
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 8 min ago
DXVK 1.4.2 Released With Fix For Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered
DXVK 1.4.2 is out as another weekly update to this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation library used by Wine / Proton for accelerating Windows games on Linux...
It Looks Like HDMI FreeSync/VRR For Linux + Wayland Support Will Eventually Come For AMD
AMD provided an update on their Linux FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support at this week's X.Org Developers Conference event in Montreal. There's good news both for HDMI and Wayland Linux users with Radeon graphics...
Blender 2.80 & LuxCoreRender Performance With NVIDIA RTX SUPER Comparison
Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.
The ACO Radeon Compiler Alternative To AMDGPU LLVM Looks Good But Work Isn't Done Yet
In addition to Intel announcing their work on the new "IBC" compiler back-end for their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, the developers working on the Radeon "ACO" in cooperation with Valve were presenting the latest work on their compiler back-end at this week's XDC 2019 event in Canada...
Logitech Gaming Keyboards Getting A New Driver With Linux 5.5
The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...
Linux Returns To Parallel CPU Microcode Updates To Reduce Cloud Disruption
Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again...
Systemd Starts Tapping ChromeOS For USB Devices That Support Auto-Suspend Well
Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux...
The Matrix Of Software Projects Mapping Khronos APIs From DXVK To Zink & CLVK
Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones...
Fedora 32 Planning To Ship With GNU Binutils 2.33
Not particularly surprising considering Fedora tends to always ship with a bleeding-edge toolchain, but for their Fedora 32 release to kick off 2020 they are planning for GNU Binutils 2.33...
Intel Has Been Quietly Developing A New Backend Compiler For Their OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
One of the interesting reveals so far from this week's X.Org Developers' Conference in Montreal is that Intel has been developing a new back-end compiler for their OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers based upon their experiences so far with their NIR support and the less learned over the past number of years...
Intel MKL-DNN 1.1 Released, Now Branded As The Deep Neural Network Library
Intel's open-source crew has had a busy week with their first public OpenVKL release, OSPray 2 hitting alpha, and now the release of MKL-DNN where they are also re-branding it as the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL)...
Windows 10 vs. Eight Linux Distributions In Various "Creator" Workloads On An Intel Core i9
For those wondering about the current performance of desktop Linux distributions against Microsoft Windows 10 with the latest updates as we embark upon fall update season, here is a look at the performance of eight different Linux distributions compared to Windows 10. While a larger set of cross-platform tests are currently being worked on, for this article we are focusing on different "creator" workloads from video/audio encoding, render workloads, and related software prior to the larger comparison in the next week or two.
Blender 2.81 In Next Phase Of Development With NVIDIA RTX Optix, Intel Open Image Denoise
The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items...
PostgreSQL 12 Released As Newest Update To "World's Most Advanced Open-Source DB"
As was anticipated, PostgreSQL 12.0 is now officially available...
RADV Vulkan Driver Picks Up Several GFX10/Navi Fixes, Including To Address Random Hangs
If you are a user of AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" graphics and don't mind riding Mesa Git, the latest 19.3-devel code as of yesterday has several more GFX10 fixes/improvements...
Flatpak 1.5 Released With Version Pinning, Self-Updates In Portals
Flatpak 1.5 is the newest pre-release for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech...
ASTC Texture Compression License Turns Out To Be Restrictive Outside Of Khronos APIs
The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs...
AMDGPU Submits LRU Bulk Moves Support As A Linux 5.4 "Fix" For Better Performance
While initially queued as a work-in-progress feature for Linux 5.5, AMD has now submitted a batch of "fixes" to the current Linux 5.4 cycle that include enabling of the LRU bulk moves performance-boosting functionality...
Igalia Is Working On "mediump" Support For Mesa To Help With OpenGL ES Performance
Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...
Google Is Uncovering Hundreds Of Race Conditions Within The Linux Kernel
One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer...