Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 19 min ago
Bootlin's Best Techniques For A Smaller Kernel + Faster Boot Times
In addition to a talk at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe on trimming the Linux boot time with systemd changes, Michael Opdenacker of embedded Linux engineering firm Bootlin presented on their techniques for not only speeding up the Linux boot time but also reductions in the kernel image size...
NetworkManager 1.21.3 Is Another Step Towards NM 1.22
NetworkManager 1.21.3 is the network management project's latest development release in the path towards the upcoming NetworkManager 1.22...
Outreachy Developers Have Been Making Some Useful Contributions To The Linux Kernel
This past week at the Open Source Summit Europe in France there were several past Outreachy interns that shared their work on contributing to the Linux kernel and related open-source projects. Several of these projects have resulted in useful additions to the Linux kernel...
Linux 5.5 Kernel Livepatching To Allow Tracking System State
It's been a while since last having any new features to report on in regards to the Linux kernel's livepatching infrastructure for applying kernel updates without system reboots. With the Linux 5.5 there is a big addition to livepatching and that is support for tracking the system state changes...
Godot 4.0 Vulkan Support Continues Progressing - GI System Overhauled
Godot 4.0 continues to be worked on with much excitement by lead developer Juan Linietsky and others. While continuing to advance the Vulkan code in general for its introduction in Godot 4.0, over the past month most of the development efforts were focused on global illumination...
KDE's Dolphin Now Lets Users Know What's Preventing A Drive From Being Unmounted
For those wondering what KDE developers are up to at the start of November, KDE's Nate Graham has published his latest weekly blog post highlighting the new developments in the KDE space...
Kernel Address Space Isolation Is Still Being Explored For Better Security
IBM developers and others continue exploring the potential for address space isolation in the Linux kernel to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data in attacks like L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), MDS, and other vulnerabilities. Though this does increase the complexity of the kernel code and the performance hit is still to be evaluated...
Linux 5.5 Bringing Thunderbolt Lane Bonding, DP Tunneling Updates
Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...
BMW Continues Making Great Progress With Linux
In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles...
GCC 11 Aims To Default To C++17 Standard
With the C++17 support in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) already being quite mature for about two releases/years, when the GCC 11 development cycle opens they are looking at enabling their GNU dialect of C++17 to be the default standard when compiling C++ code...
AMD Sends In More "Arcturus" GPU Code For Linux 5.5
Along with Intel sending in their last feature pull to DRM-Next for Linux 5.5, AMD has done the same in sending their lingering AMDGPU feature work for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...
Rav1e Begins Adding SSE4.1 Support, More x86 Assembly
The Rust-written "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues working on better performance potential with recent Intel/AMD CPUs...
Wine-Staging 4.19 Brings Fix For X Rebirth Game, Updates NTDLL User Shared Data
Fresh off last night's Wine 4.19 uncorking, Wine-Staging 4.19 is out as the experimental blend of Wine with more than 800 patches for experimental/testing patches atop the upstream code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...
Valve's Steam Survey Numbers For October Just Point To More Inaccuracies
With the start of a new month we are always eager to see what Valve reports via their "Steam Survey" for Linux usage (among other stats) for the month prior. The October 2019 numbers are now published but they don't indicate any Linux change in marketshare but with some odd indications...
Wine 4.19 Implements More VBScript Functionality, ARM64 Support Fixes
Wine 4.19 is out today as the project's first development release for November and as we get quite close to the feature freeze / RC period for Wine 5.0 that will be out in early 2020...
KDE Frameworks 6 Ideas To Be Floated At A Developer Sprint This Month
With Qt 6.0 planned for release in late 2020, KDE developers are thinking about the eventual KDE Frameworks 6.0 for when they plan to transition to the evolutionary Qt 6 tool-kit. The first of likely several developer sprints around KDE Frameworks 6 will be happening already in late November...
GNOME's Mutter Adds XWayland Full-Screen Games Workaround
Thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is another optimization to GNOME's Mutter around XWayland full-screen gaming...
vkBasalt CAS Vulkan Layer Adds FXAA Support
The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA...
Ice Lake, Ryzen 9, Kernel Happenings & Other Highlights For An Exciting October
During October on Phoronix there were 287 original news articles and 27 featured-length Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware happenings and other open-source/Linux news for the past month...
Intel Submits Last Bits For Linux 5.5 DRM Driver - Includes More TGL/Gen12, Discrete Bit
Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...
