
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 29 min ago
Google's SwiftShader Now Supports Vulkan 1.1
SwiftShader. Google's CPU-based implementation that originally was focused on OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9, now has Vulkan 1.1 support in tow...
GNOME Launches Coding Education Challenge With $500k In Funding
The GNOME Foundation has kicked off their Coding Education Challenge for promoting programming around free/open-source software and with Endless Computers providing the $500,000 USD for prize money...
20-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison For Total War: Three Kingdoms
Total War: Three Kingdoms is the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive and saw a same-day release back in May. While back then it was said there weren't benchmarking capabilities for this game, there now is a test profile. For those wondering how Three Kingdoms performs on Linux, here is a twenty way graphics card comparison using the newest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA drivers.
Unity 2019.3 Beta Released With Renderer Improvements, Linux & Vulkan Fixes
The beta release of Unity 2019.3 is out today for this wildly popular cross-platform game engine...
Logic Supply Announces Karbon 700 Rugged Linux PC With Core / Xeon CPU Options
Earlier this summer we checked out the Logic Supply Karbon 300 as a well-built and very durable Linux-friendly PC for low-power environments. That Karbon 300 came equipped with a low-power Apollo Lake Atom processor while today the company announced the Karbon 700 with higher-wattage Core and Xeon CPU options for high performance IoT / edge computing...
AMD To Land Support For Navi 14 Into The Upcoming Mesa 19.2 Driver Stack
As a possible sign that AMD Navi 14 graphics cards could be coming sooner rather than later, support for Navi 14 is slated to be back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 release due out in a few weeks rather that entered its feature freeze earlier this month rather than waiting for next quarter's Mesa 19.3...
Proton 4.11-3 Pulls In D9VK 0.20, Taps Gamepads Directly, Fsync Fixes
Valve's Wine-based Proton for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux is seeing more exciting work in their 4.11 branch...
Google Does A Good Job Sticking Close To Upstream For Their Linux Kernels On Chromebooks
For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter...
Mesa 19.3's LLVMpipe Driver Adds Support For Shader Image Extensions
A number of months have passed since having anything new to report on the progress of the LLVMpipe software driver, but David Airlie now has landed a number of improvements to this LLVM-leveraging "soft" OpenGL driver for Mesa 19.3...
Sway 1.2 Released For This Popular i3 Inspired Wayland Compositor
Drew DeVault released Sway 1.2 overnight as the newest feature update for this popular Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager...
Linux 5.3 Moves Ahead With No Longer Advertising RdRand On Older AMD CPUs/APUs
Just prior to yesterday's Linux 5.3-rc6 kernel release, a change was pulled into the code-base that disables the advertising of RdRand support on older AMD CPUs/APUs...
Linux Kernel Clearing Up Intel CPU Names With Proliferation Of Different Cores
Stemming from recent discussions over Intel's Linux enablement for Intel's Lightning Mountain SoC that characterized it as a "AIRMONT_NP" for a "network processor" even though it's not limited to networking use-cases, and with Intel's proliferation of different CPU cores in general, the Linux kernel is seeing some cleaning up of their different Intel CPU names...
Ubuntu & Debian Moving Along With Plans For Removing Python 2 Packages
With Debian 10 "Buster" out the door and Python 2 hitting end-of-life at the end of the year, Debian is working on their process of removing Python 2 packages that don't get ported to Python 3 and Ubuntu is working on similar action for their Python 2 packages not found in upstream Debian...
D9VK 0.20 Offers Performance Improvements, New Features For Direct3D 9 Over Vulkan
Joshua Ashton has released D9VK 0.20 "Frog Cookie" as the newest version of this project mapping Direct3D 9 over Vulkan to help improve the Windows gaming on Linux experience...
VKMS Getting PRIME Import Support For Helping To Test Linux's PRIME Functionality
The VKMS virtual kernel mode-setting driver is seeing support for PRIME import added to it so this software solution can be used for helping to test multi-GPU PRIME configurations on Linux even without the hardware attached...
AMD Renoir Graphics Power Management Gets Wired Up
While AMD's next-gen Renoir APUs are Vega-based and not Navi, beyond the initial Linux driver enablement seen over the past few weeks coming out a few days ago were a set of patches just getting the power management in order...
FFmpeg Lands OpenCL-Powered Video Stabilization Filter
FFmpeg has landed a "deshake" OpenCL filter to its code-base to serve for video stabilization support...
NetBSD Made Progress Thanks To GSoC In Its March Towards Steam Support
Ultimately the goal is to get Valve's Steam client running on NetBSD using their Linux compatibility layer while the focus the past few months with Google Summer of Code 2019 were supporting the necessary DRM ioctls for allowing Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to tap accelerated graphics support...
KernelShark Has More Plans For Improving This GUI Around Linux's Ftrace
One month ago was the release of KernelShark 1.0 as the GUI for visualizing Ftrace Linux kernel traces. While v1.0 was a big step forward and switched from GTK to Qt, KernelShark 2.0 is already in planning with more features...
Linux 5.3-rc6 Released - Marking Linux's 28th Birthday
Linus Torvalds today released the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel. It also happens to be 28 years to the day since Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel...