
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 11 min 46 sec ago
KDE Will Prioritize Wayland, Consistency & Apps Over The Next Two Years
This summer KDE was looking for ideas on new goals to pursue along the likes of their successful Usability + Productivity initiative. In marking the start of their annual Akademy developer conference in Milan, the KDE developers announced their new set of goals to focus on for the next two years...
Debian 10.1 Released With First Batch Of Fixes To Buster
Debian 10.1 was released today as the first collection of security and bug fixes to this summer's release of Debian 10 "Buster" GNU/Linux...
POCL 1.4 RC1 Brings Better SPIR/SPIR-V Support On The CPU
POCL, the "Portable Open Computing Language" project known for implementing OpenCL support on top of the CPU, is closing in on its version 1.4 release...
GNOME 3.34 RC2 Available For Final Testing Of This Big Desktop Update
GNOME 3.34 RC2 made it out on Friday night as the final step before next week's official GNOME 3.34 release...
Linux 5.4 Bringing New Driver To Help SGI Systems Going Back To The SGI Origin
SGI systems going back to the SGI Origin servers starting some two decades ago will see better mainline kernel support with the upcoming Linux 5.4...
Intel's Vulkan Driver Now Hooks Into DriConf For Driver Settings/Workarounds
Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has now hooked into the DriConf infrastructure for handling driver tunables and workarounds...
NVIDIA 435.19.03 Vulkan Linux Driver Brings DXVK Fixes
NVIDIA on Friday released their 435.19.03 Vulkan beta driver as their newest Linux driver update. This Vulkan beta doesn't come with any new extensions this go around but does have some DXVK fixes for helping Linux gamers...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku ARM64 Upstreaming Started, AMD Ryzen Workarounds Added
We are approaching the one year anniversary since the Haiku R1 Beta and the developers working on this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system are as busy as ever with improvements...
Intel Linux Graphics Stack Gets Another Speed Boost - Helping Civilization VI By ~18%
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver crew has been on an exciting spree lately of not only punctually enabling new hardware support but also pushing some big performance improvements for new and existing generations of graphics hardware. Today another performance achievement was unlocked...
WireGuard Releases New Snapshot While Not Expected For Linux 5.4 Mainline
WireGuard 0.0.20190905 was released on Thursday by lead developer Jason Donenfeld...
Firefox 69 / 70 Beta Against Chrome 76 On Ubuntu Linux
With Firefox 69 released and Firefox 70 entering beta, here are some fresh web browser benchmarks between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome from Ubuntu Linux. On the Firefox size, Firefox 68, 69, and 70 Beta were tested with and without WebRender being enabled and compared to Google's current Chrome 76 stable release.
GNU Wget2 Reaches Beta With Faster Download Speeds, New Features
GNU Wget2 is a from scratch rewrite of the popular wget downloading utility. GNU Wget2 wraps around the libwget library while now being multi-threaded and supporting other features to provide better performance over the current wget releases...
Intel Graphics Compiler Changes For Gen12 - Biggest Changes To The ISA Since i965
Since June Intel's open-source developers have begun volleying the initial open-source graphics driver code for Tigerlake "Gen12" hardware. To date the Gen12 changes haven't been too invasive even with this being the first generation with the "Xe Graphics" engine branding. But that's now changed with a new patch series showing major changes to the graphics instruction set...
Turbostat Utility Sees Late Updates In Linux 5.3
The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting various power/frequency metrics on x86_64 processors saw some late updates merged last weekend for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel...
ARM-Powered Lenovo Yoga C630 Laptop To See Better Support With Linux 5.4
For those excited by the prospects of running Linux on Arm-based laptops, with the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel will be better mainline support for the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop...
Mesa Gets One Line Fix To Help With KDE KWin Crashing
Landing Thursday within Mesa 19.3 Git but marked for back-porting to the stable 19.1 and 19.2 series is an Intel driver fix to address an issue with KDE's KWin sometimes crashing...
Facebook Engineer Proposing New Slab Memory Controller For Linux - Saves Lots Of RAM
Roman Gushchin of Facebook's Linux kernel engineering team has proposed a new slab memory controller for the Linux kernel...
Last Minute Shell & Mutter Changes Ready For Testing Ahead Of GNOME 3.34
GNOME Shell and Mutter today saw their v3.33.92 releases as their second and final release candidates ahead of next week's GNOME 3.34 stable release. While usually things are very quiet at this stage, there have been some prominent last minute performance fixes...
Running Intel's Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Rome? Still Significant Performance Uplift Over Ubuntu
The current AMD EPYC 7742 2P benchmarking that is happening at Phoronix is an interesting Linux/BSD operating system performance comparison. That's in the works while so far are some Ubuntu and Clear Linux numbers. Yes, Intel's open-source Clear Linux platform does run fine generally on AMD hardware -- including the new AMD "Rome" processors -- and generally does still run damn fast. Here is a look at Clear Linux on this 128 core / 256 thread server with Clear Linux against Ubuntu 19.04 as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10.
Librem 5 Will Begin Shipping In The Weeks Ahead, But Varying Quality Over Months Ahead
As we approach the end of Q3, Purism has been quiet whether they will make their revised target of shipping the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter after passing their original plan to ship at the start of 2019. Well, Purism has just published an update and they will begin shipping the phones in batches beginning at the end of the month but the quality isn't yet up to scratch...