
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 41 min ago
Intel Now Aiming For Gallium3D OpenGL Default For Mesa 20.0
While we had been eager for Intel's goal of defaulting to their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by EOY2019, it looks like that is going to swing by one quarter with the plan now for Mesa 20.0 at the end of Q1...
Purism Shares More Photos Of Initial Librem 5 Phones, PureOS UI
Now with more Librem 5 smartphones from their first batch now shipping, Purism has begun sharing more photos of the current hardware as well as the state of their Linux-based PureOS software stack...
A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD
For those thinking of playing with Ubuntu 19.10's new experimental ZFS desktop install option in opting for using ZFS On Linux in place of EXT4 as the root file-system, here are some quick benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of ZFS/ZoL vs. EXT4 on Ubuntu 19.10 using a common NVMe solid-state drive.
Arch Linux Nears Roll-Out Of Zstd Compressed Packages For Faster Pacman Installs
The upcoming release of Arch's Pacman 5.2 is bringing support for compressing packages with Zstd which ultimately will provide faster package installs on Arch Linux...
GNOME Shell + Mutter Begin Landing Graphene Integration
In the newest development code of GNOME Shell and Mutter for GNOME 3.36, Graphene integration has begun to replace some elements of Clutter...
A Vast Majority Of Linux's Input Improvements Are Developed By One Individual
While there is an ever increasing number of open-source developers focusing on the Linux graphics stack with the GPU drivers and related infrastructure, it's quite a different story when it comes to the Linux input side. It's basically one developer that has been working on the Linux input improvements for the past number of years...
Google Ejects Open-Source WireGuard From Android Play Store Over Donation Link In App
Apparently Google doesn't appreciate donation links/buttons within programs found on the Google Play Store even when it's one of the main sources of revenue for open-source programs. WireGuard has been reportedly dropped over this according to WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld...
LLVM Clang RISC-V Now Supports LTO
With the recent release of LLVM 9.0 the RISC-V back-end was promoted from an experimental CPU back-end to being made "official" for this royalty-free CPU ISA. Work though isn't over on the LLVM RISC-V support with new features continuing to land, like link-time optimizations (LTO) most recently being enabled within the Clang 10 code...
Khronos Opens Door For Allowing More Open-Source Drivers To Reach Conformance Status
Khronos president Neil Trevett was at this month's XDC2019 conference in Montreal and he clarified their position on accepting conformance submissions by the open-source drivers...
TURNIP Vulkan Driver Gets MSAA Working
Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in recent weeks has been back to seeing new activity and this week more useful contributions are being made...
New "FUSE2" Kernel Driver Being Experimented With For File-Systems In User-Space
Longtime FUSE developer Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been working on a new "FUSE2" FUSE kernel driver for implementing file-systems in user-space...
Highly Threaded Linux Software Running Under CFS Quotas See Big Performance Fix
Thanks to a Linux kernel fix that is likely to be back-ported to the various stable series, highly threaded software running under CFS quotas for enforcing CPU limits are about to be much faster. At least in a synthetic test case, the kernel fix yields a 30x improvement in performance...
xf86-video-ati 19.1 Released With Crash & Hang Fixes
A few days after the xf86-video-amdgpu 19.1 release, xf86-video-ati 19.1 is out as the newest X.Org driver release for older ATI/AMD graphics processors...
Windows 10 vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Driver Performance With Intel Icelake Iris Plus Graphics
With picking up the Dell XPS 7390 with Intel Core i7-1065G7 for being able to deliver timely benchmarks from Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Icelake generation, one of the first areas we have been testing is the Iris Plus "Gen 11" graphics performance. In this article are our initial Windows 10 vs. Linux graphics performance numbers for Ice Lake.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Coming To Linux On 5 November
Feral Interactive revealed today that Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be released for Linux on 5 November...
KDE Plasma 5.17 Released With Wayland Improvements, Better HiDPI
Plasma 5.17.0 is out as the newest desktop feature release from the KDE project...
Ubuntu's ZFS Trajectory Is Going From Exciting To Even More Exciting
While it is already exciting to have the Ubuntu 19.10 desktop easily support installations to a root ZFS file-system, moving ahead with their original Zsys effort it should be even more exciting for Ubuntu storage possibilities on both the desktop and server...
Red Hat Developers Eyeing CPU Thermal Management Improvements For Fedora 32
Several Red Hat developers are looking at improving the CPU thermal management capabilities for Fedora Workstation 32 and in turn possibly helping Intel CPUs reach better performance...
Linux Graphics Drivers Could Have User-Space API Changes More Strictly Evaluated
User-space API additions and changes (granted, no ABI breakage permitted for the mainline Linux kernel) to Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers is done fairly easily by their developers and possibly without enough thought. Linux DRM subsystem co-maintainer David Airlie has issued a proposal that would make user-space API alterations more strictly reviewed...
LLVM Plans To Switch From Its SVN To Git Workflow Next Week
LLVM developers had been planning to transition to the Git revision control system in place of SVN by the time of their developer meeting in October. It looks like that goal will be realized on the same-day as kicking off that annual developer meeting...