Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 3 min ago
Purism Provides Update On Librem 5 Shipping, Known Issues
Following the closure of Librem 5 initial "Aspen" batch shipping window and it coming out that the devices were just sent to employees/insiders, Purism has now provided more information on the shipping windows ahead and known issues...
UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 Released
The UBports community has released the eleventh over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch that they continue advancing as the open-source Linux smartphone/tablet stack based currently on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...
AMD Joins The Blender Foundation With An Emphasis On Vulkan
Just earlier this month NVIDIA announced their funding of the Blender Foundation at the flagship "patron" level and now AMD has followed them in backing this foundation for assisting the development of this leading 3D creation software...
Firefox 70 Linux Performance, Firefox 70 vs. Chrome 78 Benchmarks
With the new releases of Mozilla Firefox 70 and Google Chrome 78 here are fresh benchmarks of these web browsers with testing under Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, on the Firefox side looking at the performance with WebRender and compared to prior releases.
Will Cooke Steps Down As Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Director
With Ubuntu 19.10 having successfully shipped last week and the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle just getting off the ground, longtime Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke announced he is leaving Canonical...
RADV Lands More Fixes + Performance Improvements Into Mesa 19.3
It's always great waking up and to find RADV improvements in Mesa Git for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that is particularly popular with Linux gamers...
Chrome 78 Arrives With Dark Mode Enhancements, Native File System API, SMS Receiver API
In addition to Mozilla Firefox 70 having been released on Tuesday, Google released Chrome 78 as the newest version of their web-browser...
Valve's SteamOS Compositor Has Begun Seeing Some Activity Recently
SteamOS Brewmaster hasn't seen any updates in a while (SteamOS 2.195 came out this summer with minor updates) though recently Valve's SteamOS Compositor GitHub repository did see some activity igniting hopes we could see a new release still this year... Well, it would be really great seeing a release re-based to Debian 10 "Buster" but any activity would be welcome even just pulling in all of their Linux graphics driver infrastructure updates they've funded in recent times...
OpenChrome Still Aspiring For Open-Source VIA Graphics, But Not Going Mainline This Year
At the X.Org Developers Conference earlier this month Kevin Brace provided an update on the state of the OpenChrome project that he continues to single handedly push forward...
XDC2020 X.Org/Wayland/Mesa Conference To Be Hosted In Gdansk, Poland
At the XDC2019 X.Org Developers Conference earlier this month in Montreal they named the location of XDC2020 in Europe...
Khronos Rolls Out OpenVX 1.3 While Updating OpenGL 4.6 + OpenGL ES 3.2
It's a busy day in the royalty-free API space...
GNU Project Developers Debate A Restructuring As A "Bottom Up" Organization
GNU developers unhappy with Richard Stallman sticking around as head of the GNU Project and not planning to make any "radical" changes are now expressing their desire for the GNU to be restructured as a "bottom-up" organization whereby those active developers and volunteers involved could potentially have more say...
Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux Performance Benchmarks
Recently I picked up a Dell XPS 7390 Core i7 Ice Lake laptop for finally testing this Intel 10nm+ processor under Linux. I have delivered some results so far like the Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance and the Spectre impact with Ice Lake while this article is the first of several really drilling down on the CPU performance. In this article are benchmarks showing how the Core i7-1065G7 compares in raw performance and performance-per-Watt to the earlier Core i7-8565U (Whiskey Lake) and Core i7-8550U (Kabylake-R) processors.
Updated AMD Zen CPU Microcode Lands In Linux-Firmware Tree
Updated AMD Family 17h (Zen / Zen 2) CPU microcode has quietly landed within the linux-firmware Git tree...
Firefox 70 Released With JavaScript Baseline Interpreter, Other Updates
Firefox 70.0 officially hit the web this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser...
AMDVLK 2019.Q4.1 Vulkan Driver Brings Performance Tuning, Reworked Pipeline Cache
AMD has been off their weekly release regiment for their open-source AMDVLK Vulkan driver but this morning they issued their first new release in just about one month...
Intel's Graphics Compiler For Their NEO Compute Stack Now Supports Jasper Lake
The team maintaining the LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler as part of their "NEO" OpenCL/Compute Stack have rolled out v1.0.2714 that includes initial support for Jasper Lake among other improvements...
Linux 5.5 To Restore Power-Savings For Hybrid Laptops When Not Using The dGPU
On recent kernels when using a laptop with hybrid graphics but not running with the discrete GPU graphics enabled, a regression meant the dGPU never got powered off... Fortunately, for Linux 5.5 -- and potentially to be back-ported after that -- is a change to restore that power-savings...
Intel Lands More Graphics Code For Linux 5.5 - Jasper, More Intel Xe Multi-GPU Prepping
Intel's open-source developers kicked off a new week by sending in their latest vetted changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...
Mesa 19.1.8 Released To End Out The Series
More than one month has passed since Mesa 19.1.7 compared to the usual bi-weekly release cadence, but on Monday following the closure of remaining blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1.8 was released that also ends out this release series...