
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 36 min ago
Vulkan 1.1.117 Adds Line Rasterization - Helping Out CAD Applications & More
In addition to the release of OpenXR 1.0 for kicking off SIGGRAPH 2019 week, The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.117 as a fairly notable update to this high-performance graphics API...
Khronos Officially Releases OpenXR 1.0
Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0...
AMDVLK 2019.Q3.3 Released With More Navi Performance Tuning, Vulkan Extensions
Two weeks after AMDVLK received initial Navi 10 support, another release of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver is now available. With this 2019.Q3.3 release there is performance optimizations for Navi as well as some new extensions...
TurboSched Is A New Linux Scheduler Focused On Maximizing Turbo Frequency Usage
TurboSched is a new Linux kernel scheduler that's been in development by IBM for maximizing use of turbo frequencies for the longest possible periods of time. Rather than this scheduler trying to balance the load across all available CPU cores, it tries to keep the priority tasks on a select group of cores while aiming to keep the other cores idle in order to allow for the power allowance to be used by those few turbo-capable cores with the high priority work...
PyPy JIT Now Running Well On 64-Bit ARM For Faster Performance
Thanks to funding from Arm Holdings and Crossbar, the PyPy folks working on their speedy Python JIT implementation have extended it to support 64-bit ARM (AArch64) with compelling performance results...
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6 Released With Navi/RDNA Support
AMD's GPUOpen development team has kicked off the new week by releasing Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6, their open-source and cross-platform GPU profiling and analysis utility. With Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6 comes support for gathering insights on AMD Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics processors...
Latte Dock 0.9 Brings Better Settings, Layout Enhancements
After being in development the past year and in beta the past few weeks, Latte Dock 0.9 is now officially out as this KDE-aligned desktop dock...
Linux 5.3-rc2 Comes In As Reasonably Large Following The Big Merge Window
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3-rc2 and sums it up as a "reasonably large rc2 to go with a fairly large merge window."..
GNOME's Pango 1.44 Released With Many Text Rendering Improvements
GNOME's Pango text layout and rendering library is now in much better shape with the brand new 1.44 release following receiving some attention by Red Hat's developer team...
Linux 5.4 To Support The Buttons On Newer Microsoft Surface Laptops
Coming for the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year will be support for the buttons on newer Microsoft Surface devices...
EROFS-Utils Adds LZ4 Compression Bits, Finally Has A README
While initially the user-space utility for Huawei's EROFS file-system was not publicly available, it came last November and this past April they began rewriting these EROFS user-space bits. Fortunately, since then they have done a better job of keeping EROFS-utils up-to-date against their latest kernel module changes for this read-only file-system...
Linux's 32-Bit Kernel Has Been Buggy Since Being Mitigated For Meltdown
Whether you like it or not, the Linux kernel's x86 32-bit support has already begun suffering some minor forms of bit rot. Most kernel developers are no longer actively testing x86-32 and distribution vendors are beginning to drop 32-bit support. The latest example of x86 32-bit's effectively demoted state is some buggy undefined behavior functionality living within the mainline kernel for the past year since the Meltdown mitigations landed...
Linux k10temp Support Pending For AMD Ryzen 3000 Series Processors
Patches are now queued into the Linux kernel's hwmon subsystem staging area that allow the AMD "k10temp" driver to support the Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processors...
KDE Ends July With Improved Widget Positioning, Faster KRunner Results
KDE developer Nate Graham has posted his latest weekly summary of KDE's development happenings as the team wraps up work for July...
Linux 5.2/5.3 Kernel Performance On The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
With yesterday's Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, some suggested that the Linux performance could have been better if using a Linux 5.x kernel. Well, here are some benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with its Linux 4.18 kernel compared to Linux 5.2 stable as well as the brand new Linux 5.3 development kernel...
KernelShark 1.0 Released After Switching From GTK To Qt
KernelShark 1.0 has been released as the tool for visualizing Trace-cmd Linux kernel traces...
X.Org SiS Driver Kept Alive In 2019 To Fix Silly Compiler Warnings
It's vintage X.Org driver week... Not only was there an S3 display driver update for that vintage hardware, but a SiS X.Org display driver update has also been released...
Alibaba Crafts A 16-Core RISC-V Chip @ 2.5GHz
To date there haven't been any really compelling RISC-V processors from a performance perspective but it's looking like we could soon be crossing that threshold...
Windows' WSL2 Now Allows Localhost Access, Custom Kernels
Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build on Friday that offers up more Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) enhancements...
Binomial's Basis Universal To Super-Compress glTF Assets, WebGL Gets New Extensions
With SIGGRAPH 2019 happening next week in LA, The Khronos Group has already kicked off the news cycle by making several announcements from forming a 3D Commerce Initiative Working Group to releasing new WebGL extensions to making use of Binomical's Basis Universal tech for better compression...