
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 36 min 16 sec ago
LLVM 9.0-RC2 Released While LLVM 10 Switches To C++14
LLVM 9.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing while LLVM 10.0 has switched its code-base over to supporting C++14...
AMD Renoir Lands In Mesa's RadeonSI - Further Pointing To Vega, Not Navi
Last week AMD sent out their initial Linux graphics driver support for next-gen Renoir APUs. Those Linux kernel bits will land with AMDGPU in the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle while the RadeonSI changes were merged today marking that OpenGL support as a new feature for the upcoming Mesa 19.2...
Clear Linux Rolls Out Revamped Documentation
While Arch Linux remains the gold standard for quality Linux documentation, Intel's Clear Linux has rolled out a new documentation web-site to assist new/existing users in making use of this performance-optimized and security-oriented Linux operating system...
EPEL 8.0 Is Now Ready To Offer Up More Packages To Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Users
EPEL 8.0 is now ready for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and the eventual CentOS 8 for complementing the standard repositories with extra packages for what is found in Fedora...
Blender 2.80 Performance With Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 vs. AMD EPYC 7742
The Blender 2.80 release arrived at the end of July that unfortunately was too late for using that big new release in our launch-day testing of AMD's EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors but as a follow-up here are AMD EPYC 7742 performance benchmarks up against the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake as well as the AMD EPYC 7601 2P. Blender 2.80 performance is the focus of this article along with some other renderer benchmarks.
The Qt Company Announces Its New High-Level 3D API - Qt Quick 3D
Continuing on from the recent technical vision for the Qt6 tool-kit, The Qt Company has now announced their new high-level 3D API they are developing for this next major release of Qt...
FreeBSD 13 Is Preparing To Finally Retire GCC 4.2
GCC 4.2.1 has been out since 2007 and while there have been many big updates to the GNU Compiler Collection over the pase decade, that version remains somewhat common in the BSD land due to being the last version under the GPLv2 license. GCC 4.2.2 and newer switched over to GPLv3+ and that is why several BSDs have stuck to using GCC 4.2.1 or at least keeping it in their base repository. But now for FreeBSD 13, this old version of GCC is set to be retired with FreeBSD already being quite focused on LLVM Clang as its default compiler while also offering newer GCC versions via its package management system...
Building The Default x86_64 Linux Kernel In Just 16 Seconds
It's now been one week since the launch of AMD's EPYC Rome processors with up to 64 cores / 128 threads per socket and better IPC uplift compared to their previous-generation parts. Rome has outperformed Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs in their class while offering better power efficiency and way better performance-per-dollar. One of my favorite metrics has been how quickly the new EPYC 7742 2P can build the Linux kernel...
A Script Making It Easier Turning A FreeBSD Install Into A Working Desktop
With TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) no longer focused on delivering a quality BSD desktop as they once did, while there still are options out there for a desktop-focused BSD like MidnightBSD, for those wanting to use a vanilla FreeBSD installation can now setup a desktop easier using a new script...
Apache Software Foundation's Code-Base Valued At $20 Billion USD
The Apache Software Foundation has published their 2019 fiscal year report highlighting their more than 350 open-source projects/initiatives and this also marks their 20th anniversary...
Reiser4 File-System Port Updated For The Linux 5.1 + Linux 5.2 Kernels
Up until today the newest Linux kernel version supported by the official Reiser4 out-of-tree file-system driver patch was Linux 5.0, but that has now changed with the belated Linux 5.1 kernel support arriving as well as a separate patch for Linux 5.2 kernel support...
Cooling The Raspberry Pi 4 With The Fan SHIM & FLIRC For Better Performance
With the Raspberry Pi 4, a passive heatsink is an absolute minimum for running this new ARM SBC unless you want to deal with potentially drastic performance limitations based upon your operating conditions. However, if you will be enduring the Raspberry Pi 4 with significant load for any measurable length of time, an active cooler is almost warranted or otherwise a very capable passive cooler. In this article we're looking at the Raspberry Pi 4 performance with a Fan SHIM as an active fan designed for running on the Raspberry Pi off the GPIO pins as well as the FLIRC as a metal case that passively cools the device.
NVIDIA 435.17 Linux Beta Driver Adds Vulkan + OpenGL PRIME Render Offload
NVIDIA this morning introduced their 435 Linux driver series currently in beta form with the release of the 435.17 Linux build. With this new driver comes finally the best PRIME/multi-GPU support they have presented to date...
Vulkan Video Decoding Coming In H1'2020, Ray-Tracing Progressing
The Khronos Group has posted their material from the SIGGRAPH 2019 graphics conference and includes some interesting updates on Vulkan and their ongoing efforts...
NVIDIA Continues To Be Involved With Making Vulkan More Appropriate For Machine Learning
NVIDIA engineers continue to be among those in the Vulkan technical sub-group working to advance machine learning for this API...
Fedora Developers Discuss Ways To Improve Linux Interactivity In Low-Memory Situations
Similar to the recent upstream Linux kernel discussions over the poor Linux desktop experience when in memory pressure situations particularly with systems having limited amounts of RAM, Fedora developers are discussing ways to improve this experience as well...
Oracle's Kernel Test Framework Might Be Added To The Linux Kernel Tree
Knut Omang of Oracle is working on integrating the Kernel Test Framework into the Linux kernel source tree/repository...
Mir 1.4 Released With Fix For GTK3, Support For Exclusive Zones
The Canonical team led by Alan Griffiths for maintaining the Mir display server with Wayland support today rolled out Mir version 1.4...
Qt PDF Being Discussed For Qt 5.14
Being evaluated for Qt 5.14 is shipping Qt PDF that allows PDF documents to be rendered/viewed inside QWidget-based applications...
Linux Finally Has A Fix For Crackling Audio Input On Recent AMD Systems
Queued now for Linux 5.3 and also marked for back-porting to existing kernel stable series is a fix to address distorted and crackling analog audio input that has affected AMD systems for at least the past two years with certain Realtek audio codecs...