the problem at a performance cost, but with some compiler toolchain magic, it's possible to mitigate a good portion of that impact...