
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 16 min 51 sec ago
X-Plane 11.50 Flight Simulator Bringing Vulkan Support
For years we have been looking forward to the realistic X-Plane flight simulator rendered by Vulkan as an alternative to their long-standing OpenGL render and with X-Plane 11.50 that is finally being made a reality...
Rspamd 2.0 Released For Advancing Free Software Spam Filtering
Rspamd 2.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it's coming with plenty of changes...
Tons Of The Intel Tiger Lake "Gen 12" Graphics Compiler Code Just Landed In Mesa 19.3
A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base...
KDE Plasma Mobile Is Beginning To Look Surprisingly Good
The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop...
Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Mesa Driver Nearing OpenGL ES 3.1
Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support...
Intel Compute Runtime 19.40.14409 Adds "Early Support" Tiger Lake Support
As written about a few days ago, Intel engineers added Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support to their compute stack "NEO" for Linux users. That support has now made it into their latest weekly release of the Intel Compute Runtime...
Mir 1.5 Released With Bug Fixes & Wayland Improvements
Canonical's developers continuing to advance the Mir display server that continues to be focused on providing an abstraction for Wayland support have issued a new feature release...
AMD Linux Driver Bringing BACO Support To Older Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands GPUs
It's fairly rare these days seeing big patch sets out of AMD focused on improving the open-source Linux driver support for the likes of aging GPUs such as the Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands generations, but this Friday there is some notable development activity...
Intel's IWD Wireless Daemon Now Supports IPv6 Network Configuration Handling
Intel's open-source IWD wireless daemon that continues work on replacing WPA Supplicant is up to version 0.22...
A Deep Dive Into The Performance-Focused AMDGPU "Bulk Moves" Functionality
Recently on Phoronix you have likely heard a lot about the LRU "bulk moves" functionality for the AMDGPU driver after it was talked up by a Valve Linux developer for the performance help to Linux games and then the change landing in Linux 5.4 as a "fix"...
"VIRTME" Revised For Virtualized Linux Kernel Testing
The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday...
Mesa's DRM Library Looking To Change Its Versioning Scheme
Mesa's DRM library could soon be shifting to a date-based versioning scheme similar to what is already employed by Mesa itself (year.release) and the X.Org Server is also looking at similar versioning...
Intel SVT-VP9 Finally Makes Its First Pre-Release For Speedy VP9 Encoding
While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release...
System76 Launches Two Intel Laptops With "Open-Source Firmware" Coreboot
While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS...
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 vs. Clear Linux vs. Debian 10.1 Benchmarks On An Intel Core i9
Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.
Valve's Radeon "ACO" Vulkan Compiler Back-End Now Supports Navi
The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!..
AMD Sends Out HDCP Support, New GPU Support In AMDKFD For Linux 5.5
In addition to Intel this week sending out their first big batch of graphics driver changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle kicking off at year's end, today AMD developers sent in their first batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes targeting this next version of the Linux kernel...
X.Org Server To See New CI-Driven Automated Release Cycles, Big Version Numbers
There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship...
OpenSUSE Expanding Encryption Options For Its Installer
While Ubuntu developers are busy adding experimental ZFS support to their installer, the SUSE developers working on their YaST installer are working on offering better security options for their platform by beefing up the encryption capabilities at install-time...
RenderDoc 1.5 Released For This Leading OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D Open-Source Debugger
RenderDoc has already been the leading open-source graphics debugging tool for OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D across multiple platforms and it continues only getting more useful with each new feature release...