
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 59 min ago
Firefox 71 Landing Wayland DMA-BUF Textures Support
Firefox 71 is bringing another important Wayland improvement!..
Fedora 31 Won't Add An Official POWER Desktop Spin
While Fedora recently began spinning workstation/live images for POWER (PPC64LE) at least as a work-in-progress, it won't be made a formal feature of the upcoming Fedora 31...
NVIDIA Begins Funding Blender Development
NVIDIA is the latest high profile company now contributing significant funds for advancing the open-source Blender 3D modeling software...
Imad Sousou Steps Down As Head Of Intel's Open-Source Efforts
After an incredible 25 year journey at Intel and having founded the Open-Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou announced today he is stepping away from Intel...
Intel Readies Another Big Graphics Driver Push With Linux 5.5 - Lots For Tigerlake/Gen12
While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle...
PostgreSQL 12 Performance With AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Benchmarks
One of the areas of performance I had been meaning to look more at following the recent AMD EPYC 7002 series launch was for database servers. With the original EPYC 7000 series performance, the performance came up short in competing with Intel Xeon CPUs, but for the EPYC Rome processors it ends up being a very different story. Given the launch last week of PostgreSQL 12, I've been trying out this new database server release on both EPYC and Xeon processors.
Intel Lowers Costs On New Xeon W-2200 Series & Cuts Core 9000 F-Series CPU Pricing
In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs laqunching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too...
AMD Announces Navi 14 Based Radeon RX 5500 Series
AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Nav 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...
NVIDIA Still Working On A Generic Allocator - Has Working Open-Source Implementation
For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...
The FSF Is Re-Evaluating Its Relationship With The GNU
With RMS resigning as head of the FSF but ultimately is remaining as head of the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is now publicly re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU...
GDB Debugger Lands CTF Support
The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for the Compact C Type Format following support for this debugging information format having been added to the GCC compiler and Binutils...
Meson 0.52 Released With Better Support For Solaris/Illumos
While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms...
JACK2 1.9.13 Released As First Update In Nearly 2 Years For The Low-Latency Audio Server
While Red Hat is pursuing Pipewire with plans to fill the use-cases provided by the JACK(2) low-latency audio server, JACK2 isn't letting up and Sunday marked version 1.9.13 for the project and their first release since December 2017...
Vulkan 1.1.124 Released With Shader Clock & Timeline Semaphore Extensions
Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions...
Linux 5.4-rc2 Released As The "Nesting Opossum"
Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid...
Linux 5.4 Radeon Performance Rises Slightly Higher With Bulk Moves Enabled
With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.
Godot 3.2 Enters Alpha With Many Improvements
While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...
Linux 5.5 Staging To Add New "WFX" WiFi Driver For Low-Power IoT Hardware
WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months...
AdaCore Has Been Developing A GNAT/Ada Front-End To LLVM
While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack...
Intel Tiger Lake Support Lands In Their NEO OpenCL/Compute Stack
In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model...